Listening for the Flavor

"Now, what shall we call this new sort of gazing-house?" asks the poet Rumi in my readings this morning.

"Now, what shall we call this new sort of gazing-house
that has opened in our town,
where people sit quietly
and pour out their glancing
like light,
like answering?"

Pondering this poem, I found myself thinking of a man I knew many years ago, at a time when I was newly divorced and not yet remarried. He was all the obvious things that make a man appealing to a woman -- tall, dark and handsome, athletic, intelligent, a great dancer, with beautiful bone structure and a warm voice that always had a hint of laughter in it.

But what I remember most about this man was his quality of attentiveness: when you were with him, you felt he only had eyes for you; that your words, your thoughts, your feelings were more important to him in that moment than anything else in the world. That attentiveness poured out of his eyes "like light, like answering," and when I had the opportunity to bask in that glow I DID feel bathed in light.

The very fact that I remember that quality so clearly -- though I haven't seen, heard from, or even thought of this man in probably 20 years -- tells us how rare that quality can be. Most of us, I think, are more like this sunflower -- always turning our backs on the moment, looking back to what was, forward to what will be, or over our shoulders to see who is following. How often do we really listen to our mates, our children, our friends, our co-workers? How often do we give them every ounce of our attention, with every fiber of our being?

But perhaps the more important question here is this: how often do we attend to the Living Presence with that kind of focused concentration? How often, in savoring the colors of the moment, do we listen with our tongues for the delicious flavor of the Divine?