The Ears of the Heart

We talk about the eyes of the heart, but I know that it has ears, too.




When our granddaughter Nadia was a toddler we went to the Detroit Zoo.  It was a beautiful autumn day, sunny and mild, the trees and ground mottled in golds, scarlets, and browns of the falling leaves.  When the rest of the family ducked into the restrooms, I found a bench to recline on and closed my eyes in the warm sun.  As soon as my eyes closed, I heard vividly the sounds of distance children’s delighted squeals, the squeak of buggy wheels, the breeze in the trees.  It was as if my mind was exploding with sounds.  I opened my eyes, and it all returned to its muffled normal.  Again I closed my eyes and the crescendo re-emerged.  I learned later that vision is a brain hog, taking up most of our capacity to process experience.  Closing our eyes opens our other senses.

This realization came back to me this past week when Kathy and I had a long conversation with our son Chris from Europe, where he had lived and worked for a dozen years now.  We miss him; his reliance, like so many others these days, on a cell phone makes long conversations a costly proposition.  We finally succeeded in getting on Skype together, he on his laptop in Frankfurt and we on ours here; for an hour Kathy and I sat in my study comfortable in our chairs, Chris forming the third point of the triangle, warmed by each others’ voices as if around a virtual campfire.  On the speakers, I could hear him with both ears instead of my half-deaf telephone mode of listening.  Their fidelity picked up not only the rich sound of his voice, but the slightest sounds of movement there, 4400 miles away.  We could hear him picking up his glass and putting it down again, turning in his chair, leaning forward to think, and back to laugh. 

When Chris was small, we would listen with him and his sisters to “The Spider’s Web” on WDET, Detroit Public Radio, program that would serialize what we now would call audio books.  With the sounds of Madeline l’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time to Jack London’s Call of the Wild, our ears would paint images that our eyes would never see, anchored as we were in our living room around that braid rug.  It was our hearing that set us free to travel, carried on the wings of the human voice.  We would put the kids to bed, their eyes closing, their minds miles away, in Carmazotz, or along the Klondike. 

That night after our conversation, Kathy and I climbed into bed, and our prayers for Chris were for our son who was, in that wrinkle in time, not in Frankfurt, but just down the hall.  We live in a time when the voices of those we love are all we have in a too-large world.  Perhaps there is a gift waiting for us, a small world right between our ears, just a few inches from our heart.  All we have to do is close our eyes and listen.

Ring…ring…ring….

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.