Listening: The Willingness to Change

Asking is the active polarity that opens up energies; listening is the receptive polarity that allows these new energies to find their space. Listening is a mode of sensitivity, an awareness of all the messages we are receiving: the messages we receive from the body, from the earth, from our moods and reactions to others, and from our dreams. To listen is to establish a dialogue with everything and everyone that comes into our path. On the outer plane, our senses - sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch - are separate entities. The deeper we penetrate into listening, however, the more we may become aware of a realm where the senses converge - a realm in which seeing is hearing, for example.

To listen is to keep one's attention supple and sensitive, to allow a voice to speak through the natural as well as the human world. When tracking an animal, you bend your ear to the ground and pick up a vibration from afar. Listening, then, is an act of humility in the original sense of the word humus - not having one's head in the clouds, but being close to the earth and her signs, bending down low to hear the rumblings in the ground.

~Rick Jarrow