Don’t listen, really listen. Listen to the territory and the landscape from wherein the message is born. Listen to the tone, the color, the music, the melody. Do not remain attached to one or more meanings, or be immediately reactive. Let whatever is being communicated hang in its own aura for awhile, reveal its substance slowly to you.

The problem is partial listening. Is fragmented listening. Is listening from a fixed point of view, a ready made opinion. It is next to impossible to listen in this landscape of of bite size messages, disembodied quotes, corpses of ideas, ripped from the fertile soil of time and space and gestation.

It will take a certain amount of radicality, to be a listener. An ability to be still, very still, in the mist of the tremors of arising opinions and ideals which get louder and more deafening.

You will have to step out the the screen, for awhile. You might even have to go outside and look at a tree. Remember, there are trees. There clouds. There are other animals than you.

It seems self evident, but is it? When is the last time you looked at the morning star and actually saw it. I don’t mean the image in the retina — I mean the total wonder and glory of the morning star, the star of Bethlehem, if you like. Did you let it into your your heart, or does it just hang there, like a pixel? Did you notice how it shimmers, how it touches all of your senses, even your sense of sound. Are you able to hear a star?

No you don’t believe in unscientific crap like the music of the spheres — besides you are too far removed from the ears and the eyes which did actually see and hear such spheres. You know that stars are burning balls of chemical gas. You will not salute a morning star, praise it, call it a God. But you are happy to praise abstractions, ideals, economic progress, the ecology, liberal democracy. You bow every day to those ideals. You will not bow to Helios, the God of the sun. That God is dead. We killed him a long time ago.

Even now, as you read these words, you are creating an image of the star, which takes you further away from it. You are mapping it, you are naming it, you are making it part of your territory. You would try to go there, if it wasn’t too far away — if the technology was advanced enough, if you could build a spaceship.

But just for a moment abandon your territory, your distance, your infernal desire to colonize space. Listen to the space itself, the origin, the context. Nobody has every put words to That. It escapes your intellect, because your intellect can’t really go there — only your heart can. Your theology, your religion can’t go there either — it can only give you technologies of wiping the dust from your eyes and ears. It goes beyond even faith, because when you merge into the morning star, what is there to believe in really?

Listen, this is a command. Its not me commanding you, being arrogant, preaching at you. It is what life commands you to do all the time. It is what life offers, a feast of cosmic music, of nuanced vibration, a sensual landscape of endless depth. Its not easy, and most human activities these days seem to conspire against listening, true listening, deep listening, holistic listening, heart listening, body listening, listening deeply to time and space, listening to otherness, to strangeness, to the whispering trees, to the barking hounds, to that still pristine voice…

The radical act in this age of distraction and disintegration could be so simple. Listen, the trees speak. Look up. The evening star.