Experience the sounds of life
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, the audible world is worth a thousand stories. Picture the earth as mother, her ecosystems as womb. There, life is nurtured as nature intended. Each birthing bounty. Forces, though challenging, a part of the ongoing balance.
A child feels at home in this environment without sharp corners and unworldly sound. It’s why my children and now grandchildren have always yearned for discovering a wooded path or scrambling up a trail, or taking in the many sounds inviting them to explore. When my kids rustle with me toward fern-filled mossy enclaves, or run through riverside bottomland, or lie facing a sky sailing with clouds, we, along with every living being, become an integral part of that beating heart which feeds us all. That rhythm sounds the right to live one’s life free from tyranny and with dignity.
A child experiences the first sounds of freedom from parents and loved ones present when they take that first couple steps. When they ride a bike for the first time. Then when they go off to school, and later when goals are set and their dreams pursued. Whenever we enter these unplugged, natural landscapes, we intuitively begin to plug into a familiar cadence for which we longed all along. Quarantine’s restrictions give way to a free pursuit of truth, a drive to thrive, one of life’s calls to meaning eons-old.
Like opening a window to morning birdsong. A greeting which reminds us, we too, are free to live.
Sounds inform and protect. Sounds abound from Nature when we listen. A garden. A treed park. A backyard thicket. Every human-made or engineered sound has found its birthplace in nature herself. The swift-winged whoosh of an email being sent. The symphony on stage. Voices harmonizing. The thunderous roar of a jet engine. Laughter which bubbles up and trickles over us. The alarming call of a siren. Grief, so low it’s frequency pains the soul. Hope, lifting high the spirit in resounding promise.
The currents of collective serenity in prayer or meditation or at tasks requiring concentration, or personal sacrifice, a note, we as animals might hear when we encounter, breath held for a precious few suspended seconds, the breathing deer standing at the forest edge soon picking up our presence and bounding, disappearing into the green underbrush in balletic hush.
Perhaps the thrum of the bullfrogs in early evening from the boggy end of our ten acres stirs something primordial tonight, a recollection of a brand new heartbeat from a daughter’s mother’s womb, the perception of a a son’s father’s joy, sounds embedded into survival’s code, tones welcoming life as the gift that it is.
For the growing child and those trusted adults who are lovingly present, the experience of stepping into a world without wires can be wonderful, amplified by birds, animals, insects, and weather, enrich a child’s understanding of the world in real life.
At once our footfalls enter a church of chirps, chatter, and hums of the forest. An owl nearby calls out, capturing our attention. Squawks, flits, wings and legs at work from ground to log to limb to leafy highways intersect with movement. The spiraled chase of squirrels racing upward, leaping effortlessly between interconnection of branched byways. A hawk’s piercing cry travels on high. We spot it as it flies by, wings spread wide.
The practice of hearing begins when a child attunes the sounds of mother from the protection of the womb. This first sustaining sound of life is the message upon which all living things depend — the first information heard.
The buzzing garden, a
tree caressing a nest, offers an audible world to behold for a child. That which ripples in original design, a stone skipped across a pond, a single drop of water from a finger tip, weaves the days in beautiful ways that only nature can, informs us
to take time in it and to remove the veil of technology which can lure us to risk forgetting it.
When a child listens to the truth that he or she is an integral part of that ecosystem appreciation is fostered for all of those things which
sustain life. The first pulse, the swish of life coursing through a tiny heart, the first resonance of life detected from the expectant mom is the clarion call that we remember to our children, for the resounding promise which life holds.