Listening to Each Other
The seasonal melancholy wraps around the little patch of sky over my head like an old lady’s shawl, lacy and secretive. Meditating in the purple twilight feels sinfully good. Did I say “sin”?
The soul knows what’s good for itself. Listening is one of the keys that helps sooth the troublesome waves against the questioning coastal line.
The shrill call of a katydid on my porch insists that it is still summer and the warmth of the last few days supports his call, but you and I know that winter is just around the corner. Still, I have to admire the persistence of his serenade, and diversity. Here is an animal whose very perception of the world is a far cry from my own; he listens to the stridulations of his wings through ears embedded in his legs.
The scale of the differences between us is really quite hard to imagine. Beyond the great disparity in size and structure, our heritage and family lineages long ago diverged. His family line contains some 6400 species, while ours has a mere 8 (even our taxonomic class, Mammalia, has only 5,000 species). This singer’s roots are ancient too. Fossil katydids are found in the rocks of the Carboniferous—that distant era 300+ million years ago during which vast coal deposits were laid down, when the air was sweet (with O2 that is) and our mammal-like ancestors bore little resemblance to the furred creatures we are today.
The porch light went on by itself. I smell the firewood coming from my new neighbor’s side. Fire already? Maybe she is cooking herself some homemade Italian pasta.
Outside, two very different beings staring at each other, one a lone representative of an ancient lineage singing a plaintive song of love in the lengthening nights of autumn. We are alive in different worlds, perceptions shaped by biology and evolution. While he sings, I listen and watch and with the empathy that marks my species, I appreciate his struggles. I can even imagine a kind of hope hard-wired into his actions--hope that his song will be heard by an individual much more like himself than me. And this thought gives me hope that we, the human race, can see that our own species’ differences are indescribably small in comparison, and that listening to each other is possible.
I wrap the jacket tighter around my sensitive human body, and I too begin to sing soundlessly.
::
ZuoZhou, 2008
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