Each of Us is a Listening

I have been known to call myself the girl with the words. Language has always walked with me, the way some people know intuitively how to plant perennials so that they appear in just the right colors at just the right times and other people can throw open the door of a seemingly empty refrigerator and create a meal that will make your mouth water even as tears of joy pour down your cheeks. I am an amateur in the garden and the kitchen, but words colonize my brain and tumble out of my mouth, sometimes with mixed results. I can be a ventriloquist, speaking other people's unformed thoughts, but I can also be indiscreet, saying things that are better left unsaid. It is my observation that most of us discredit our gifts. Anything that comes so easily can't possibly have value. In that spirit, I have often worried that my love affair with language might be facile, immodest.....and here I am doing it again.

To mediate my self-doubt, I consider our mythic origins, the stories we tell ourselves about creation that add the dreamscape of consciousness to the irrefutable hard facts of science, for a certain balance. You don't have to believe the literal truth of scripture to resonate with its stories. In Torah, the world is created through speech...."and God said let there be light." The New Testament tells us "in the beginning was the Word." Language, this endlessly transmuting, shape-shifting opera of human and divine agency, predates the manifest world. Words come first. Speech is sacred. Sound is central. Sound is also the last sensory input to fade away when one of us passes out of this clamorous life into something more expansive and hushed. A dying person will fool you by appearing to be unresponsive. But even if you believe she is unconscious, she can hear your words and register their key, their intention. I mention this because I was too sick with the flu to fly to California when my mother was dying in a nursing home in Berkeley. My mother and I were sharing a virus the way we used to share a hot fudge sundae at the counter in Schrafft's. I called to say goodbye, to offer a prayer, but all I could hear was the whoosh of the respirator and the chatter of the nurses. I put loving words out into the world, but there was too much interference and I wasn't sure that they had been received. In my mourning, I reflected on the primal nature of listening, the ear that heard and continues to hear creation unfold, even at the very end of life.

Each of us is a listening. We receive the harmonies and cacophonies all around us, the stories the world tells, even when we are unaware of them. Each of us apprehends the surrounding sounds, speech, music and silence through our own receptors, unique as fingerprints. Running water. Scraps of Russian in the street in Brooklyn. Inshallah. Miles Davis. Mama dada. Hands up, don't shoot. What we hear depends on where we are in the world out there and where we are in the world in here, inside our awareness.

Hearing is symphonic in a way that seeing is not. We can only see what is in our range of vision, but we can hear many sounds coming from multiple directions and various distances simultaneously. Sitting on my porch, I hear the traffic on route 7 in the background. In the foreground, I hear birdsong. I know that for me sound has its prehistory in my mother's heartbeat in utero and will follow me to my final breath. I pray that the music I am playing in response is for the most part gracious, tuneful, and that I am making my best effort to hear the songs other people are singing.

I am not always successful. I was born listening, but I have so much to learn about how to understand the sounds I receive. I want to hear more of what other people are telling me, unadulterated by the interference of my own soundtrack, and I want to develop the ability to edit out the toxic static. Noise pollution. Political vitriol. Gossip. My own interior drumbeat of regret, judgment, worry.

When I am free of all that racket, I can listen to the world with the ears of a newborn. I can hear the onions frying on the stove, the breeze whispering. Sometimes, I can even hear the silence that precedes sound.

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