Listen
Hard
“Put
your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
Anne
Sexton
This is a time of intense
listening. I went to my gym to walk yesterday because it's so hot
right now that walking outside is dangerous. What registered with me
as I traipsed around the track, was how many people at the gym were
wearing headphones or ear-buds, or were glued to the television screens that line the walls. So, for the rest of the day, I
conducted a one-woman survey: what percentage of people that I saw on
the street or wherever I went were either reading something on their
phones, talking through an earphone to a disembodied person, or were
otherwise plugged into media? It was way more than half. Maybe it's
because I am old, but it seems like we've forgotten how to be alone
with our thoughts.
If we are always plugged
in, how can we assess for ourselves how we feel and think about
something. If all our information is coming in from without, is there
still a me in here processing that information, and am I in touch
enough with my gut and my heart to decide for myself how to think and
feel? In other words, how many of us are simply parroting what we've
heard? How many of us stop to think it through? To feel it through? I
wonder.
Right now, I am sitting
on my porch and just outside the screen, a red-headed woodpecker is
making his way up the side of an oak tree. He stops and pecks at the
bark, sometimes finding a bug to eat, then he hops a couple of paces
and pecks again. My point is that if I am always plugged into media,
I will miss this fabulous bird, and miss the thrill it gives me to
see his brilliant red head whacking at bark, and the magical way he
can hop vertically up the tree. There's a world out here—I don't
want to miss it because I'm scanning shoes on Amazon, or memes on
Facebook, or reading the most recent scandal out of Washington. I
want to live as me—thinking and feeling for myself and not having
social media shape me like a lump of clay.
There's a great line in
one of Anne Sexton's poems that says, “Live or die, but don't
poison everything.” It think living is better—living in the
real world, as your real self. So, “put your ear down close to
your soul and listen hard.”
In the Spirit,
Jane
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