A Music of the Soul - Democratic Underground

NanceGreggs

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Fri Jan-16-09 12:44 AM
Original message

A Music of the Soul

Edited on Fri Jan-16-09 12:51 AM by NanceGreggs

I am beginning to hear something I feared was lost to me – to all of us – forever. A kind of music of the soul.

At times throughout the dark and deafening past eight years, I have heard a lone cello. It had a mournful sound – like the tapping of rain on a flag-draped casket, the quiet sobbing of a child trapped by fear, the fading echo of a voice wracked with pain.

At times, I have heard a solo violin. It played a melancholy tune, like the sound of workers whose hands were idle, of women who could not feed their hungry children, of men who cried – openly and unabashedly – out of shame for what the world had become, and what they had been reduced to as a consequence.

Too often I have heard the cacophonous noise of war, the blaring of out-of-tune horns that called soldiers to battle, and served as the backdrop to some unspeakable horror that has been wrought.

So often I have struggled to discern the harmonies I know are out there, sung by like minds and like spirits the world over – one to the other, heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul.

Amidst the din of corruption and greed, I have sometimes found it possible to hear – though faintly at best – the subtle song of prayer being spoken in a thousand different languages, a disparate collection of voices all singing to the same God.

But lately the music grows closer, and louder.

I can hear it in the voices of protesters in Israel who recognize that their neighbors in Gaza are singing the same plaintive song – and are determined to be heard not separately, but as a duet.

I can hear it – at times, here and there – in the hymns sung by Christian choirs, in the songs sung by cantors in the synagogues, in the voice of the muezzin who admonishes all Muslims to hasten to prayer – in the voices of all of those who recognize that the common purpose of understanding each other’s beliefs, and embracing each other’s differences, contribute to the only kind of harmony that is true enough to beckon the heart, as well as the ear.

I can hear it in the tunes hummed by workmen determined to find their way back to the plant – songs that originated in faraway places, long ago abandoned for a new world and a better life – orchestrated to blend bag-pipes and Spanish guitars, French horns and baliliakas, garbage-can-lid percussion in perfect tune with heirloom dulcimers and hand-me-down ac-cor-deens.

I can hear it – growing closer, and stronger now. It sometimes resonates in the heart like a bass drum, or gently touches the soul with the same quiet hand that lovingly caresses the strings of a harp.

But the music is out there, and it is as magical and majestic as we remember it being. Its revival is a reminder to grasp the principles of the past and hold them close; its renewal is the soundtrack of the rest of our lives.

The music-makers – those who sing the songs of peace, who play the music of hope, who create the compositions of a new era of understanding, who weave the strength of old traditional tunes with the promise of new, yet-to-be-heard melodies – are coming into their own.

Listen.

In a few days, a new conductor will stand before the orchestra and raise his baton. He will direct the flow of the strings, dictate the volume of the horn section, choose the moment when the cymbals crash and capture the attention of the world audience.

But it is the music-makers who will take us all to the ultimate crescendo – the moment of playing in harmony too sweet to go unheard, too important to go unheeded, too beautiful in its perfection to be ignored.

Ready your instruments - strike up the band. We are all players – so let’s determine to play our parts well.

We are not only the people we’ve been waiting for. We are the musicians who will be heard for generations to come.

Let our song not be forgotten, but sung and remembered as something worthwhile.