Listen Up
Put Your Hand Down
You are lucky if you can be quiet
when someone else speaks but
that does not guarantee you are
listening
Listening means paying attention
especially when you don’t hear
what you want to.
If you’re not careful you’ll miss
the truth and without that you’ll
never know what your next step
should be if any
Listening is not passive
It’s the only way to choreograph
your dance with grace compassion
and most of all with power especially
if what you hear leaves you weak
in the knees
Listen to yourself with the same divine precision
and you will always know
what’s next
@denaparkerduke @tinylightswrites @atinylight
There are certainly plenty of things that we don’t need to listen to.
But we have to listen closely to know which ones those are.
Having surgery on my eyes has turned my attention to listening. When one sense fails you, or simply needs a rest, you keenly appreciate all the others. While endlessly listening to books on tape and podcasts I have been amazed at how listening often just lulls me to sleep. At least with a book you can pretty quickly find your spot again. With listening alone you don’t search for the spot where you fell asleep but the spot where you stopped listening, which is never the same place. Trust me, this often leads to having to listen again to large portions of text you don’t remember hearing. Unfortunately, as in life, a lot of words slip past that we fail to hear.
There’s a lot of talk these days about how much we need to listen to each other, especially if we disagree, and how, perhaps that is a lost art, or completely gone. But I wonder: How do we truly listen and then respond especially when what we hear is threatening, alarming, or just simply in dire need of a counter response? We certainly can’t do it very well if we haven’t first listened well, but it still may require a dire response or action on our part. We simply better make sure we were awake enough to have first listened well.
May our best listening come hand in hand with the best of our attentions.
