All those years/forgetting/how easily/you can belong/to everything/simply by listening… – David Whyte
When I was five, my father (with me, at left, when I was two) sustained an injury that almost killed him. After seven days in a coma from a blow to the head while playing handball, he lay at home in his bed recovering. The doctor had given strict instructions that he was not to move from that bed.
One day in 1948, I found myself playing alone in a room nearby his with a knapsack and knife – one whose blades he had warned me not to open. I opened one and it closed on my thumb.
As I watched the blood pour from my gashed thumb (I have the scar to this day) I knew I should not disturb my father. He was dangerously ill. I only had a cut.
Hiding my bleeding thumb behind my back I asked Dad if he could reach a bandaid in the cabinet above my height. Listening with the ear of a caring father, he knew there was something else going on. "Why are you holding your hand behind your back?" he asked.
When I showed him my thumb, I watched him struggle to his feet to help his tiny son. It took all of his strength to help me deal with my little cut. I will always remember this act of his caring heart.
It is in the "listening" that caregivers discover the need of others and the nature of their role in meeting that need. What a gift lives in this power each of us possesses and infrequently uses – the power to listen with our hearts!
Of course, listening symbolizes every other way we connect to the need of another – through seeing, through touch, through tasting another's agony, through smelling the fear that lives in those who have become vulnerable, and most of all, through listening with our hearts.
"Listening" here, means listening and seeing with through the eyes of our hearts. It means reaching back through everything we have learned to touch the core truth of what we knew, intuitively, as children – the truth that lives beyond our mere senses.
My dad died in 1995. One of my many sweet memories of him is how he rose from his sick bed to care for his little son – a thing he could do only because he heard a need beyond the words I spoke to him.
Today, someone will speak their need to you. They may use other words. They may seek to cover their true pain. If you are "listening" you will hear what gift of love is needed from you to meet the unspoken desire of another.
Live Love, not fear.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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