Listening

Reading from July 9, 2014 yoga class

From the book: Haiku Mind by Patricia Donegan   From the chapter entitled "Listening"

stillness--
piercing the rocks
the sound of cicadas
                       Basho Matsuo

Anyone who has heard the seventeen-year cycle when the cicadas return cannot help but hear their almost deafening sound.  It's as if Nature is crying out for us to listen, like Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers, which she said she painted big and bright so we would really see them.  Sometimes we need reminders to open our senses again, for the more we practice listening, the more we can hear.  It was John Cage in 1952 who "shocked" people at the time by giving a now infamous music concert entitled "Four: 33."  The audience heard no traditional concert music but rather the silence of the hall, which forced the audience into "listening" (for four minutes and thirty-three seconds) to the other "musical" sounds: someone coughing, a car driving by, the distant jet overhead, the sound of their own heartbeats.  That was it, a lesson in listening to the music around us.  We begin life listening to the sounds in the womb, and end our lives with hearing, the last faculty to shut down.  And in between, there is so much to hear.