I heard someone say about the piano, that when playing the music of the Masters, since we have no idea what they went through to write the music, we need to add our own suffering and passions to the notes or they just won’t work.
While the Masters expressed themselves in between the notes and staves, we look into our vocabulary to do the same.
I seem to continuously struggle to say what is really in my heart. There have been so many occasions where I wish I could re-speak what I was trying to say. How much easier it would be if we could say things aloud a couple of times before we hit the ‘send’ button!
How can we verbalize our life’s purpose or passion through the use of a utilitarian language, a language that has evolved into the aspect of producing commerce, not life?
It’s common usage isn’t much good in expressing the various depths of our love for our mates, our communities, or our children.
I remember having a deepening conversation with a friend where we slowly moved through discussions of love, friendship, life‘s hurts and closed in on ‘why we are here‘.
She desperately tried to say what her life purpose was, struggling for new words to fit her rising emotions. Her face looked like she had just looked into the face of god. She saw herself there and couldn’t share it.
The essence or the ‘being-ness’ of it all was there clearly. I felt it spilling all over me…I was enlivened, enriched, I ‘got’ it and yet, while being in the middle of it, she could hardly find appropriate words to speak it!
Is this what we have reduced language to? To be used in everyday mundane-ness…….our job, shopping, the markets, our pretended happiness with the status quo?
What she struggled with and for, was a new language, somewhere in the mystical realm, a new place to stand, new distinctions. Her purpose could have been named anything….something that captured it for her alone….something that rings familiar for her. And yet, as listeners, while we mean well, we’ll take that uniqueness away so we can understand it in our own minds.
We’ll take it away, re-arrange it and give it back to her like another yesterday, another ‘already is’, covered in a bit more icing and claim we understand what her soul is trying to express. And we miss out on getting right inside that soul, where authentic life really originates.
She said, almost apologetically, giving in to some level of resignation, that ‘enjoying beauty’ was a part of her purpose. Wow! There was gold in those words!
There exists a whole world of possibility in what led up to that short phrase. She tried to expand on it from spirit, but it didn’t work. It didn’t describe how many gadgets would be produced in how short a span, who would receive a promotion, and what kind of car or house one would buy as a result.
But can you see what could arise out of ‘enjoying beauty’? The world is so desperate for her gift! I know that being around her, allows for much ‘enjoying beauty’ into my own life.
Maybe our gift isn’t something we grab out of a list of options, then use common verbiage to declare it as our choice….but maybe it is what has chosen us, instead, and it therefore has its own lexicon!
Did you feel it? Right there? Me, too. I felt a ‘resonance’ somewhere in the general area of my soul! I think I‘ve got a piece of it….and for now, that’s all that matters!
Rich