by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes: Dear Brave Souls> Making music, finding one’s own music, the voice, the body, the writing of, playing of, enjoining in one way or another…
is like covering a formerly blank canvas in colors.
There is a music body in each of us, one who I think helplessly, angelically, is attracted to such beauty in music of many kinds and in many ways. Why? Because certain kinds of music, customized to each person’s sensitivities, is health, stamina, remedio, medicina. Beloved, and certain kinds of sound, is Life helping life to live fully alive.
Do you play the violin, the cello, the viola?
Or another stringed instrument… how well and from whence forward?
I used to play the acoustic 12 string and acoustic reg guitar. When I had to sell away my beautiful red Gibson to make ends meet, I never went back. I was mastering flamenco soleas and the old songs of the people. That was over 45 years ago.
I love music. I mean love, the way a fish happily dives in water then leaps out of water high in the air, and then turns and plunges back down to the deep in such joy. Over and over.
I wish I could play worth a hoot. I cannot. My way is to be able to write songs pouring out on the page like thunder and lightning strike –but my coordination as a person with dyslexia and thick layers of school teachers’ negative cement poured over many of us long ago… I have to pneumatic drill my way through each time I think to sing or try to play an instrument … keeps as Bruce Springsteen says about his music, ‘my tenuous grasp of rhythm,’ just that, tenuous. lol
But I love music beyond the beyond, so many kinds. And I hold back nothing in loving. There are many ways to be with the Life-giver, Music. And I hope you are, and if not, will soon be.
I wonder if anyone in their seventies has managed to master the violin for instance, which seems like kajillion years of full on practice daily– what joy that must be to draw the bow across the strings with confidence and attack that brings the wood and strings to life in perfect tune!
Where are you in your music body?
—-Mine dances robustly. I do mean ‘free of body’ dancing really. No thought, no mind, no body, dancing!
—-I sing daily [mostly to myself softly but sometimes in my trainings I will sing a goodnight lullabye to my dear learners at night.]
—-I listen to a lot of music, the more thundering, passionate, tsiganok [gypsy] music, the tribal songs from across the world that are oten vocables and in minor keys, and drumming from many different tribes from Hungaria to the Americas to Asian steppes.
—-I write tons of songs but am stymied on melodies, but there are certain ones that are ancient and held by folk/corridos music that I so love.
And you, what is your music body doing?
Is it filled in, you know, like a painting covers a blank canvas and vibrates in many colors there?
Even if there are little bald spots in the canvas, color them in. There is to be a set of images the music body follows.
____Mine are the lyric lines I write, the thunder I seek and listen to, the joy of my ‘no-body dancing’ in the many weathers of music, the tattoo of the beat on my spirit body, the healing aspects of different kinds of music felt by body and arranging and rearranging the body and neurology, and more.
