One time, I was following my abuelo in the tomato fields.
We were bending at our backs, stooping close to the earth, parting leaves of the plants, searching for ripe tomatoes.
"Ah, Little Salt, pulling words from you is like picking one of these tomatoes," he laughed. "Hard work!"
We kept a few in our sacks to take home to mamÃ.
She stewed them with green beans and chicken legs.
We ate them in the dusk, after the long day, smiling at each other in peaceful quiet.
"It's okay that you don't talk, Little Salt,” said my abuelo as I rested my head on the straw pillow on the cot beside the open window of our bus.
"If you talked all the time, you'd never learn anything."
He's right, you know.
I learn by listening.
As I closed my eyes to go to sleep in the heat of the metal frame of the old bus I wondered, "If you only listen, will you ever be able to teach anything?
How do you find your voice?"
Hmmm.
Part of me wants to live my life as a talking teacher, have my ideas at the center of the universe with everyone and everything orbiting around me.
Part of me wants to live my life as a listening learner, have the ears of my heart at the center of the world listening to life around me.
I know most of what I know by watching my abuelo live and work the farms and fields of our lives.
Maybe I will speak.
Maybe it will be without words.
Maybe I will speak with my life.
Maybe that is the greatest thing I've ever learned.
Learning to listen to other people's lives.
Learning to listen to life.
I watch my abuelo.
I follow his footsteps.
It is a humble path.
- trevor scott barton, stories for a brown-eyed girl, 2020
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