CHAPTER 1

Listen ...

The jungle speaks to me because I know how to listen.

Mowgli, in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

Life Can Be This Good When We Listen

The world intrudes with noise and obsessions. The drums of life beat a cadence,and we scramble to keep time.

As adults, we sometimes lose our ability to hear what the universe is saying,its message drowned out by the roar of technology, the blare of commercialballyhoo. The gifts working their way into our lives often whisper in vain. Wecannot hear them, we say. Or if making out the sound, we cannot decipher themessage.

It has not always been thus. As children, we warmed to tales and adventures thatwere read to us. We traveled the highways of imagination. We greeted realitywith wonder. We listened for it-in the rainfall on a summer's night, in theheartbeat of our mother as we lay against her chest, in the morning song comingfrom the bluebirds outside our window.

We were meant to hear the world with the ears of life's celebrants. We can findour way back to that ability to truly listen. What we once heard, we will hearagain. And more.

Listening is a step to consciousness, toward recognizing who we are and who wewere meant to be-beings around whom the fire of life crackles withpossibilities.

Tune the instrument of your heart to hear, and the song of life will vibrateever more richly through you. The wonder you deserve will begin to flow to you.

And in the quiet of your soul you will make out plainly the message the universeis sending: you are a miracle.

Life can be this good.

Finding our own song

Childhood, for me, was like sailing on an ocean of wonder.

Maybe it was my dad's passion for theater. He fulfilled his dream of becoming anaccomplished actor, making his debut in professional theater in his forties.Perhaps it was the lyrical nature of my home. My mom was, and is, a poet. WhileI was still a kid she had six books of her verse published and was honorednationally. During my childhood, imagination ran rampant in my home, and I wasits lucky companion.

I can still see the doll I would rock and dress and put to sleep nightly. That'sright, a doll! Who knew then that years down the road, I would rock and sing andtickle the backs of my children, putting them to sleep in almost exactly thesame way as I did the little doll of my youth. (I outgrew this phase after theage of seven, but until then you couldn't touch me for nursery skills.)

Then, at the age of nine, I was recuperating at home following the removal of mytonsils. I'm not sure how it came to be, but I clearly remember a green costumelaid out on my bed. Tights. Tunic. Cap with feather. That's right, I was PeterPan. For two weeks, I wore nothing else, flying from bedroom window to thepirate's lagoon in the never-never land of my mind. I thank my lucky stars I hadcreative parents who would never shame a prepubescent boy into thinking thatdolls and tights were somehow unseemly for a young male.

This was the fairy dust of childhood, and I sprinkled it with abandon.

During these early years, as the twin spells of theater and poetry worked theirmagic in me, my grandmother brought me to the Alpinelike village of Stowe. Thiswas a thirty-minute ride from Burlington, Vermont, and, for a child, a trip towonder. There we visited the Trapp Family Lodge, the adopted home of a familythat had fled the Nazis in Austria, gaining renown as the subjects of theacclaimed musical The Sound of Music by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The family would gather on the lawn in front of the lodge and, if you werelucky, perform a few songs. It was quite miraculous and entertaining for a childwho loved music and theater in equal measure. The eldest of this family was awhite-haired woman with ruddy checks. Looking nothing like Julie Andrews, this,indeed, was Maria, once governess and now mother figure to the rambling brood.

I remember meeting her and having her take my hand. I remember her voice, hermusic. We had the opportunity to walk amid the beautiful birches opposite herhome. On several occasions as I was growing up I visited Maria, especially whenI was old enough to drive myself. Even today I always go straight to that samegrove of birch trees, the trees where Maria had strolled, sharing the majesty ofmusical notes with a young boy. I would sing along with her then and wascaptivated by her dazzlingly blue eyes, which seemed to dance with her passion.

During one such visit, I remember singing to her a song she had once sung to me,looking eagerly at her for her approval. She smiled but shook her head slowly.Had I made a mistake? Had I sung the wrong notes?

"No," she said. "The notes are the right notes, but the song ... the song is mine.Do you know what it is you must now do as you grow into a young man?" I hadn't aclue. She nodded, grinned, and opened her arms as if to embrace all of tomorrow."You must find your own song. You must find Jan's song. And when you find it,you must sing it with your whole life."

At the time I wasn't...