Athena, it is said, invented the trumpet, blowing into it
with her inner wind, creating a robust, strong music. But at some
point someone showed her what her face looked like, all puffed up, engorged
with air, and she never again played the instrument she herself had created.
She left it to others.
Later, she gifted Athens with an olive tree in her long-running contest
with Poseidon, who had offered Athens only a well of brine. She lent
her military strategies to countless ancient battles. She turned
a rival into a spider. She orchestrated Medusa's death. She
married Hephaestus but seems never to have slept with him. She lived
a complex life: warrior, maiden, avenger, savior.
But she let her music die. She let vanity and fear destroy
her song and perhaps that's why she turned so rigid, so sour.
Too often we constrict our own music. The reasons are many,
like Athena's, and our lives are the poorer. We pinch off that wellspring
of wonder and go to our graves with our song still unsung.
Summer Solstice invites each of us to sing this year.
Don't hold back. Breathe, stand as tall as you can, feel alive, and
sing.
These are terrible times -- so sing.
These are times of deceit and denial -- so sing.
These are times of untimely death -- so sing.
These are times when democracy is dying -- so sing.
These are times when barbarian warlords masked as Christians would
make us feudal serfs -- so sing.
These are desperate times when greed may be poisoning the environment
beyond healing -- so sing.
These are times of vast despair -- so sing.
Yet these are also times of tender hope -- so sing.
And these are times of abiding love -- so sing.
....In
our songs, we have a chance to stay balanced, to become one with what connects
all
of us -- no, not love or life or anything else requiring a carefully nuanced
definition. What truly connects all of us, all species, is
simply what we take most for granted: AIR. For no one, no matter
how depraved, can exist without air. Without it, we cannot even sing.
Thus, we all share in this common "field" of connectedness.... and so,
perhaps, knowing we're all breathing one another's atoms, and can never
escape one another, we can finally find ways to heal one another.
May we again honor what could be, and once was -- the simplicity
and purity of earth's unending cycles, the need to restore trust in those
deeper rhythms, the blood-deep yearning for the summer sunlight that kindles
fire in seed and soul and nurtures all living beings, regardless of their
innocence, guilt, or ideologies.
May She, the mother-face of the Divine, step forward and bring
some sanity to our ravaged world. May She help us regain our sense
of wonder so that may reach out to one another with shimmering new ideas,
stories, choices, options. It's time -- in fact, it's long past time.
We have to trust that it's not already too late.
