Everyday Canvas

Listening and Snakes

For "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" 

Prompt: Use your favorite song title to inspire your entry today.

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I have many favorite songs, but at this moment, The Sound of Silence comes to mind. I wouldn’t start with “Hello Darkness, my old friend,” however. Even though darkness refers to a mood here, I don’t take silence together with darkness. Quite the opposite. “A vision that was planted in my mind” for a neon light touches the silence and makes a vision universal and benign.

Let us look at it this way. What does any problem-solver, a fixer of people and situations, do? He or she listens in silence and observes. What does she or he observe? Not the sidewalks or cobblestones but what the other person is saying or is trying to hide. The silence in trying to hide gives away a person's innermost thoughts and worries.

Then, some spells of silence between people can be awkward and at times, intolerable. Still that silence says something profound, if we listen to it closely. Usually, those--the fixer uppers among us--are the more silent ones. Why? Because they are listening. Listening is a form of consciousness, evolving from within and it is an art, especially if we are listening to what is missing or what is silent.

For: "Space Blog" 

Prompt: From innerlight ’s " Quotes" 
Read the above item and choose a quote and write about it.

“Snakes like you usually die of their own poison.” Neath the Arizona Skies (1934)

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Don’t you think snakes get the worst rap in the animal kingdom? For our own twisted reasons, they instill a deep-rooted fear in us that the other animals fail to do, well, mostly.

If you take an objective look at snakes’ existence, they are more helpful than harmful as they take care of the pesky rodents in our yards. They only attack if threatened and if you dare walk close to their nests where their young may be.

The quote here refers to a bad person while unfairly pointing at the real snake. Plus, the quote is wrong in a second sense, the scientific one. Snakes don’t die from their own venom because they make their own antidote, except maybe if bitten by another snake such as the King Cobra.

So, while I don’t like the targeting and blaming the snakes, as animals, I can comprehend what the quote means. To me, it means what will do away with a rotten person will arise from his very own rottenness. A simple example: Who usually kills a bandit? Another bandit. Or maybe one of the bad habits he has fallen into. Case closed.

So, for being not so hot ourselves, let’s just leave the animal kingdom alone.