EverydayBliss: Singing Your World into Being

Some of my favorites:
Azam Ali, Vas, Niyaz, Dead Can Dance

These past two weeks in the morning, I have been doing something unusual: I don't turn on any music.

It is that rare time of year when it is warm enough to open all the windows and doors and the children are still in school. And so, my morning music is the birds singing and perhaps a neighbor using a hand-pushed seed spreader.

These sounds and my small white cup of Italian espresso combine to make me feel spoiled in this place of peace.

According to a very old Celtic myth, the world was not created or spoken into being, but it was sung into being. I love this. If we are made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, then we are made of song, melodic vibration, harmony.

In groups, we are a chorus.

Birds know this; they recreate the world every morning with their songs.

How do you create your mornings?

By the time a lot of people I know arrive at work, they are already grouchy, already aggressive, already ready to see the world as against them. Just picture what most people look like in their cars: hunching forward, looking for that spare inch of space that might allow them to beat the light.

Why are they like this? They have not been singing their worlds.

Instead, they treat sound as another source of junk food -- to be consumed quickly with no attention to nutrition.

Their TV's are turned on with breakfast and the noxious ramblings of what passes for news is the first thing they attempt to digest. And they say, "well, I don't really watch it; it's just on for company." But they are hearing it.

They get in their cars and turn on talk radio or thumping club music. They get to work and put on more talk radio or fluff music interspersed with people who are paid for their "wit."

Years ago, a plumber came to our house to do some work that had him walking up and down the stairs, through the living room, and in and out of the house, over and over. At one point, he stopped and stood in front of me.

"It's so peaceful in here. Then I realized you don't have a TV."

Exactly. And he noticed. And he was smiling.

I think the only reason I finished the first draft of a very long novel is that every time I sat down to write, I put on the same CD (the soundtrack from the move Frida). Whether I felt like it or not, the writing came. I can't listen to that CD now without getting the urge. And now, I've managed to train my brain that any sound will do as impetus, as long as it us not chaotic.

Chaotic sound makes for chaotic feelings.

But peaceful sound makes for transcendent feelings.

Last spring, we were fortunate enough to get tickets to hear Azam Ali sing with her group Niyaz. They take the works of Rumi and other Persian poets and create a world beat based music. It is all sung in Persian.

If you have never heard Azam Ali sing, you are missing one of the world's most beautiful birds.

Sitting there, being washed over by her voice, I realized that I felt like I was in church, that I felt like I was witnessing someone pray.

Now that is how to start your day.