I listen to a song. Is it the notes that take me away, the soul in the voice of the singer, or the rhythm and the beat underlining it all? Life would not be the same without music. It is a metaphor, it often is. The lyrics, even the tune, the notes that make you feel like you are traveling down a road, jumping off a waterfall, or sinking into the earth. Music is transcendent, it is parallel to culture. It is the rainbow that surges from the planet, stretching to the skies of our hope, dreams and minds. One can study the world of culture and philosophy by studying music. What do we all revel in or feel as companion humans on this planet? Culture and individuals are important. The human condition is constant, though where do all these different colors come from? The come from the dirt, the landscape, they play off the flavors in our cooking, they speak of the mind and soul, and the struggles and oppression we all suffer from. They describe our families, be them loving, lonely, grand or sad. They speak of our longings, our history, and the aromas that run through our lives. They are composed of the patterns and poems of our minds and hearts. They define us.

Light ekes through the dusk that shadows this morning, losing ground with every passing moment. Music can be like this as well. It can penetrate through our skin and open our minds. It is never okay to stop expanding, learning and stretching. Many things in life aim to put us in a box and keep us there. Music can be a tool to stretch the bars of these cages, and transform us so that we may slip through them. Once we get a taste for the free world of creativity, we may never return to that conformity. I believe spirituality is meant to be freedom as well. So many religions search to define ourselves for us. They search to keep us in these cages. To me, creativity is the answer, and why for many years this has been my tool to reach God. When one’s mind becomes jelly, unable to feel the strong muscles of necessary exercises, it becomes too easy to adopt someone else’s plans and ideas. I did not fit very well into school once I got to college. They wanted me to regurgitate and adopt. I went to a creative and special high school, and was never able to reach the level of freedom I was able to discover there. I must report that even there I fought for my freedom, the rights to have my mind make its own music and choreography, it was simply allowed for me to live amongst the fringes of life’s tapestry and add to it. Great teachers encourage us to do this. We all should be adding to the cloth of culture, composing our own music of the soul, feeling our way to our very own notes, dancing the dance that comes freely from within. We need not compare and copy the dancer next to us. We must break free and be the individuals we were meant to, and understand the innate possibility within that God granted us. He gave us the choice to make ourselves better, to compose our own song, and to add our own patch to society’s colorful quilt.

Maybe today I don’t want to be myself. I want to pretend and play. I want to discover who I am, for I am special, an individual with my own mind and ideas. But today I am going to take a journey on someone else’s wings to gain a perspective that I have not discovered. I will delve into their art, absorb their music, and watch them dance. Longing for myself, I must explore the complexities of others. I enjoy their obstructions, their bumps, their textures and flavors. I keep an open mind and refrain from judging. This way I am able to experience their culture, their music, for we are all sheltered under God’s love, he made us from dirt so that we may grow and form our own colorful flowers. Grace, be sent on my DNA, obtuse, sour and sweet. Thank you so much for this blessing.