Sound and balance

What a funny few weeks it’s been. I felt such an influx of energy, knowing, and inspiration during the first quarter of the year, and then some time in May I felt myself go back into the Void. In this quiet space I just wanted to do two things. One was to be in nature, literally getting my hands and feet in the dirt of my garden. I’ve been asking nature to teach me about balance. Yet I’ve also been asking how human beings hold the balance between heaven and earth in a way that’s distinct from, say, the way that trees hold that balance.

Which brings me to the other thing I’ve been doing: exploring the nature of sound. I started taking voice lessons this year only half certain of the reasons why. I was guided to this very special teacher who had been offering more traditional, technical voice lessons but has been wanting to expand into more spiritually based work. We’ve been doing some really amazing learning together, and we’re always surprised where our sessions go. Last week a chunk of clarity dropped into consciousness during our lesson: sound in all its forms (breath, voice, music, rhythm) was the missing piece for me in my search for balance between heaven and earth, spirit and matter.

I’d been working things from both ends, so to speak, “down” in the ground and “up” in the light. Yet sound was giving me a very visceral way of bringing those two ends together and seeing the unity in that polarity (again with that paradox!). I was experiencing the emergence of sound from the physicality of my being and hearing / feeling it move into light, and I was also learning about sound’s role in Creation with a capital C—the movement of light into form. 

There’s also a third dynamic of co-creation coming into play, which I recognize from the times I’ve received poems. I’ll usually get a sense of a rhythm, and then words to go with that rhythm, maybe an image, and then I’ll scramble to write it all down and work it more concretely. I’m finding that likewise there are melodies available to me. Not that I am “composing music,” but when I play with my crystal bowls, there is a certain melody that keeps wanting to arise. I just hum it for my own benefit, because of what it does to center or uplift me. When I garden the sounds that come to me are entirely different. It seems so obvious now, but the context and the interplay are factors I’d never considered before.

Where is this all going? Who knows. Were I to venture a guess I’d probably be wrong because that’s how things tend to go for me—surprises at every turn!