A story about listening
Listen.
She is a genius, but no one knows this about her.
She looks at the world with a heart and mind full of curiosity and wonder.
That is how I first learned about her - because of her curiosity and wonder.
"There's a girl who knows a lot about whales," came the word over the water.
And she did.
She drew a beautiful, detailed picture of a bowhead whale and wrote beneath it, "A bowhead whale's blubber is over two feet thick so it can withstand the Arctic cold. The bowhead can create it's own breathing hole by breaking through ice up to one foot thick."
She drew a blue whale and wrote, “A blue whale's heart is as big as a Volkswagon Beetle, but it's ears are the size of the point of a pencil."
And she drew a sperm whale with these words, "For many years, oil from a sperm whale's head was used to provide light for people. In fact, people measure the strength of light in lumens, which is the light of one pure white spermaceti candle."
She is a whale genius.
It is not her ingenuity that causes me to love her, though.
No, I don't love her for what she can do.
I love her for what she can't do.
She cannot speak.
She hasn't spoken a single word in her whole life.
When she was two, her mamí talked with her in the language of poetry as she walked with her tied to her back down the long rows of peaches under the South Carolina sun.
Her mamí reached up to the trees, took the peaches in her hands, and rubbed the fuzzy skin against her soft cheek.
She whispered,
“Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres
porque de las praderas planetarias
otra estrella no tengo. Tú repites
la multiplicación del universo.”
“I love the handful of earth you are.
Because of it's meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.”
She waited for her to talk back to her in toddling language, to say words like mamí and amo and tú, but she didn't say them.
She didn't say anything at all.
She only looked at her with wide, unblinking, brown eyes, eyes the color of the deep parts of the earth, and jutted out her bottom lip as if to say, "There is much I want to say, but I can't.”
Now, people ask her, "What's your name?" or "How old are you?" or "How are you?" and she answers them with whistles instead of with words.
They ask her abuelo and mamí, "What's wrong with her?" and they simply sigh the sighs of people who have carried heavy loads on their backs and in their hearts.
They answer, "Dios sabe, God knows."
I know, too.
So I want to tell you so you will know.
That's the meaning of life, right?
To know and to be known.
To listen.
To be heard.
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