“To make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”—Emily Dickinson
When I was a child, I was known for being able to fall asleep anywhere. Once I laid down on a busy sidewalk to snooze while my mother stopped to chat with a friend. What my family thought of as my super-power was sometimes more than a facility for napping, though I lacked the words to describe it. I would lay down—in a patch of lilies of the valley or on a sun-warmed elm tree stump in our yard—and engage my senses with that spot. I could smell it, feel its texture and temperature, put my ear to it and listen. To an observer, I appeared to be asleep, but in reality I was hyper-aware of my surroundings. I could never have described in words what I was feeling: both the intimacy of connection and a sense of the vastness of Earth, stretching out in every direction from my point of contact with it.
As I grew to adulthood, I got busy and spent less time outdoors responsible for my own entertainment. I stopped trying to connect with the woods or the garden. And now, many years later, what once came so easily is hard to do. So I pray now for “the robin’s focus” to turn my ear away “from all profane distraction/and listen for the silent, sure stirrings/beneath the surface of things” as in the prayer, below, from If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics by Bruce Sanguin.
A Listening Ear
(Matthew 13:1–16)Let those with ears to hear listen:
O Holy One,
when did we stop listening?
How did we come to believe
that we know everything
that is about to come out of the mouths
of our partners, children, and teachers?When did the sound of a red-winged blackbird
cease being a source of delight for us?
How did we decide that it is not worth the effort
to enter the world of what is other than us?
When did we stop listening to our own lives
as sources of sacred revelation?
Why did we stop listening to the echoes of the past,
where wisdom stores life’s lessons,
or for the strain of that yet-unformed future,
waiting to be born?Grant to us the robin’s focus,
that we might turn our ear—
away from all profane distraction
and listen for the silent sure stirrings
beneath the surface of things—
as though our life depended on it.Amen.
—Jenifer Hanson, Prairiewoods director