There are different kinds of listening and attending. In a busy world we tend to listen, partially, casually, with our ears and a mind diverted by many things. But there is another kind of attending which is what we are concerned with here. It is listening and attending with our Heart. This not difficult to do. It simply requires a moment’s pause in the hurly-burly rush of our lives, to pay attention with our Hearts, to care about what is happening before us. In the closing lines of his great poem The Lake at Innisfree the Irish poet William Butler Yeats expresses how these moments reverberate in our memories.
“I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
AUDIO ON DEEP LISTENING