Sounds, Part 1 The Grand Conductor - 2011
Sounds slip into my soul as if they were keys to my safe. These are the sounds I don’t hear with my ears. My sound downloads tend to happen in an auditory way. I “hear” them coming in. The feeling is of opening a channel and allowing the flow. The downloads may bring a feeling of euphoria or joy, or other high vibration emotions such as sorrow, or surprise.
There are the sounds of bubbles in wingless flight, of icy kisses dripping from a tree, of crickets at home in tall grasses. The sound of sunlight on my skin, a newborn’s smile, a dog’s enthusiastic wag of its tail, a slow dance with my partner, a comforting hug, or the sounds of my great-grandson’s twelve-week sonogram. Smiles and kind words, God’s medicine, make all the right biochemical responses ignite within. These are songs of a living universe, heard more by the soul than the ears.
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A sense of quiet, of stillness, has had the greatest download impact on me emotionally. Reviewing the hundreds of photographs I’ve taken during international travel, I’m reminded that the knowledge or behaviors that enables humans or groups to adapt, survive, and prosper in their environment centuries to evolve, is savaged in moments.
The Lion Monument, carved from the living rock of a cliff in Lucern, Switzerland, commemorates the Swiss guards who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution. The lion is huge and impressive, his attitude gentle as he protects the entrance to the cave. I held back tears at his bowed head, a broken spear sticking from his shoulder. Protecting the cave entrance is a shelter of vines and a pond at its base that mirrors the lion among the water-lilies. Stillness came to me like a storm suddenly quelled, when gravity is once more joyfully obeyed.
The 2000-year-old Colosseum in Rome, damaged from several major earthquakes beginning in 443, is a major tourist attraction. The sheer size and the history of this complex monument is staggering. But more shocking and within sight of the Colosseum, are the World War II ruins. I stood at the railing overlooking the remains of the cathedrals, shattered marble columns, business structures, and homes once filled with the laughter of children, smells of vendor sausages and pasta, and sounds of the hawking of wares in the streets. War ravaged, broken people and broken dreams. A feather could have fallen, without drifting one way or the other, unable to shake me from contemplation.
And there are more like these.
The Great Wall of China, over 2,300 years old and the longest man-made structure in the world, was built by Chinese prisoners. A shadow passed over me as I stood on the top of the stairs, hugging my coat closer as bursts of cold wind surrounded me. I understood the sorrowful download of an estimated 400,000 deaths of prisoners shackled with leg irons. The sounds of hundreds of leg irons paused in the shadow. When the pain was processed, when the thoughts were done, when the ghosts were gone, I felt a sense of tranquility.
Visiting the Arizona Memorial and Battleship Missouri--Bookends to the Pearl Harbor attack, I was dumbfounded to learn that in only two hours 2,335 service members and 68 civilians were killed, and another 1,178 wounded. Numbness took hold of me. I was unable to cry—not because I didn’t feel it, but I felt it too much, so much that mere tears would not assuage it. As I peered into the water, I had a sense that the calm is an ocean at peace. That it’s not anchored to anything other than itself, yet it is so vast that it is stable. Rooted to the spot on which I stood, reflecting inward—bringing peace.
So many “downloads” experienced in addition to these mentioned. For example, the Warsaw, Poland, Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 or the Minsk, Belarus Hatyan Village War of Extermination Memorial and the Island of Tears Monument, symbols of sorrow to all dead Belarusian warriors during the whole history of the country. And in each instance, a form of stillness engulfed me.
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What war ravages, takes decades to heal from. And for what? For power? For money-nexus greed? For profits? Because leaders aren’t bright enough to think of how things are from the perspectives of others and find ways to cooperate?
It is breaking bones when all that was needed was a hand of friendship and kind words. Yet this is the world of the never-sober-never-drunks. This is the world in which the cold indifference of the money-connection damages the prefrontal cortex, reducing the ability for creative perspective taking, enhancing the “primitive hulk smash”* mode of comic books. When will we start taking faith seriously? When will we learn to see one another through the lens of the heart?
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So many more photos to go through! Next, my focus will be on the fascinating people I’ve met, and the beauty of the places I’ve visited. When I write about them, when the words begin to form clusters, sentences and paragraphs—again it is this silent music of the universe, the sound of creation, that is the grand conductor.
*Hulk smash is a meaning taken from the comic universe. Refers to the kind of destruction that comes from a childlike or simplified understanding of the world, immense strength, and a lack of control.
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