Soul-music

Benedicamus Domino!

Tonight, I wanted to write about something which I call soul-music. I don't mean here the music popularized in the 60s and based on Blues and Rock and such, but rather something more subtle. Soul-music is an experience (whether musical or not doesn't matter) that literally sings to the soul and causes it to respond in sympathy with that experience. For me, this singing has to take the form of something which leads me out of myself and causes me to look beyond my everyday life to something higher, deeper, truer.

One of the first experiences of this soul-music that I can remember is the hearing of a set of wind-chimes over my grandmother's back fence. I would stand at the fence when young for minutes on end just listening to the chimes which belonged to a neighbouring house. I found it marvelous that the mere passing of a breeze could make these pieces of metal or glass create such beautiful and unlooked-for music! It was as though the wind itself was composing its own tunes, or as though the chimes were brought to a kind of strange and momentary life by the wind playing upon them.

I recall that I never really wanted to find the chimes, to know where they were. I always wanted to just stand at the fence, knowing I could never reach these marvelous things, but knowing that their sound could always reach me and fill me with a nameless and unbounded joy, a simple happiness for which there really is no word. I have always wanted a very tuneful set of wind-chimes, because whenever I hear them they add something to my surroundings. They automatically make me feel peaceful whenever I hear them, and it is incomprehensible to me that anyone could find their sound annoying. I am sure that some people do, but for me, it is as though the world has been made just a little more magical when I hear a well-constructed and perfectly-balanced set of wind-chimes ringing. And it's never the same if some hand makes them ring either. Only the wind's touch, so unpredictable and so changeful, and yet so strangely rhythmic as well, can truly make them sound as they should. That is what makes them fall like music into my heart and soul. They seem to bid me hush and be still, to call me into some sacred and secret place where the wind has a language all its own and where I can almost begin to understand it, just as wind among rustling trees can do. It is truly beautiful and restorative to my spirit to hear, on a pleasant summer's day, the soft chiming of the bells of the wind! It is one of the most joyful noises I know!

Deo Gratias!