Music, as so many people have written about, is truly poetry for the soul. You’ll notice I didn’t say poetry of the soul, because that’s a whole different story.
I spent the afternoon listening to some live local musicians and watching how the audience responded. It’s an intricate dance we all play in the world – the musicality of the human soul pulls us towards each other and towards ourselves. Thoughts, emotions, memories all bundle together to bring forth a beauty of being, an intensity of life and living. Watching all these exuberant young people prancing around (yes, there was one particular young man who was definitely prancing), moving to the music, with bodies touching every so often in softly beautiful intimacy, I was struck by the pure perfection of life in all its facets.
I sat there wondering at these ethereal and yet so grounded creatures – their lives set on the cusp of moving forward to something else. I felt saddened that all these bright beings were on a rushing path that’s pushing them forward to enter grown-upness. Asking the question of which way to move.
Music brings about a deep flash of understanding your possibilities – right there, in the sweetness of just one note, the whole universe can open itself to you and the entirety of your being unfolds with such clarity. In that moment, you know the answers, you know exactly who you are.
But then, we move on, we stop going to festivals, we get bogged down with car payments and house payments, children and school fees. It’s the cycle of life as we know it. And we forget who we were, who we are. Suddenly, from freedom of self, we are in a place where we say, ‘this is who I was’ – why can’t we say in that moment and in the next forever moments, ‘this is who I am’?
Perhaps I sound like someone who is yearning for a lost youth, but it’s not that. I’m grieving the almost lost youthfulness of an entire generation – it was so clear, watching them moving in congruence to the music, one mass of possibility bobbing up and down together, singing along to the words of new poets, brilliant minds. I saw the next generation of bankers, debtors, parents, captains of industry and I wondered what they would do with the spirit that is in them today. Will it die or will it just lie dormant for the years they pretend to be grown up? Will that barefoot young woman with a secret smile still be there in that boardroom or that fancy restaurant? Will she still yearn to move her body without constraint to the beat of a young man’s composition?
Or will she forget the music in her soul?
I hope not. I hope this generation never stops moving to a beat. I hope they never stop feeling the freedom of the fullness of vitality and promise. I hope they don’t forget every moment of possibility and discovery.
Go to this link and listen to one of the magnificent beings who are currently speaking in to the soul of the next set of grownups. I hope they survive the transformation with naivety and joy intact.
fullstopwords.com 