Harmonics

Went to Vigil practice last evening. E, C, and I practiced our readings with relative ease and speed. I was able to run through Exodus twice—to chew on it. learn its textures, taste it—a welcome thing. I stayed a while after, though, steeping in the space…as if trying to take it into my being somehow. Trying to take in this active space where Word and song and dance and decoration are being planned, choreographed, practiced, carried out, for the glory of God. I wanted to take it in, yes, but also, I must admit, the desire was to be taken in by it…to loosen and send myself, my spirit, forth into that space to swirl with all else occurring…to have the wind of movement, practice, choreography, conversation, shush by where I was standing—tucked into the curve of two pillars meeting—and gather to itself some portion of mystical me-ness so that it, too, becomes a part of all that is present behind, beside, beneath, within, the feel of the space created.

This brings me back to thoughts of the voice of God… remembrances of when the choir director told me that notes are made up of harmonic waves. What if the note of the voice of God is also made up of those waves? Those waves being bits of the wind, bits of laughter, wailing, loving, soothing, shouting, mourning, foghorns, ram's horns, car horns... elements of the noise of life's fullness harmonizing into the note that is the voice of God.

What if the feel of a space is a sensing of the same sort of waves? Except, instead of converging in a sound, they ripple into a feeling? Feelings that are lush with all that has already happened in the space, all that has been given to a space. New birth, welcome, praise, commitment, perhaps indifference, commendation, sadness, contradiction; encounters with peace, hunger, love, grace, anger… Feelings that are detected differently by each one who enters the space…each one who has a changing shoreline to receive the tidal lapping of those waves. Sometimes the waves take part of us, and sometimes what is in the waves remains with us. Both are changed in the process.

Hm. Instead of practice making perfect; perhaps practice best begets more practicing.