RockOm

By Trevor Harden, Trevor@RockOm.net

This morning my dog shit all over the carpet.

I had some musical gear to unload from my car so I drove from my garage around to the front of the house to bring everything in the front door. In the amount of time it took me to circle the block, my dog had waylaid my office, peppering the Berber with... well, I'll spare you the details.

As you can imagine this started my day off on a sour note. I left for the office frustrated and in a mental funk. My brow was furrowed; my muscles, tense; my mind was like an angry jackrabbit on speed. In a moment, however, music would come to the rescue.

I decided to help the chilling process by popping in an album RockOm is reviewing by the kirtan band Shantala (watch for their feature in the next couple of weeks). As the first track slowly blossomed like a springtime flower, my mind and mood began a similar unfolding. My breathing deepened, my shoulders dropped and my thoughts began to decelerate.

This in itself was a powerful enough experience - observing music's power to open and release oneself from contraction. But this is not where the story ends.

You see, the coastal Lowcountry is rather gray, cloudy and gloomy today. The fall season is turning the palmetto trees brown and the landscape into a bland, monotone wash. And in any other day my 30-minute commute to Savannah would be inwardly-focused anyway, thinking about what I had to do that day instead of enjoying the world around me. Today, however, the same piece of music that helped me to open did something quite magical to my senses, namely my eyes.

The drab countryside started to come alive. Vibrant, yellow wildflowers popped out alongside the road. The trees swayed in rhythm to the beat of the tabla. The overcast sky became interesting, providing a curious color contrast to everything else in my peripheral. I saw that there was life and color out there, but I had simply not seen it.

And the people. The drivers in the other cars transformed from obstacles and non-entities to being viewed as manifestations of the divine, children of God, sparks of divinity. The hustle and bustle of commuting cars was being observed as a cosmic dance. In a few words, everything became glorious and connected. Creation, as it turns out, was singing.

This is not the first time music has done this for me. On a number of occasions I have put on earbuds during nature walks. And sometimes the sounds of nature itself is the "music" you need during a walk or hike, but at other times playing music actually changes and enhances the experience. In listening to certain kinds of music, you actually begin to perceive and see things in a totally different manner than you would otherwise.

I write all of this mainly as an observation today, but also to encourage you to experiment with this yourself.

Firstly, that since music is certainly a tool for opening, see if you can use it this week to help transform your mood and contraction when it arises. And secondly, experiment with using music to "doctor your eyes." Take a walk through an art gallery, a mall or the woods both without a musical soundtrack and with one. Observe the difference and, if you're so moved to do so, give thanks for music's awesome power and influence.

Lord, the air smells good today,
straight from the mysteries
within the inner courts of God.
A grace like new clothes thrown
across the garden, free medicine for everybody.
The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise,
the first blue violets kneeling.
Whatever came from Being is caught up in being, drunkenly
forgetting the way back.

[Rumi]

Tags: contraction, creation, divinity, life lessons, music, Nature, opening, Perception, Song, Transformation

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 6:56 am and is filed under Featured Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.