The Earth is speaking at every moment, but you do not understand what She says. Her language has not passed out of memory, it is not gone from the world, but you have replaced it with your own. You no longer take counsel from birds or breezes, the sound of rainfall or a waterfall. You have been born into a world with many teachers whose wisdom is bottomless because it reaches to the depths of time.
All that you are, all that you have been, all that will become of you—these are included to the smallest, finest detail in the vast library of voices that write nothing because they forget nothing. Because they have no reason to set anything down.
A sparrow is not obsessed with its own importance. It understands the world from the inside out, and speaks its entire truth with every utterance. Nothing has been forgotten. Nothing has been lost. No knowledge that is useful for your survival, your joy, or your liberation into beauty is beyond you. But all has been provided for and all has been offered to you, continuously and without interruption from the moment you were born.
The heart is an ear that perceives the sounds of this world. You must learn above all else to listen with it. All wisdom lies within your reach because it not only surrounds you, but lies within you. What the heart hears is the sound of its own belonging.
[art: Farid al-Din Attar, Mughal painter: The Conference of the Birds]