Echoes

Sitting beneath the juniper bush and tending to the soles of my bare feet, a voice is heard.  I am alone.  I am quiet. I am five.

The voice returns.  One that sounds like mine.  Yearning.  Alone. Hopeful. Young.  Hello… it beckons.

It is a gift given.  A treasured sound in my quiet play.  I was at peace in my aloneness.  Not sure it had turned to lonely.  But the voice was an echo of my own search. A word to be returned.

Hello…I respond loudly, looking up from my bare feet and down my graveled driveway.  I see nothing.  I listen.  And it returns… “How are you?”

I wonder. How am I? I was content. Now I am curious. Excited. Perhaps even afraid. But the simple and acceptable answer still finds me at five.  “Fine”, I shout down the barren drive.

Now I can wait no longer.  I run to the road. To the sound.  And she does too.  And we stand by metal mailboxes on wooden planks and stare.  She smiles.  I smile.  And our friendship is ignited.

She had been visiting her grandmother, as she did once a month or so.  And in hopes to pass time, she stood beneath their plum tree and to hear her own echo.  She shouted hello. Her voice echoed back. Then when the she heard fine as the mirrored response, she leaped to solve the mystery.

We were none to similar, but we could sit in the fruit trees for hours passing time, spitting pits and leaning on our wisdom.  Her with her bright blue eyes and artistic flair of a city girl…me with my simpleton style, akward limbs, and toothy smile, both entering stages of discovery and friendships and losses and changes and braces and boys, echoing our stories and finding our reflection. It was a friendship of sporadic consistency, and in the few moment we would find in the tree trunks, we found enough solace to face our own separated worlds.

And isn’t that what we seek? To know that the joy, confusion, pain, creation, contentment, anger, fear, passion, and wonder are reflected in another? To know that we are not the first or last to feel the beat of the human condition.  But that our voices can be heard in another’s heart.

I am grateful I sat beneath the juniper tree. That I sat long enough by myself to know the voice in my head.  So then, when I heard the voice of another I could echo her words and find my own.  Because then, we found each other.

May it so now be true.  To listen within in peace. To listen outside with compassion.  To echo what is true in one another. And to find our own voice.