Our senses are wider than we imagine, the means by which we cross thresholds into each other’s worlds, into the world, into our future Self, and, if we have a god, into our god too.

The wide sense of listening not only allows us to hear the sounds but also the silences which exist between the sounds.  These words from John O’Donahue caught my attention when I came upon them at the birthing of today:

All good sounds have silence near them, behind and within them.

Do you listen for the silences?

In a conversation shared with a friend, each is listening to the silences within the other?

When the sounds of traffic and manufactured things abate and the silence of nature breaks in, listening to you, its child?

When all the talking inside your head ceases and you lean into the thinness?

When the bad noise fills our lives to excess we are aged before our time.

But if we can catch the silences and learn the new things which come to us, tee might find ourselves renewed, able to renew others through our listening to them.

This wide sense of listening is slow, or deep.  It mustn’t be hurried because there’s something else to be listened to.  How many times have we misunderstood another, or undervalued nature because we have not slowly listened?

Whilst this may all sound magical or mystical, truth is, it’s all held in small habits which we form – and which we love – in ways we are able to inhabit daily.