It is interesting that it took until word number 13 to focus on "music". Music is at the heart of me, I know, and possibly that's why I hesitated. It's so big. And I see it at the heart of the Goddess, the swirling creative light and love energy encompassing everything and moving ever-outwards. I mean, that energy must have a sound too.
So by "music", I don't just mean my beloved genre of the choral evensong tradition, and the exquisite sounds of a cappella vocal groups like The Tallis Scholars and Voces 8. That is the music that zings straight to my heart. Undoubtedly you have a form of music that does the same for you. And I don't just limit the word to the "Western" canon, the music that one is likely to hear on local classical music radio stations or at symphony concerts. That may have been the focus in all my musical education and degree courses half a century ago; at the time, there was little acknowledgement of the countless other music traditions worldwide. (I hope students today are receiving a more well-rounded picture, and developing a more flexible ear than I did!) There is music, too, in all our "manmade" constructs, highway noise, construction sounds, the horns of the great ships communicating with the lift bridge, airplanes overhead, and even the sounds of bottles and cans being dumped into a dump truck.
In the context of Mother Nature, there is music everywhere, in webs of life hundreds of miles from the nearest radio station or concert hall. Hundreds of miles from the nearest humans, humming on their way to work or listening to contemporary music in the car or by headphone. It isn't much of a stretch to hear music in the wind, in the waves hitting the lakeshore, in the calls of birds or coyotes, in a swarm of bees or the click of deer hooves on the sidewalk or pebbles. The bigger stretch -- but I believe it is there -- is hearing the music of the stones, the birch bark, the moss, the desert floor, the flower in the garden. On this snowy early winter day in northern Minnesota, surely there is music in the snowflake as it floats down, lands, and merges with other flakes or, perhaps, melts.
But on this same day when the world population evidently topped 8 billion (Lordy), I am also interested in the ways in which every single one of us is essentially a musical instrument. Our cells are singing, the blood surging through our bodies is singing, and our moods are sending out a song to the people around us and the Universe. Are we singing a song that is beautiful and harmonic, or dissonant and painful? Is ours an instrument making an effort to blend in with other instruments, or a beautiful soloist, or are we taking our instrument and bashing all the other members of the orchestra on their heads? It comes back to what I wrote about the other week, sensitivity. Can we hear our own music? Can we hear the music of our souls, the music that earth transmits out into space, the creative song of the Goddess? When we cannot, or when trying to meditate isn't really working, a few moments of silence just listening may help. You will hear music. There is music everywhere.
