January 27, 2026:
In my aesthetic education philosophy class, this week’s weekly exercise was to “Listen to your surroundings. Attend more closely to the sounds around you throughout the week. What sounds do you notice?”
Last summer, a writing invitation from Ruth Vinz's poetry class asked us to similarly "Listen to the world around you today." As I entered into this current week of listening, I thought back to how many of my peers' poetic responses in Ruth's class seemed to indicate some idea of "unplugging" in order to really listen—hinting at an underlying, perhaps subconscious, belief that the digital sounds that fill our lives are secretly just distractions from the noise of the world humming beneath it all; that the traces left of the natural world are the true reality waiting to be heard by the properly attuned ear. However, as I'm sure was also the case for many of my classmates, the events of this past week made it particularly difficult to allow myself that type of listening. I, too, had come to believe that I must choose between listening to my phone or to the natural world—that I wouldn’t be able to hear the icy snow fall outside without choosing to ignore the other things crying out for our attention.
Given our homework task of noticing what we hear in our surroundings, it’s no surprise that my days were full of that familiar, almost cosmic feeling of now-that-I'm-looking-for-something-I'm-hearing-it-everywhere. One of these moments in particular stuck with me as I watched The Sound of Music for the first time. While I worked to reconcile what it really means to me to listen to the world around me, it seemed like the prelude of the musical sought to offer me an answer—
Before the opening credits even roll in, Julie Andrews’ character Maria sings of the sound of the hills and her response to them. As she warbles atop the Austrian Alps in the face of 1930s Nazi Germany’s encroachment, I halted to consider the futility of my difficulty in separating what I literally hear with my own ears from what I’m figuratively hearing as I move through this world—my own internalized understandings of what people seem to be saying through action or silence in such times as these.
Maybe our reflex of "unplugging" is just like Maria's spinning confession: "I go to the hills when my heart is lonely / I know I will hear what I've heard before / My heart will be blessed with the sound of music / And I'll sing once more." In times when hope feels elusive or even scandalous, perhaps we turn to the hums of the natural world not to escape the "distractions" of our lives, but to be reminded that despite bearing witness to thousands of years of unspeakable tragedy and brutality, still "The hills are alive with the sound of music / With songs they have sung for a thousand years / The hills fill my heart with the sound of music." We must find ways to not turn away from the noise of injustice and despair, but rather turn toward, enveloping ourselves in tales of hope, resilience, and resistance so that we may go and tell these stories back to the world, carrying them with us in each step toward a different future.
The timing of hearing Maria's song while our social media pages are full of people doing what they can to respond to the cries of our world also caused me to consider how listening—as an act of attending to something—oftentimes requires an act of telling about there afterward. Maria is singing because the “hills fill [her] heart with the sound of music,” not in spite of their divine inspiration. Maria’s sweeping melody, then, might also prompt us to consider the cathartic power and resistant hope of both listening and talking back to: “My heart wants to sing every song it hears / My heart wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees / My heart wants to sigh like the chime that flies from a church on a breeze / To laugh like a brook as it trips and falls over stones on its way / To sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray.” I’m thankful for this week’s reminder that what I literally hear with my ears and what I hear with my heart need not be held so separately in my mind.
As we learn to pray for different possibilities, allowing our hearts to sigh for the surrounding loss and surmounting injustice, may we tune our ears to the sounds that will move us to imagine new worlds—ones that can sing the songs of the hills back to us.