Hearing the Unhearable

Vermont’s popular former governor, former U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, author, poet, Madeleine May Kunin, 85, gave a talk and read some of her verse.  My beloved and I attended.  

I had never before seen Ms. Kunin in person.

As it is for many people at a certain aging time, her voice no longer enjoys the plasticity and control of articulation and projection that the most effective public presentations require.  At least not without the compensations of a first-rate sound system, which unfortunately was missing in this case.  I grasped barely a word.  Yet felt no barrier to her generous spirit.  I simply listened with my heart.  

I learned this from my mother, who died a couple decades ago of Alzheimer’s.  As the disease claimed her consciousness, conversation demanded my willingness to suspend all ordinary notions of personhood and what it means to share deep emotional space with another.  In the week before she left her body, my mom and I would sit together for hours without saying a word, yet connect in ways that prompted me to wonder if this were the link we shared when I was in her womb.

A couple of days after Ms. Kunin’s presentation, my beloved and I drove two miles down the mountain from our home to attended Northern Vermont University’s student production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance.  These kids, teenagers many of them, were the counterpoint to Madeleine Kunin, challenged by their very youth and immaturity to have their voices and acting equal their aspirations: to raise goosebumps of amused comprehension on every audience member with a working funnybone.  Again, hardly a word reached my ear in a form I could decipher.  And again, it didn’t matter.  All I needed was an open heart for their courage and enthusiasm to touch me.  My tears accompanied the final curtain as the players waved to us in delight and gratitude. 

My beloved has taught me that energy doesn’t lie.  As we grow our intuition, our attunement with the breath of the universe (what Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, called the God who loves without measure and without regret), we increasingly sense what others are broadcasting regardless of their words or actions.  

Intuition is how we feel, for instance, that a scream in anger is expressing the pain of separation from one’s true self, pain we haven’t yet learned to free.  

Intuition is also how we come to hear what the poet Mary Oliver, 83 when she died this winter, called “…the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.”