…that goodwill is the magic of universal cooperation and sharing.
To listen, one has to have not only a certain quality of attention but also a sense of affection, a sense of trying to understand what life is saying. Then both are in communication with each other.
One has to learn the art of listening. When you listen to music which you like, there is no resistance. You go with it, you shake your head, you clap your hands, you do all kinds of things to express your appreciation, your understanding of the quality of the music, and so on. There is no form of defence, no form of resistance, you are going with it, you are flowing with it.
So, learning the art of listening, to the birds, to the wind, to the breeze, is to become extraordinarily sensitive in listening. When you listen, you catch up quickly, you don't have to have a lot of explanations, analyses and descriptions, you are flowing with each other.
Talking together as two friends sitting in a park, or in a wood, quiet, birds are singing, there's plenty of light coming through the leaves on the floor and there is a sense of appreciation of beauty. When you so listen, the miracle takes place. When you so listen, it is like sowing a seed.
So one has to learn the art of listening.
If you listen very, very carefully, you capture it so quickly, the meaning of what the other is saying. There is great beauty in listening to a bird, to the wind among the leaves, and to a word that is spoken with depth, with meaning, with passion.
Is it that we are so caught up in our own network of problems, our own desires, our own urges of pleasure and pain that we never look around, never watch the moon? Watch it. Watch with all your eyes and ears, your sense of smell.
Watch.
Look as though you are looking for the first time. If you can do that, that tree, that bush, that blade of grass you are seeing for the first time.
To be in communion with nature, not verbally caught in the description of it, but be a part of it, be aware, feel that you belong to all that, be able to have love for all that, to admire a deer, the lizard on the wall, that broken branch lying on the ground.
Looking at the evening star or the new moon, without the word, without merely saying how beautiful it is and turning your back on it, attracted by something else, but watch that single star and new delicate moon as though for the first time.
We have lost all sense of relationship in which there is not only a verbal statement of affection and concern but also this sense of communion which is not verbal.
It is a sense that we are all together, that we are all human beings, not divided, not broken up, not belonging to any particular group or race, or to some idealistic concepts, but that we are all human beings, we are all living on this extraordinary, beautiful earth.
Have you ever woken up in the morning and looked out of the window, or gone out on the terrace and looked at the trees and the spring dawn?
Live with it.
Listen to all the sounds, to the whisper, the slight breeze among the leaves. See the light on that leaf and watch the sun coming over the hill, over the meadow
....that animal grazing and those sheep across the hill watch them. Look at them with a sense of affection, care, that you do not want to hurt a thing.
When you have such communion with nature, then your relationship with another becomes simple, clear
………….without conflict and pain.
