Listening to God

Late summer melancholy lingers – for which I apologise.

I told a friend that I was having difficulty listening to God, and I am.
My life is calmer now than it was when I was teaching and dealing with my demons, less frenetic, and yet I still don’t tune in properly.

Last Saturday, at Kevin’s company’s summer barbecue we were in a park area surrounded by marsh. After the food, children and adults gathered around a brightly-coloured wasps’ nest type structure hanging from a tree. A Piñata. I think you have to have enjoyed this frequently as a summer party activity as a child for it to have meaning, to me, the outsider it appeared ludicrous. Adults watched as children beat the thing with sticks or baseball bats, so that it would break and cheap sweets would fall out.
I wandered off to peer tentatively into the woods and then was drawn in a little way and I listened.

Last Monday I had the opportunity again. I was dropped off at the water’s edge and wandered along, finally finding a spot to sit and just be. But this time I couldn’t listen, I was distracted by the water, the schloop sound of the river-waves brushing the land. There was a sign in the water saying ‘no swimming’ and yet the river looked so inviting, I longed so much to be in that water that I could almost feel it around me.
Where I sat there were branches, logs, driftwood, some patterned with the cubing of rot, others bleaching in the sun. There was sand, neither golden nor silver, but brownish grey, the colour of the half-weathered driftwood. Amongst the sloughed off bark were feathers and dry grass.

Clouds like road tracks cut the blue sky, wispy but straight, leading off into the distance, but who knew where? And a single Canada Goose flying, its neck stretching out before it a symbol of its determination. And then its determination faltered and it swooped around.

Behind me, the cottonwood trees, constantly shivering, their leaves turning over and back, tinkling softly like mah-jong tiles falling.

Along the path, banks of bindweed and real Scottish thistles, bindweed around the thistles, their strands covered in thistledown. Dock weed, with big spikes of now brown flowers, and nearer the ground, heads of pink clover, the colour slightly washed from them by who knew what.

I realised I had spent too much time there, in that late afternoon I had been too early, now I would be late

I started walking down the lane towards my friend's house, a long, straight road. I saw myself in one of those incomprehensible French movies where the camera will follow someone as they do nothing but... walk along a straight road.
In my head, Harry Enfield’s character ‘Mr. Cholmondley-Warner', his post-war BBC accent telling me,
‘When there is no pavement, walk facing the oncoming traffic,’ and I did.

A sudden scent made me stop.
Over a garden wall, a bank of sweet-peas watched me, and I wondered how these flowers could display so many different bright colours.

But I was late and instead of listening, I had to go.
I crunched on a verge strewn with fir cones and a handful of still flame-coloured maple-leaves from last Autumn, as though someone were stage-managing my imaginary film.

I believe in the neo-Freudian explanation, that we set ourselves up for failure, we distract ourselves. I certainly didn't give myself the time to listen, allowed myself to be distracted by the water, by the camera and the voices, and the things that could have helped me to stop and listen to that still, small voice of calm, I had to hurry away from because I had not given myself time.

I listen to people, I try contantly to improve that type of listening so that I can really hear what they say, and in truth, that is hard enough.
But over the past few weeks, a number of small things have led me to believe that there is a great deal more to be listened to than just the voices of other people.
I do a lot of talking to God, like a child, I express my awe, my annoyance, my pain, my questions, my fears, my love, but I don't do much listening and so I do even less hearing.

I know the truth is out there. I just need to be a better listener.