Books & More

In the fall of this year the book To Hear the Forest Sing will be available for purchase. The book is a collection of writings gathered over a decade. Some of the stories have been featured on the Listen Well site and some have never been recorded. The pieces grew out of Margaret's musings during her daily walks in the woods...

The book begins...

         "The writer Joan Grant believed that every human being was both teacher and pupil, and that at any moment we are both instructing someone and learning from someone else, with one always behind and one ahead. Humanity, she said, was moving forward en masse into enlightenment. But, she warned, the instant any single member of this interdependent progression stopped learning, he would in turn lose his ability to teach. This refusal to learn would gum up the works, so to speak, and the united movement toward awakening would hesitate, would falter.

       I would add that those near the same level of learning will alternate between acting as teacher and pupil for one another, shifting positions, tossing the learning ball back and forth. In this generous exchange of lesson and learning, the open, curious personality is most valuable, and the pedantic know-it-all becomes a hindrance. An arrogant temperament causes evolutionary gridlock. It does no good to honk your horn, yell out the window, because the person who has stopped learning can move neither forward nor backward. Their frozen attitude has created a maddening pile-up of stalled souls.

         So it would appear that the short list of qualities most valuable for the student to cultivate would be as follows: curiosity (always the top of the list), a willingness to learn (paramount), the ability to listen, to remain still and quiet, to cooperate with the rest of the students, to be able to listen (did I mention this?) I won’t go into what it is that makes for a difficult student. I assume most of us have lived these attributes, and suffered the consequences..........."