Instead of looking to other humans for love, we need to align with our own love, because it's not the love of other humans that will make us happy. What will make us happy is the love we feel for every human, the love we feel for God, for all creation. When the love comes from someone else, we can love it and it's nice; but when we feel our own love, it's the best thing that can happen to us. We live in heave, we live in bliss. Open your heart and love unconditionally — not because you want love in return, and not because you want to control someone. That is false love. When you love with no conditions you transcend the dream of fear and become aligned with divine spirit, the love of God, which is love coming from you. That love is LIFE, and just like the sun, it is shining all the time.
Perhaps we will see that listening is not a course you must register for, a new gimmick that will magically transform your social and professional life. It happens when you take time to look around you, to be still in the evenings, startled by mornings. To listen means to be aware, to watch, to wait patiently for the next communication clue. And, as anyone with a speech or hearing disability can tell you, listening is not always auditory communication...When earth's auditory energy is received as a whisper, or perhaps not at all, other senses become sharpened, grasping communicative clues we have forgotten, in the rush of life...Listening becomes visual, tactile, intuitive. Listening ... perhaps ... is just a mind aware.
~ from LISTENING: WAYS OF HEARING IN A SILENT WORLD by Hannah Merker
Listen
Now is the earth most still.
No plows break the bare and frozen ground.
No creature stirs from its earthbound
burrow, tunnel, nest.
Matter is quiet.
Its clamor
hushed, we hear the rising of the star,
the morning light,
the seed within itself unfolding,
glowing, growing.
All is quiet and the earth most still.
Tonight's rain is a tenderness. I can guess from walking in it, touching it; but now I think I know its other dimension, can almost "hear" its sound, tonight close to silence.
~ from LISTENING: Ways of Hearing in a Silent World by Hannah Merker
