Listening.

So the other day on a teva hike, Yuri told us to take a few minutes to just sit by ourselves and listen to everything around us. He wanted us to try and hear at least three different things really clearly. I tried, but I could really only focus on the wind.

The thing with wind is that it does so many different things. It whispers, it shrieks, it cries, it wails, it sighs; it blows, it brushes, it tears, it pulls. It goes from calmness to gale-force, and everything in between.

Old Native American legends said that trees could talk to one another, but they never mentioned the means by which they did it. My guess? The wind. Think about it. Think of the inflections of the human voice, the intonations, the levels of emotion and sound. Now think of what you hear in the wind, the hundreds of thousands of variations in the way it blows. Every breeze could be a whisper, every gust a laugh, every gale a shout, a scream, a cry for help.

It might be nothing. But what if the trees are talking to each other? What if they're studying us the same way we study them? What if they find us beautiful but deadly, interesting but impossible to understand--the same way we do? And they talk about us; they gossip through the wind like children, like schoolgirls, like people. And if they can communicate, if they can talk and laugh and cry, they can probably feel, too. So maybe we should start showing them a little respect before we cut them down.

It's funny what you think about when you just take the time to listen.