Chirping

Most mornings, I step outside with my first cup of coffee. I leave my cell phone inside and connect with the nature that exists right in my neighborhood.

Some mornings, birdsongs are abundant. Arguing squirrels create a counterpoint to a chorus of treetop melodies. I don’t have to try to listen to them. I can’t help but hear them. If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine being in a lush forest rather than a suburban neighborhood.

Other mornings, what I hear most immediately is machinery. Traffic. Lawncare devices. Construction equipment a few blocks away. Garbage truck on the next block over.

So I stand still for a moment and allow myself to attune. I listen more carefully. I acclimate enough to the noise that it becomes less of an impediment. And eventually I hear it. A bird. And then another. Sometimes not close by, but chirping loud and clear through the mechanical noise.

It’s a profound moment. It happens regularly, and I’m struck by it every time. The first natural sound that my ears perceive through the less natural sounds. The birds are most likely singing before I perceive them, but the moment I catch the song is special.

I’m not angry about the machinery. I hope we move toward a culture of more ecologically sound lawncare, but I’m grateful we have maintained roads and garbage collection and all of that activity of “civilized community.”

But the reason I’m out there with my cup of coffee in the morning is to connect with something different. And I always find it. It just requires more patience some days.

When we say we listen to each other deeply, I think it can be like my experience of listening for natural sounds. Sometimes, we communicate to one another with such clarity that we can’t help but connect with one another. And sometimes, there’s a lot of noise.

Maybe that noise comes from our own need to be heard. An internal haze of sound that places more urgency on our own voices. Maybe a fear that if we let another person keep droning on, we’ll never get a chance to sing our own song into the mutual space. Or maybe that noise is just us showing up weary from other events and experiences.

Maybe the noise comes from speaker themselves. Sometimes we don’t speak clearly. Sometimes we speak with a tone that’s difficult to take in. When we’re angry or agitated, for instance, and the listener isn’t prepared for it.

But if we are willing—if we acknowledge that we show up with a mutual promise to listen deeply to one another—we can have that profound connection and say, There you are! There’s the truth you needed to share with me in this conversation. There’s the vulnerable authenticity I needed to witness in this moment.

We might have to be still for a moment and attune ourselves intentionally to one another’s chirping. And maybe that also means trusting that we too will be heard through all the noise.