The Language of Ears

When I was seven, my grandfather kept a terrier named Barnaby who seemed to understand the world entirely through the tilt of his head. I remember sitting on the back porch in Enugu, watching Barnaby track the flight of a dragonfly. He didn’t have words for what he was seeing, but his whole body was a question mark, his ears twitching like antennae catching signals from a frequency I couldn’t hear. As a child, I envied that. I spent so much of my time trying to translate my thoughts into clumsy sentences, while he simply existed in a state of constant, vibrating readiness. He was never waiting for the next thing to happen; he was already living inside the anticipation of it. We grow up and learn to hide our excitement behind polite faces and measured responses, forgetting that there was a time when our entire being could be expressed by a sudden, sharp movement of attention. What is it that we stop listening for when we decide we have finally heard enough?

Leanne Lindsay has captured this exact, breathless anticipation in her photograph titled Theo. It is a reminder of how much life can be held in a single, unscripted moment of joy. Does it make you want to go outside and see what you have been missing?