Music Meditation
Tirelessly my human mind reaches for meaning everywhere she looks. The puzzle pieces of my life fall together with each passing moment as the narrator inside my head laughs again and says, “I told you so.”
I find myself looking for patterns, creating stories from experience to predict how the present moment will transpire — admiring the fabric of two lives woven together with individual moments, beautiful, radiant memories. And yet, everything changes.
Presently everywhere I look in the world, certainty is in short supply and still my casual neighbours trade self-important opinions in everyday conversation like cheap wine regifted. My heart aches.
One friend lost a baby, the others getting a divorce, a third whose daughter got a scholarship to some Ivy League school. Amidst the entropic chaos of life, music remains the same.
Music is my mindful medicine, providing both the familiar and the new. It holds the space between tension and release within my own mind and interactions with others. Music supports the work of my nervous system to stay the course amidst floods and storms, no matter how the weather presents.
When a playlist I have shared deeply with someone I love returns to my circuit, I am teleported again to that very moment, transformed and transfixed, if not saddened by the ambiguous loss of her presence so apparent in my mind and yet absent in the flesh. Hours spent lost and held in the vibration of sound, re-lived and replayed. Music in this way allows me to grieve and to praise the beauty of what is gone. When the grieving is paused (because it’s never really over) or my capacity to listen expires, by heartache or any other measure, I turn to the process of creation.
Unlike children whose parents had wisely had them instructed until certain their foundational music capacity was ripe, music found me in my late 20s and slowly took my world by storm. Suddenly, an activity wherein there was no competition and no glory, nobody expected me to awe a crowd or make a paycheck. Unlike the hours I had invested in dieting and CrossFit, music holds no overt intention to change the participant despite its capacity to do so in the most brilliant way. How beautiful this activity that asked nothing from me but attention and love while giving back joy and perfection.
It took me a long time to find my perfect instrument. After struggling with painful guitar strings and picking up an odd assortment of sound-producing structures from exotic countries, I was beginning to think that it might be too late. Before long however, a vision came to me like llightning, the harp! The rest is history.
The feather, my first harp, is white and light brown standing 48 inches tall, with 32 nylon and steel strings. Middle C and her sisters stand out in lipstick red, while the Fs flash midnight blue, both guiding my hands into their proper position, most of the time. Like my Celtic ancestors before me, playing the harp I become a midwife of sound. Nimble fingers feel for direction to herald angel’s messages down to earth, so soft, and yet unrelentingly poignant. When I get it right. Notes on paper focus, refocus my eyes and attention so tuned to the task at hand. Everything else disappears.
The oscillation between problem-solving and release cascades episodes of satisfaction that I can feel in my toes — a private celebration of attainment, made better by the absence of an audience. Maybe one day I can pull that off in good company.
Maybe one day, I’ll record it. Meanwhile, in the quiet hours of the early morning, I play call and response with the birds teasing the world to life. In the stillness before sound, I am stalling — I am stalling the email inbox, the social media fury, the meal prep food consumption never ending circle. I am stalling everything, and it’s wonderful. Intentionally, I forget what time it is in order to squeeze in one more song.
Playing the harp, I feel connected to some great great grandmothers I never knew, who played colourful songs of seasons to their babes in cribs or their husbands by a warm burning hearth. Imagining beautiful Irish women with soft features and sharp hair, blinded by small-pox or some other maladie yet intimately connected to every note on their instruments. I may never be exactly like them, but this is my time — my time with the music, passed to me by my ancestors.
Tenderly, I’ve gardened enough implicit knowledge that even ancient compositions begin to blossom from my fingers. No longer are they sprouting and jagged seedlings searching for light but instead begin to take on life of their own. Cross-pollination occurs between what I learned before and what is budding now so that the natural personality of a piece starts to shine through; finally, I hear their true colours.
So much of my ease with the instrument was born from the relationship that I have with my teacher Allison. Over 80 years old, she invited me to lessons twice a month, even during the pandemic. Our meetings proved to be a rare gem of social interaction inside an isolated world. Wearing her seasonally themed costume jewelry, Allison would instruct with cardboard cut-outs of shiny ladders representing scales and paint colourful music notes on my sheets to match the harp string colours. She wrote down everything we practiced twice so that I would have a copy to take home. Our 30 minutes sessions usually become close to one hour and 30 minutes because I spent a considerable time listening to her life stories more than once. The third time’s a charm for all things in Allison’s world — the third round of revision and the third time she would tell me a story. I never had the heart to tell her that I’ve already heard the punch line, but I always laughed along anyway. To hear about the romance stories between my favourite composers of years gone by or to learn about medical first aid practice in the War seemed like half the reason for being there. Thanks to Allison, I can read music for the first time in my life, and I can sit with my instrument to become engulfed in the production of sound without too much self-editing.
Playing the harp has become my meditation practice, and in fact, it often slides in right before I sit to be with the silence. The mindful plucking of strings and sorting of my attention clears my mind before I can tune into quiet. In fact, it is easy to tell what social dilemma or life decision is banging at my door if the concepts try to interrupt my music practice. The answer to me becomes focus and refocus on playing or to truly sit and give the challenge some empty brain space. Both are good practice. In this way, music not only brightens my soul but also provides the perfect solution pathway to life’s problems; with my nervous system at rest, I can approach a conversation in my mind in a new way so the answer that I feel in my gut becomes very clear. Music is the mindful meditation to which every cell in my body attests yes and proclaims, finally — feels like coming home.