When you bring a guitar into tune, there is a sound beneath the sound that rises as each string begins to play its neighbor; as the combined harmonics of low and high notes begin to ring together and sustain each other; until the joined voices have filled the body of the instrument, and the whole is in vibration, in chorus.

If what fills me fills the guitar, then that harmony must be joy.

I offered to be part of our community “Solstice Sing”* when it was a small offering among ourselves and local musicians… nice venue to sing a little song, among friends.

Then more folks got wind of it, and suddenly there were top-notch professional performers and singers and sound healers surfing in! It made for a fine event… and left me shy of my often-ragged voice (raggeder than I would like, if I am unable to avoid comparisons). Whenever the rain in my brain got too heavy, I took deep breaths, and got down off my need to achieve, remembering I was just offering what I had to whomever came to hear it. And hey, no one was getting paid for this: easier to find humility when everything is free.

When, despite the gales and throes of the day, there is a spark of beauty…

There is a kind of strength which cannot be culled, when you are able to lift your voice in a song. Tonight there were a few old standards of mine, which I revisited in a few free minutes; the heart softened more than ever by life found new corners to fill and dark spaces to illuminate. And as a chord progression changed, and the dynamics of a certain passage smoothed out – the voice, in a line made more poignant by recent events, filled with more humanity, and the fingers on the strings followed that lead – so that the song once rich was somehow richer, the melody somehow deeper.

Of course, the reason all those beverages and treats are such a hit (in terms of popularity) is that they are really are a hit (in terms of physiology). So the veins and the various systems of the body open their mouths wide to suck it in, the charge is lit, the buzz is immediate… and like any such rush, the fall is equally precipitous, the crash as hard as the flight was high, the ugly feeling and the desire not to live with it trigger a search for a quick fix, and back we are again with the promised, instant high.

It is nine in the morning.

With those first words, I have given you the freshness, the low rays of the sun, the clear skies of so many mornings. It is Saturday: I have given you some stillness and freedom from Purpose. There is the faintest breeze, in fact, which plays around the drying field grasses and late-summer flowers, and an untainted blue sky. My daughter is whistling in the living room. Outside, the crickets – who love the fact that I haven’t mowed the upper field in weeks – have set up a cadence, a syncopated cricket-waltz, three to a second; or perhaps their syncopation is a studied lack of rhythm, dancers who don’t know the steps, and so hes…itatethenstep then hes…itate and another until Schubert or Brahms would measure them incompetent, or brilliant, failed student or master…

Tonight I was sitting in a pile of wood shavings, they fell like heavy flakes of snow as I carved away layers of beech, until I was adrift. A seated Buddha is concealed within what was originally a modest 6" block of roughcut. The Buddha’s always within… I know that… you just need the patience and the skill to find it.

Meanwhile, I almost lopped off the Buddha’s nose last week, having angled my gouge slightly too deeply along the grain, with the pressure of my desire to find Buddha, the fibers released all at once, and a large wedge of wood pulled up right at the middle way where his face might have been. Justin, a master carver and this group’s guide, said “Well… maybe the Buddha in there is smaller than you thought…”

Some words seem to be born of an inner and shared light…

For me they may arrive after the stillness of meditation; but just as often the softest and most human words are accompanied or are led by a melody. All creation is frequency, is a movement of waves, from the highest vibrations of quasars or atomic particles to the lowest throbbing of stars in their orbits.

Or, in our daily rounds, from the bluest light to the reddest, those frequencies of creation which our eyes perceive; from the whistle of a kettle or the hum of a bee to the drone of a bowed bass or the rumble of thunder, in frequencies which our ears perceive; to the cycles of ocean waves, whose interstices we hear as they crash to the sands, while their slow pulse, like the breath of the planet, moves through our bodies noticed, unnoticed; to the celestial hum of the earth spinning on its poles; to the year-long wave of a planet around its sun; to the millennial arc of a sun around our galaxy’s core, a music so slow that only the Spirit can listen, leaving ourselves to intuit from our cruder senses.

There is one line you cannot trace with your finger, and which you cannot follow with your eye. A melody, with words, describes the heart. And as the thread of notes is drawn out from the lips, drawn out like the finest line of silk, it is taken by the wind, it coils around a finger, it settles into residence in other lives, it is colored by sunlight and hidden by nightfall, it is raised up with a baby’s cry and deflated by lament for the departed…

A word from the wind at the window pane the winter’s come to stay awhile the heart longs for heaven the heart looks for sun but this song is sung alone

That’s all right there’s a sad kind of sweetness in a song or a sweet kind of sadness that carries you along from the best of intentions that gently go wrong to saying sorry as though they owed you something