More Thoughts on Listening from the Heart

“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe
wrote as she contemplated the art of
seeing. To listen takes time, too — to learn to hear and
befriend the world within and the world without, to attend to the quiet voice
of life and heart alike. “If we were not so single-minded about keeping our
lives moving, and for once could do nothing,” Pablo Neruda wrote in his gorgeous ode
to quietude, “perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this
sadness of never understanding ourselves.”

This
inspiriting, sanctifying power of listening is what writer Holly M. McGhee and illustrator Pascal Lemaître explore in the simply titled, sweetly
unfolding Listen — a
serenade to the heart-expanding, life-enriching, world-ennobling art of attentiveness
as a wellspring of self-understanding, of empathy for others, of reverence for
the loveliness of life, evocative of philosopher Simone Weil’s memorable
assertion that “attention,
taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”