Hearing- in and out of the classroom

We read a lot about listening and hearing in the scriptures, too.

The contrast of city and country. I think people who spend their first night in the country are surprised that it isn't really quiet. There are different sounds. Unfamiliar sounds. You learn to differentiate between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the significant and the insignificant. People living in the city learn the same skill - different sounds.

Close your eyes when you're sitting in a familiar place. What do you hear? Turn off all the artificial sounds. Now what do you hear? Find a "quiet" outside place. Close your eyes. What do you hear? How many different bird calls? Do you hear water running? Do you hear the wind? Do you hear leaves rustle. Was it in a tree or on the ground?

We've had a lot of cold and wind here over the last few weeks. My yard is a sheet of ice. (An interesting experience for my dogs. A good way to learn not to let your dogs pull on the leash.) When the wind blows, the trees creak- in my yard and when we walk. Sometimes they just bend and I don't hear them. But sometimes I watch them bend and hear them groan.

About 15 years ago we had a terrible ice storm here. My husband got up to move all the kids downstairs. As it turns out a branch did poke through one bedroom ceiling. The electricity was out for almost a week. But the most amazing thing for him was sitting on the porch that first night in deafening quiet listening to the trees groan and creak, crack and fall. He woke me up and I listened, too - not just trees in our yard but trees a block or two away - trees across the street and over the hill. In the morning he took the older kids on a short walk through a literal fairy ice palace - not the safest thing to do given the icicles that fell were like daggers we realized later - but it was memorable. The whole city was closed down. Everything was quiet but the ice.

How do we teach children to hear? How do we teach children to listen to the sounds around them, to the people around them? How do we teach them to remember what they hear and how to sift through the more significant and less significant? How do we teach them to hear an invisible God?