I love words.

I love words that crack my heart open.

I love words that soften my prickly defences.

I love words that pierce the veil of my illusions.

I love words that console and lift me up from the clutches of melancholy and despair.

I love words that suddenly offer a perfect match between inner and outer worlds and paint my experience of being human with tender hues and bright colours.

I love the art form of Words & Music gently ushering me over the rim of intelligibility into the empty space where human consciousness meets divine intent, the luminous space where I rest, breathing and listening.

I love words. And I wish to serve them well.

Nonetheless, within my enduring love for words, resides also my essential flaw: I am a woman who talks too much. I know, all too well, my tendency to speak up quickly when anxiety besieges me and then to hastily name what I believe I perceive and understand. The effervescent urge to speak up, proffering eager comments and thrilled ideas, showed up early in my life. As soon as I went to school, it joined me and, without asking for any permission, simply came on board determined to teach me a few things about life. I wanted to share with my girlfriends my appetite for learning, my wonder at the miracle of life and the beauty of the world, my passion for daydreaming and playing make-believe games. This young enthusiastic child did not yet know of the silence, stillness and solitude that the mature, and maturing woman, would come to treasure guided by the words, “Be still and know that I am God”. Such was the fervour of my nascent personality, that I grew to resent anyone or anything that asked of me to be still and, more crucially, told me to shut up. Yet, abiding a strange compelling call, I chose to learn to be still and lean into, or drop into, the space beneath the surface noise so as to hear the sound of silence.

Recently, having experienced a direct encounter and a raw confrontation with my essential flaw, I have begun to crawl along the vulnerable edge between what overwhelms me on the inner and overcomes me on the outer. Surprisingly, and with the help of David Whyte’s words of consolation, I have discovered that, in the midst of what seems to be a crisis, I can inhabit “a world of luminosity and intensity, subject to the wind and the weather, surrounded by the music of existence …” [1] There, in the all-encompassing embrace of God, I was shown the art of distillation that crafts words and music into the most exquisite art form: that of the heart singing its song without words and partaking, voiceless and wordless, in the conversational nature of reality.

The art of distillation is a twofold practice drawing on the elemental power of fire. First, we are summoned to the fierce combustion chamber into which we must throw the illusions and chimera of the over-imaginative mind feeding our compulsive thoughts and unexamined desires. There, we enter the labyrinth of our troubled mind to discover the beast entertaining our addiction to easy explanations, or our obsession with relentless self-disclosure. Here, we patiently learn the true meaning of being sober and vigilant. Then, there is the refiner’s fire which burnishes the voice of the artist who has handed in her most precious wound so that she may speak and sing of the trust, hope and love sustaining all maturing humans who aspire to become whole and offer their gift to a world on fire.

To complete this year of learning to be at home with our art form, join me for an online session reviewing the eight pathways to selfhood in their simplest expression: poetry. The ninety-minute sequence of Words & Music, including at the end a contemplative practice of silence, stillness and solitude, represents the culmination of a yearlong walk, together, exploring the pilgrim edge where inner and outer lifeforces meet and collide so that I could map the odyssey with wholeness.

[1] David Whyte, 2014 from Crisis in Consolations. The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. Edinburgh: Canongate, pp. 36-37.