So Full of Your Answer

And if you have ready-made answers in your head,

you will not be able even to listen to the question.

You will be so full of your answer,

you will be incapable of listening.

—Osho

I love the phrase, the thought, “so full of your answer.”

Like an old house full to the rafters with pale, outdated things, things that have served and have therefore been put away to serve again, worn and imperfectly fit to whatever the new circumstances (like the neck and shoulder heat patch I tried to make wrap around my knee last night), too many there for any scrap of wisdom to be found, for any chance of picking up the trail of curiosity and wonder like a neat track in the snow, a glittering small track with only one tipsy or errant line of boots (or four-toed paws), or no track, just the untracked sand or snow.

Listen along the way away from the burdensome clutter, that head and heart already full of answer, and hear Rilke’s perhaps a bird.  Perhaps the calling of a distant bell in its medieval tower on a Tuscan hill, perhaps a lapping, or a slush, a match scratching, a whoosh, a whooo, the rasp of a gutteral “r,” a whispered uncompleted word a halting syllable that makes all consummately clear.

image:  dog footprint, Филип Романски