Trixie Cruz: Listen

by Rose Beatrix C. Angeles (Trixie Cruz-Angeles)

Original post on November 15, 2008

One evening he spoke.

Sitting at her feet, his face raised to her, he allowed his soul to be heard.

"My darling, anything you wish, anything I am, anything I can ever be...

That's what I want to offer you -- not the things I'll get for you,

but the thing in me that will make me able to get them.

That thing -- a man can't renounce it -- but I want to renounce it

-- so that it will be yours -- so that it will be in your service -- only for you."

The girl smiled and asked: "Do you think I'm prettier than Maggie Kelly?"

He got up. He said nothing and walked out of the house. He never saw that girl again.

Gail Wynand, who prided himself on never needing a lesson twice,

did not fall in love again in the years that followed.

-Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead"

Listen, please. Children will do this too. Sometimes they will tell you their deepest darkest fears. You may not recognize the feeling because it’s hidden in words like, "He stomped on my foot" or "I don’t want to go to school." They are telling you they are afraid. And when a child puts this much faith in you, places his very existence into your hands, you do not -- I repeat -- do not say, "Shhh, I can't hear the TV!"

Or what about your friend, the guy who simply laughs when asked if he's gay and suffers through snide remarks and hisses of, "bading..." Listen to him. He doesn't say he suffers, but if you listened, you will hear the anguish in that smile.

I know a woman who loves to say, "I love you," and to hold the face of the man she loves in her hands. I know too the man she loves, and he tells her constantly, that he already knows that and honey, could you pass the toilet paper?

The Wiccan traditions say we are all connected. What happens to one, happens to us all. "Sakit ng kalingkingan,"(1) in the Tagalog saying, hurts the entire body. We love to tell ghost stories and we read voraciously of psychic connections and revel in tales of voices from the grave. But the simple act of listening, that most basic of connections gets drowned in the everyday world, and not even all the technology, Skype, text messaging, email... none of them help us really and truly connect to those who reach out to us, unless we pay attention to what is being said.

Sure there are many barriers to being heard. We're too busy or too tired. We have our own problems. You're not the hand-holding type. All perfectly good reasons, all completely justifiable. But in a wired world, people are nevertheless becoming increasingly isolated. This isolation has consequences on our society: depression, suicide, criminal or anti-social behavior, despair...

Sometimes we disguise our apathy in concerned terms, we say, let him grieve, or she needs time alone, or he doesn't want to talk about it, or I don’t want to pry. We justify government failings the same way, by saying, "ay wala akong paki alam"(2) or ""malay ko diyan." (3) We didn't listen to the hushed toned conversations, to the conspiratorial winks and back slapping, didn't listen to the pause the auditor made just before she put her signature under the words, "CLEARED." We barely listen to the Ombudsman when she exonerated a plunderer. Or maybe we refused to hear, our deafness is voluntary.

Helen Keller tells the story of her breakthrough at the water pump when she finally made the connection between the signs her teacher made into her hand and actual words. Sign language allowed her to emerge into our world and participate in it despite her terrible handicaps. But that precise moment when she held her hand under the water pump was clarity itself. Suddenly she had the power of words!

Can you imagine, if after she had learned to communicate, no one wanted to listen?

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(1) Literal translation, "The pain of the little finger" part of a saying that says that the pain of the little finger is felt by the whole body.

(2) translatioin : "I don't care"

(3) translation: "I wouldn't know about that.

To know more about Trixie Cruz Angeles, check out: I AM TRIXIE CRUZ