I can hear it. Can’t you? Even if you listen intently, blocking out all the other noise around you–the distant lawnmower, highway noise, even the sound of your own breathing, your heartbeat? No, keep those last two.

Really, you can’t hear it? Am I alone in this? Listen again while sitting under this Grandmother Oak. She is at least 300 years old. Older than this town. Older than this nation, as if this nation is more than an abstract idea.

An abstraction that has real consequences. Consequences for me today, for those who don’t know what those consequences might be, and those who know all too well. Those who’s voices are silenced by those who’s voices are amplified, lifted up as if they had special wisdom. More than this Grandmother Oak.

There it is again. She is speaking to me. Not in words, or even in thoughts, but in being. If I pause, I can hear the clicking of the electrons pushed away from the nucleus of an atom in a chlorophyll molecule by bombarding photons.

These invisible packets of energy from the sun give us all life. They start a chain reaction of events, causing that electron to tumble down, releasing energy this Grandmother Oak uses to create glucose, stored away in her roots, in her bark, in her leaves, in her acorns and then released into the ecosystem, passed from one to the next.

And in doing so, casually releasing oxygen that fills my lungs, fueling my consumption of glucose and powering my brain to ask, “Can’t you hear that?”

Listen more.