“Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.
Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.
Their language has been lost.
But not the gestures.”
―Vera Nazarian
What have you learned from listening to trees?
Listen, says the choral conductor, with wide ears. Listen with wide ears. Sing your part with good will, but always keep the wide ears that will let you mesh your part with the song of those around you.
What practices help you to widen your ears and improve how you listen to others?
After years of searching and suffering, the Buddha awoke to the secret of life in the practice of non-attachment. But others have discovered different secrets of life, some entirely contradictory. And surely there are more secrets of life revealed every day.
What secret of life has made you more awake?
Unseen, tiny, magic gardens are tending themselves, growing and dying back and growing again in secret. When you find them, the joy is yours. When they grow unnoticed the gardens are perfectly fine with that.
What do you create purely for your own pleasure, without the need for others to see and admire?
Even if you don’t believe in Santa, it’s easy to feel as if you are being judged by an invisible presence, that your actions and even your very being need to meet some undefined standard. But what if the watcher were merely interested, with no more notion of what was good or bad than a cat?
How is your life affected by a fear of being judged?
