As some of you know if you read the last few blogs, my "plan" was to see this trip as a capstone of sorts, a time to thank this place and the music I love and not so much leave them behind as I did earlier in my life, as to release the ways that they arguably impede me from moving ahead. I have planned (and still do) to do a little ceremony involving creating a cairn and expressing huge amounts of gratitude.
After 24 hours of immersion in rehearsing the music I love, attending a cathedral choral evensong service, and being among a crowd of like-minded people (my "tribe" at least in this field), I'm wondering how successful this ceremony is likely to be! I think our souls know when we feel dead and when we feel alive, and the fact is, in this environment, I am alive. Singing Anglican chant and the canticles, I am alive. In a soaring cathedral space, I am alive. I've always known it, and I honor this ongoing process as a simple celebration of life, joy and passion. I may not need to be limited to this one manifestation of joy, and I am different than I was even a year ago, but it still feels like "life" to me.
Yet clearly I have never been successful at "trying to figure out" successful ways to be in this environment more than once in a while. My little brain and heart are simply not big enough to see beyond this short trip. This first day proved that once you place yourself in the stream, it will carry you best if you hold only loosely to the tiller. There is a bigger vision, a love power far greater than me, that knows how to do whatever is meant to be happening here.
So I'll build that cairn all right, and I'll express enormous gratitude to the Divine. Then I'm handing it all over. A few days ago, I felt I needed a measure of closure, but the pendulum has swung ever so slightly in the direction of, "I am open, not closed, to whatever my best life looks like." Planning seems to want to give way to flowing. And so it goes, ebbing and flowing as it has for about 55 years on this unusual path. Hold me in the light, dear readers, as I will you if your best laid plans start evolving.
