Decades ago, I was a volunteer trainer at my church for a group of folks who wanted to learn how to be intentional caregivers for others in the midst of life challenges. I attended weeks of training for trainers. I studied data about subjects from divorce to job loss to infertility. I read pages and pages about the “grief process” and confidentiality and the limits of our role as non-professional helpers. In the end, only one subject really mattered. It was the hardest one to practice. It was the skill that nobody ever masters, including me. That is: Listening.

In my lifetime, one of my chief joys has been correspondence. As a transient in a military family, I was always leaving places and people behind. Letters sometimes helped retain a few of those ties. As an exchange student at age seventeen, I was transported half-a-planet away from my family long before internet or any other form of instant worldwide communication (including telephone) was available. Letters helped me keep breathing. As an adult, I connected via poetry with a friend who is my “pen pal” to this day, some four decades along. Unfortunately, our reams of written words have devolved to emails that disappear into the ether. But we write. We write. And by way of writing, we listen.

Letters, journals, and poetry are ways of listening, to others and to yourself. Sometimes I pour out thoughts unedited. Sometimes I pause to examine what I’ve written for truth and kindness. Sometimes I just want to sound clever. But in between all the words I deliver, I also want to hear what others have to say. I’m listening. The written word provides time and space to listen in a time when sitting down with a friend, or connecting with a stranger, over a cup of coffee seems like an impossible luxury. However, I hope I keep improving as a listener in person, too.

At the museum where I am a Docent, the skill of listening tops the list. Museum goers of any age don’t much care to hear a lecture about what I “know” about art. They want to question, to share what they know or think, to encounter a good listener. Wouldn’t you? Conversation is an art, and art is a conversation. Most of it is about listening.

Decades ago, I wrote a little poem. It was published in The Lyric in 1978. Now it sounds a bit wistful. Is there still time to listen? To the earth? To each other? Let’s try.

IT IS THE TIME TO LISTEN
 
It is the time to listen. Things
Have begun to speak again
More wonderful than music, more
Articulate than men:
The animals who question
And stones that mourn.
Oh, who will translate for us these
Green tongues of corn?
 
Barbara Loots