Crowing Friday, November 10, 2006
“let the wise listen and add to their learning...” - Proverbs 1:5
This is one of my roosters. His name is Roy. He loves to crow. Crow at him, he crows back at you. He starts up at first morning light, which is as early as 4 a.m at certain times of the year (like the summer, when you want to have your windows open!).
It has occurred to me a lot lately that people would get along better if we had more listeners and less crowers. And most of us are crowers. You know what I mean. How often are we listening when someone is talking to us? Aren’t we more often getting ready to crow? Just waiting for the moment for that someone to take a breath so we can open up our beak and let out a big cock-a-doodle-doo.
What does it mean, anyway, what we just said? Haven’t we just taken what someone else was talking about and made it about us? “Oh yeah, I know what you are talking about, the same thing happened to me last year when… cocka… cocka… cocka… doodle-doo!”
Did we miss out on something special while we were crowing? A learning moment perhaps? Something we could have chewed on for a bit before spitting it out?
This isn’t meant to disparage others. If anything it disparages me. I am a Roy if there ever was one. I’m just writing this down to get you thinking along with me. Are you a Roy, too? If so, I invite you - with me - to jump off the fence, get down to ground level with the hens, and just listen for a bit. You (and I) just might learn something. And we can save our voices for singing.