A Man and a Tree IV

I stopped, and I listened.

The tree did not speak in words. It spoke in intervals, in breath, in the subtle tension between stillness and growth. I listened with my whole body, the way one listens to wind before a storm or silence before a truth. Rainer Maria Rilke once urged us to “live the questions now,” and here, listening was living the question. The tree did not demand understanding—only attention. In that listening, the boundary between observer and observed began to thin.