Season's Greetings: Let Go
Notes from an Opera
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A friend of mine who is an amazing astrologer is also a trained opera singer. And a mom. Put that all together and you have access to an international performer singing on a gorgeous school campus on a Saturday afternoon as a fundraiser for her son’s school.
“You should come,” she invited me in our newly redone kitchen, which really still emanated beauty. She noticed me tilt my head and repeated, “Really, you should come.”
I’ve observed that I can let my responsibilities crowd out the could be’s. The head tilt was a nod to a pattern change and my friend picked up on it, I suppose.
Eventhough I skirted some parenting serpentines in the morning, and was hedging on going, I heard her say again, “Really you should, come.”
I did.
I bawled.
In his Pathways to Bliss, Joseph Campbell addresses this soulful drive in artists as “mythic-seizure,” which he contrasts against the rational:
The beginning of a mythic world or a mythic tradition is a seizure—something that pulls you out of yourself, beyond yourself, beyond all rational patterns. It is out of such seizures that civilizations are built … [and] the work of any artist who has given his life to producing these things … come[s] from mythic seizure. (p. 153) *Craig Deininger
I didn’t bawl because it was sad or mad. I bawled because Natalie (that’s the opera singer) understands the power of voice and wields it. When is the last time you head a song that jumped past your security measures and rattled the places you keep hidden? When was the last time you heard the depth of a voice go past the moment into long term held grief that could be yours, the collectives or you familial line? It’d been very long time for me.
I watched some people squirm in their seats when she held notes that rattled circuitry with tremendous beauty and poise. I wasn’t looking to them, I was riveted on my experience, but my peripheral held the scope, reminding me — there was a reason humans do this. There is a reason we have ritual. There is a reason many cultures have grief wailers. There is a reason that a flourishing society has flourishing arts. There is a reason we create — it is what we were created to do.
I left Natalie a voice note explaining that, “It’s not that I cried. It’s that tears emanated from being in response to the power of your voice and performance.”
You may be hearing the word frequency more often, and sometimes it can be applied to things that are “fancy” or “technological” but there are very few machines that are so refined as the human heart and our divine, innate ability to create a frequency, whether it be of fear or peace. The artists, the singers. the OPERA Singers. the ones gifted with voice can remind us that there are places inside of us that need relief and release. They need beauty, fierce and refined.
“If my tears were collected,” I pined into the voice note to my friend, “they would have been different colors.” Some felt longer than time.
For Celebration
John O’Donohue
Now is the time to free the heart,
Let all intentions and worry stop,
Free the joy inside the self,
Awaken to the wonder of your life.
Open your eyes and see the friends
Whose hearts recognize your face as kin,
Those who kindness watchful and near,
Encourages you to live everything here.
See the gifts the years have given,
Things your effort could never earn,
The health to enjoy who you want to be
And the mind to mirror the mystery.
In the Northern Hemisphere, this time of year, our digestion slows down; we go from, “I’ll just have a salad;” to pulling out our soup pots and looking for that good, good bread. Sidebar, eating seasonally helps us so much in this transition, but it is also a transition in our inner bodies, not just our bellies. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the organs that we focus on are the large intestine and the lungs.
The large intestine obviously connects with our ability to let go — or not (you can think metaphorically, or literally with constipation of emotions, or holding onto cold foods during a season of transitional warmth). The other organ of the season — can you guess?
The lungs. The keepers of the breath. The feeder of the voice, the organ that circulates our very life force, and the place we process our grief.
If we are in tune, we can hear life guiding us. When we have an ear towards natural cycles, the whispers echo louder. There I was, on a perfect autumn day, snuggled into the hills of gold and fire in Pennsylvania, with water releasing from my cells down my face. Tears that needed no explanation. Before my mind could catch up, the song moved on. If I tried to dodge the emotion, the notes dug deeper with love and equanimity. That’s why we have mastery of the art. That’s why we need to cultivate & stretch the human will — it pushes past comfort to growth,
Have you ever heard professional grievers at a funeral wailing? I have. It makes a lot of sense. They are trained to rattle your bones, so that the grief doesn’t fester, so the dampness of loss doesn’t rot you, so you can live and love still with loss, rather than have the waves take you under.
We know the damage a voice can do with yelling or nasty words, but what do you know of it wielding past your threshold and asking you: What is this? And this? And theses? Do you need them? Are you ready to let go?
You want to know what happened after Natalie sang about loss and love, in three different languages from three different operas? She sang this song, so filled with hope, from all the space she and the sound created, she sang through the fresh surrender of tears so opened hearts could sing. The whole room and the Earth beneath and around us sang back to her and with her, and perhaps through each other.
This was the song — so full of hopeful reclamation and a song from my childhood soundtrack. We watched it really, and our family sang — still sings, these songs.
I think of the cautionary tale to not live a half life. How do we know we’ve shrunk? When we are stretched and feel reclaimed space.
How do we get ourself in spaces to stretch if we take out the wild human element of divine creation? How do we gather warmth from an LED flame?
We all aren’t meant to sing.
But we all can.
In the era of being anything, I think it’s been more my vibe to remember I cannot be anything I am not, and if I am not me, I never existed.
I remember the very first time I heard that from Guru Singh, in LA at Yoga West.
“If there is only one you, and you are too afraid to be you, then the you that was destined, never was because you never lived YOUR life,” that is a paraphrase of what I heard. I was shocked. I was shocked because it was true.
I was shocked at Natalie’s gift. I mean, I got that she was talented, but I had not had my being rattled back to life, stretched into the proper portion of my Self, scatter memories swept back to the Earth, and fresh linens given, etheric windows cleaned with light streaming through. I was shocked by how necessary it was, and how grateful I was, and how lucky I was that Natalie was being Herself, so she could share what I needed, but I could not create myself.
I can create my greatness and share it with others.
And that’s how it goes.
You should try it, if you haven’t. You really should.
There would be so many more cried tears (rather than damp corners) to water the seeds of our life, if we let in the joy of being, and live our purpose; if we open our eyes to “See the gifts the years have given, Things your effort could never earn.”
With great love and music,
Kate
📍Learn more about my friend, Natalie Levin here.
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I felt Natalie's gift keenly through your descriptive portrait of words. Guru Singh, John O'Donoghue, and your own thoughts have given rich food for thought.
Thanks, Kate!