Six Seeds of the Pomegranate

Stop.  Stop playing and just LISTEN.  Listen like you used to, before endless entertainment beckoned at your fingertips, before there was temptation or distraction.  Just stop and listen.

Listen to the hollowness, to the emptiness, to the harsh screaming quiet that you can quell now with alcohol, that used to be deafening and ineluctable in the years before you could drink, in the years when you were allowed nothing but to listen.

You don’t have to be so good at listening now.  Adults rarely do.  It is a rare skill.  I do now know how much of it is talent, or how rare that is; it is not a talent people look for so you can’t test for it.  Kids have to be good at listening, unless they’re good at talking, or rich, or pretty.  They seem to have the easiest transition into being adults with other adults, because the adults who run things are the ones who talk, the ones in charge are the ones who can talk over the most other adults.  Comfort may be sought and forgotten.  No one remembers when you listen.  People remember what you say.  That is what they look for – vocalization, vocation.  Speech.  They think anyone can listen, that it takes someone special to talk.  But everybody talks.  Talk is cheapened by its very proliferation.  Now it is silence that is rare and precious and strange.

But has it ever been otherwise?  The voice crying out in the wilderness seeks another, and another and another until the humans have gathered once again, clinging to each other in a stinking, yammering, cloying mass.  And no one can hear for the talking, and no one knows how to listen anymore, they are all so busy trying to be heard.