Listening is an Act of Love

There’s so much deafening noise involved in conflict, violence, and destruction, anger boiling and exploding first in barrages of words and then of materiality, and in the midst of all this current fatal swirl in the world, I came across Dave Isay’s book of StoryCorps conversations—first published 16 years ago—a collection of repeated, varied instances of two people deeply sympathetic to each other recording the questioning, speaking, and listening between themselves, centering around important elements of their shared stories. In reading their printed transcriptions, I join as a silent witness to the tenderness and meaningfulness of their articulations. I imagine our world paired in sympathetic support, to the emergence and expressions of love that eliminates hate. This is what I do in the stillness of prayer and meditation, too: Sit quietly in listening, in witness, in expansion. Sit with a broken heart and/or a heart full of gratitude. Sit in yearning and/or wonder. Reach for the divine and for love; widen the reach; recommit to connectivity and creativity.