Artwork by Daniel B. Holeman
by Barbara Sinacore
Immerse yourself in the rapture of music.
You know what you love. Go there.
Tend to each note, each chord,
Rising up from silence and dissolving again.
Vibrating strings draw us
Into the spacious resonance of the heart.
The body becomes light as the sky
And you, one with the Great Musician,
Who is even now singing us
Into existence.
From The Radiance Sutras translated by Lorin Roche, PhD. See notes below)
Ommmmmmmmm. Sound is the doorway. It is the power that moves the sludge in me. Flow is the River on which my life raft, body and soul, rest. But sometimes I am not in motion. I am stuck. I am scared. I am angry. I am defensive. I am so very resistant to my life. Sometimes in this place I want to rest on the waters again and have them carry me. I am open to “coming home” to myself and God. But sometimes I want to carve another path for the River and control every bend that it takes. Resistance can take many forms. A whiny child’s yearning. God, don’t you love me anymore? Why is this happening? I didn’t need my stove knob to break in the middle of the Christmas season. OR Damn it, the mechanic didn’t call back. I’ll fix it myself (Now the knob is totally off and screws are everywhere.) Impatience is a GREAT way to approach fixing something. Not!
But if I pick up my dulcimer and begin to play, play anything, even a simple tune, maybe Kumbaya, my tensed up body relaxes, knots in my mind begin to unravel, the tendencies to either retreat and feel small or to be belligerent and impatient fade. The muck moves down and out of me fertilizing Mother Earth through my feet. This clearing is necessary . . . I can‘t move through the portal without cleansing the obstructions that block it. I can‘t even put my hand out for the Divine until I reach a place where I am willing to have my vision open to new possibilities. The All That Is is too big for that . . . I cannot have an encounter with God until I make space in myself for Her. . . Spaciousness.
But where can I go? What are those trustworthy things that will lead me?
My own experience tells me that I KNOW this. I know the things I love and that it is a better idea to go to those things. This sutra reminds me I needn’t follow my culture’s suggestions or even my seminary suggestions, but instead, look inside to find the one thing that I love that feels right to do right now. “Go there.” The implication is go there INSTEAD, choose what I myself love, don’t be swayed. Because I can let my love draw me to the music, that familiar much loved place, when I am stuck and can’t find my way. The joy I have felt before will draw me there. Then as I focus on each note and “tend” to it with careful and exacting fingers, I begin to hear how the notes float on the Silence, how they rise from it. And then they dissolve again. A way to begin to see the natural cycle of things, music, my life. . . . Rising and dissolving. No need to grab. Fluidity, not control, is the nature of things . . . Is the nature of the Divine Flow. I feel this in the music and somehow it becomes real for me in the moment, real enough to hold onto gently and take it into my life. Move my mind.
My lap feels the tickling of the vibrating sound box, my fingers touch the vibrating strings . . . The sound moves in me, in all of me not just my ears. Like the goddess Shiva, whose dance breaks apart “weary perspectives and lifestyles” (Wikipedia, “Nataraj”) More breaking apart takes place, like the chipping away of fragments of an egg by a tiny beak. This is resonance . . . That my body begins to vibrate at the same frequency as my instrument. This removes the jagged energy that I can literally feel on my skin, like annoying static electricity. We, the instrument and I AND the music become one . . .(IF I allow myself the time to play long enough to go here) And I KNOW that deep in myself. It changes me, readies me for the Divine to dip into me like a swimmer finding just the right angle to enter the water. Now I am not clenched inside or out, now WE, dulcimer, music and I are drawn “into the spacious resonance of the heart.”
There is a place in my heart and in yours that keeps an ongoing loving resonance. This never stops. This is the place where God lives in me. Its not an emotional, romantic place or a loving of friends place. This place loves no matter what is happening to me. I just have to tap into it. And sometimes I need something (or even someone) to draw me there or we can journey there together.
But if I am here, having moved into the heart, God’s residence, I can go into the arms of My Beloved. I can pray in rhythm to my own heartbeat thump THUMP thump THUMP thump THUMP. GOD LOVE GOD LOVE GOD LOVE. And I know this viscerally. A warmth like a soothing cup of tea in my heart area, “my body becomes light as the sky” for the weight of pushing things away is gone. In the presence of the music, feeling the walnut tree that made the wooden slats that made the dulcimer that makes the music (And this is the house that Jack built!), gratitude is in me and surrounds me.
Sometimes there is a delayed reaction. Sometimes the connection with God comes later than I expect. . . . But it does come, always. I woke up one morning with a song singing itself in my head. I was too sleepy to write it down fast enough, so all I got down were the first two of four lines: “When the turning of God’s spirit meets the tears in every year. The action of its grace moves us through the fear.”* The melody came with the words. I was so grateful. And, I know this was God’s gift, because I have had a memory problem since I was a little child, but the entire song, after it was written AND the melody have stayed with me without recording device even though I, silly me, made no time to practice for three weeks.
So, though I don’t play like the Great Musician, I know a few notes of the Music that Flows Through Everything from the One “who even now is singing us into existence” . . . yes me, yes you, and all those within the embrace of . . . . Sound.
Ommmmmm.
NOTES
This poem is Sutra #18 in The Radiance Sutras translated by Lorin Roche, PhD. This book is a translation of the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra,a key text of the Trika school of Kashmir Shaivism. Shaivism is one of the three most influential branches of contemporary Hinduism.
“The goal of Kashmir Shaivism is to merge with Shiva, the deity who represents Universal Consciousness, to realize one’s already existing identity with him by means of wisdom, yoga and grace” (Wikipedia, “Kashmir Shaivism, p. 1)