music

Carl Hammerschlag relates a healing interaction he had with a very ill old Pueblo priest and clan chief, whom he was treating in the hospital:

Suddenly, there was this beautiful smile, and he asked me, "Where did you learn to heal?"

Although I assumed my academic credentials would mean little to the old man, I responded almost by rote, rattling off my medical education, internship and certification.

Again the beatific smile and another question: "Do you know how to dance?"

... I answered that, sure, I liked to dance; and I shuffled a little at his bedside. Santiago chuckled, got out of bed, and short of breath, began to show me his dance.

"You must be able to dance if you are to heal people," he said.

"And will you teach me your steps?" I asked, indulging the aging priest.

Santiago nodded. "Yes, I can teach you my steps, but you will have to hear your own music.”

May I become hollow like the reed, so You may play your melody through me.
For I long to be attuned to the great Song of the Cosmos,
to know the song of inner praise!
O, that I might hear the divine melody within my soul
and give birth to a dancing star!

We have a destination: the heart of God. Though we have come a long way from our true home, we can still return if we give ear to our spiritual instincts, our inner heritage as a spiritual being. To do this, we must listen for the heavenly music, the Voice of God, which is constant, changeless, and unerring. Have you ever gazed in awe as a flock of migrating geese cuts through the sky? Did you look up with a strange longing welling up in you, a lonely restlessness which you cannot name? If so, you have felt the call to Soul ... you have heard the Voice of God."

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

If only I listened to my own rhythm, and tried to live in accordance with it. Much of what I do is mere imitation, springs from a sense of duty or from pre-conceived notions of how people should behave. The only certainties about what is right and wrong are those which spring from sources deep inside oneself. And I say it humbly and gratefully and I mean every word of it right now, though I know I shall again grow rebellious and irritable. 'Oh God, I thank you for the sense of fulfillment I sometimes have, that fulfillment is after all nothing but being filled with you. I promise yet to strive my whole life long for beauty and harmony and also humility and true love, whispers of which I hear inside me during my best moments.'

Silence is the highest form of music ... Music of the infinity, referred to as the music of the spheres, is often heard in deep solitude or reflected in natural sounds -- the wind, the ocean, the melody of birds. The single note of a temple gong is far more powerful than an orchestra of one hundred instruments. The clear sound it produces reverberates deep within our mind and body, conveying a sense of infinite peace and bringing us close to the melodious silence of infinity.