i have been in gatherings a couple of times lately in which someone suggested we sing in a round. i don’t remember the last time i sang in a round before that. i wonder tonight if people sing in rounds because we know what it’s like to be in cycles, to be trapped in cycles. around and around. a round and a round. maybe the cycle feels different when we cycle on purpose, harmony found amidst all the dissonance we are living through.
rounds are overwhelming. earlier this week Lama Rod Owens said “when it gets overwhelming you get overwhelming.”
we overwhelmed the overwhelm with rounds and not rounds. reminding ourselves of our lung capacity. singing at the gathering. singing at the protest.
i forgot what you said, but i remembered when it was put to music.
this week a fellow traveler shared Greg Cajete’s wisdom: “the purpose of ceremony is to remember to remember” which reminded me of Jesse Row writing about “belief in belief” in the context of reparative writing, or hope for the possibility of it. he quotes Jesse Michaels’ liner notes:
“Music is an indirect force for change, because it provides an anchor against human tragedy. In this sense, it works towards a reconciled world. It can be the direct experience of change. At certain points during some shows, the reconciled world is already here, at least in that second, at that place”1
Row writes, “All art aspires to the condition of music, Joyce said.” the condition of music, the remembering, the ceremony is the song is the we say your name is the protest is the incantation is the ceasefire is the returning to what we believe, what we hold dear.
the condition of music……enthusiasm: “Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us.”2
these things go together in my mind. a loving recognition of the triumph, with the incalculable loss. a trust in life. and the triumph did not come from the direction i’d been looking in. but it did come.
White Flights - Jesse Row. He continues, “But I’ll take it, I’ve felt it, I’ve known it: the reconciled world, the other world that is not just possible but here. It took me a long time to admit to myself that fiction could partake in this spirit, that it could be so relentlessly public and intentionally uplifting; but that was my own problem, because the evidence was and is in plain sight….what some….like Amy Hungerford, call “belief in belief,” ↩
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way ↩