we listen a great deal to the sounds in the distance, try to untangle their webbing. sometimes only wind. sometimes silence. sometimes promises of coherence, language, understanding. sometimes great joy. once we heard a wild sound which surely was an animal trapped and dying. it reached a place of longing in us to do something which we could not do. there was a body of water between us and the sound and a great distance of emptiness to search, no way to locate the suffering animal, really. we'd have gone walking and searching forever. and so instead we remained tied to the pain of the ground, dumbly on our own feet. of course later we thought it was perhaps only a bird engaged in pursuits we could not understand, it possibly mimicking sounds we only guessed at. this interpretation, true or not, will always remain possible. most recently we heard a mad dog in the distance surely on the verge of death whose cacophonous distress broke into the distress of many, only for us to later learn that it was three happy hunting beagles out on a run. what do we ever know, truly? nothing. but we listen to the sounds in the distance and try to name them.
