A musical mentor of mine who told me that at a rehearsal before my band was heading out on our first west coast tour several years back. It’s always stuck with me and I think about it when I’m writing, recording in the studio, jamming, and especially when I’m on stage with the band.
I also think about it outside of music. Listening when in conversation with a friend, with someone I work with, someone I just met. Listening when I’m sitting in silence and looking for an answer. Listening when I have nothing to say. Listening when I have something important to say and feel like I need to be seen/heard.
I’m listening to the voices of those have been oppressed for hundreds of years, thousands of years in the case of our sisters of planet earth. I’m listening to the voices of those same people asking not for political grandstanding “defund the police” but instead for “awareness, understanding, action, atonement” and peaceful protest for change. I’m not here to give my opinion on someone else’s reality. I’m here to listen so I can learn, so I can see/hear the threads of this programming that my psyche has picked up. It’s ugly and it’s ignorant and it’s not even real. It’s not even mine. That’s how powerful and prevalent it has been in our culture.
I’m here to listen to my own inner voice as well. To trust in the divine voice whose intelligence knows where I need to be.
We are all on this stage at the same time, a giant orchestra capable of playing the most beautiful passionate music and the darkest dirge as well. If we listen as we play that’s when harmony and beauty and spontaneous magic happens. My prayer is that we can do just that and let the divine flow within us play music of humanity than has never been heard, that rolls through the jungle, over the mountains and into the stars, telling the story of beings who loved each other, loved life. I can’t wait to hear that music.