4-With Zest in Life

Chapter 4 | The Joy of Hearing

On the days off of school, which were usually special days, Little White Bear and Blue Bear would ride their bicycles down to the park. Most of the time, they would play with the other kids; running around chasing each other, playing hide and seek, swinging, sliding, going round and round. But once in a while—on quieter days, or on extra noisy days—they would cross the bridge over the stream and head into the meadow.

Now there was a certain rock in a certain spot which Little White Bear always went to. He probably went there because the rock was flat, but maybe it was because the tree that stood over it was a most beautiful oak tree. It’s branches rustled in the breeze, dropping acorns onto the ground.

Whatever the reason, Little White Bear always sat there, and Blue Bear always followed, sitting down on the ground beside him. Then, with notepads in hand, the bears would be still. Listening to the birds chirping and the insects buzzing and to the branches rustling. They would listen to the stream flowing and the children yelling in the distance. Oh, they thought, the joy of hearing.

Blue Bear found that if you close your eyes, it makes the sounds come alive. When you hear and see something, you always pay more attention to what it looks like. But when you don’t see it, you must imagine it, and the sound it makes helps you do just that. You form a picture, and you think.

While taking all this in, the wonderful beauty of Yahweh’s creation, they liked to write. Poems usually, about butterflies on flowers or clouds moving across the sky. But sometimes they wrote other things too. Blue Bear liked to write short stories which he called “plants” because, as he said, “I write so many that they are almost as numerous as all the plants in the garden.”

Indeed they are.