When the darkness comes and the fire is lit, when you sit together fearing what is to come, that is when someone calls for a song.
One unaccompanied voice rises in the silence. Grief-layered edges speak of sorrow, an ache that stirs longing and holds the loss of all who listen. A melody that sounds like the feeling of heavy clouds, pierced for a moment by a flood of sunlight. The refrain sends a vibration through you; a feeling like what once was, but now is lost.
Yet, at the very center of the calling to grief and sorrow, lay hope and joy. Because the truth is, there is no grief without joy, and no joy without grief.
One lives within the other, forever intertwined; a briar rose, a blackthorn tree in bloom, a phoenix singing as it bursts into flame.
“Sorrow is not the opposite of joy. Sorrow is walking deeper into joy.”*
Music, this wordless speech that arrows straight into our hearts. Music, the language of emotion, as art is the language of symbol and image.
Music speaks truths that bypass thought, truths about what it means to be alive. Music (as all we create) originates in an “other” place we cannot delineate or control. Music delivers transcendence, heightening and enlarging our experience as inhabitants of this bitter and sweet world. Music connects us to one another, tells us we belong here.
Music expresses the soul's longing in ways that words cannot.
John O'Donohue said, "Music is what language would love to be if it could." For the most meaningful experiences and emotions in life can be only suggested by words, which are just signifiers or representatives of emotions. Certain states of being may be beyond even the power of poets to tell.
Do you feel that is true?
But music, alive with its own ways of being, speaks to our emotional and physical body with language it understands; penetrates our inner landscapes to inhabit the psyche. The soul.
There, in that unknowable land, music companions us — as a truth we understand without understanding how, as a story we tell to ourselves.
We help to create and enliven every song and story and poem that we love, simply by loving them. There is no love without co-creation. In loving, we fit together our edges, make their wonder part of ourselves — and gift our own wonder to them.
What we love, we make our own. We make what we love our own. This, we know.
We invite inside the song of rose and thorn, hold it fast, feel where it makes us wider and deeper, and make it our own.
And we are changed.
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