There’s a pond a ways out behind our house that features a family (?city?town?) of frogs who yesterday during my a.m. walk were having a hootenanny. I’m not sure (actually, I am sure) that I’ve never heard frogs living it up in their natural habitat. As I stopped to listen, it sounded like Merle Haggard on a standup bass with Mabel and little Timmy laughing a riot in the background. Joyful, insistent, wacky, perhaps drunk. I managed to catch a snippet of the main basso and after sending it to a dear friend, she asked if the frog was perhaps broken because for sure the sound is out of the ordinary. (Try them out in the sound file below although this was only a small bit of a much larger party soundtrack.)

Makes me think: I’m hearing quite a lot of beyond-the-ordinary sounds in my new surroundings. A Red-tailed Hawk was swooping around calling out to friends from tree to tree after my incident with the frogs and for a minute I felt a pang of fear that I was about to be its target. (That Toni Collette miniseries The Staircase effed me up around big birds.) Anyway, after a minute of just standing and listening, I realized the bird gave zero hoots about me. It was busy living its best life and unless I was presenting it with a challenge or had some food it wanted clutched to my person, most likely I wasn’t that interesting. It occurred to me then and there that the things I’m hearing I don’t actually understand—in the most literal sense, that is. I mean, I actually don’t understand a lot of the words ricocheting around in the larger world either. They might be in a language I’ve grown up learning but in so many ways they feel like they’re being delivered in the lingo of wildebeests. I know I need to pay attention yet it also seems important to listen to other sounds in a language not my own, one that a Rosetta Stone program doesn’t (currently) make available to learn even if just to equalize my soul.

This need to figure things out, get a handle on what’s being said and why, at some point that feels like a fool’s errand. The inner shrug, the conscious can’t-control-it stance, this was something that came up when I got to spend time with lovely friends last weekend. It’s not that I can’t hear the words coming out of so many people’s mouths, some of the most publicly traded churned up from the turmoil of their minds, souls, (black/misguided) hearts, yet if I step toward that chaos, the reactive tornado will grab me. So what to do? Stand and be aware. Do what I can when I understand what it is I can do. But also figure out how to listen and when it’s time to stop up my ears and step away. Or rather step toward something else.

Away from the public stage, there’s so much to listen to, lots of it deep inside. The things I’m usually too busy in my head to hear that might be labeled intuition but are just as likely to be my own feelings that I’m too shy or frightened to invite up and out. What would that be like to entertain some sounds of my own fears, foibles, successes, secrets? Then there are the slow-down sounds I hear stepping out my door as I walk up a hill, down a road, stand still. They seem like an excellent gateway to listening deeper in all kinds of ways.