Article voiceover
The purple grasses have said it most clearly to me What I am able to hear Though I’ve been tardy to listening They are long and lithe and dressed in no costume at all They are rooted but also bending and blowing They are lovers with the ground and the wind and all birds and green dragonflies their friends Oddly it is they who have shared the secrets of song I never understood Music is about time and the placement of pitch About the stretch of morning and the agreement with night The grasses have their song of seeds, of drinking earth of pulling the long tall strings of themselves across the busy friction of days of light and the buzzing of bees The birds sing morning psalms of gathering themselves Collecting food Layering a nest So melodic, so avian so familiar day after day the poetry of small steps of living now and thick in the trees My song that has remained unheard by myself has recently started to play tentative like a child who will sound her first note exposed to the whole staring audience of life It is human It's woman It's Whitman and earth and bodies waking for the day It's fledging rhythm new and pink and chirping away hungry and clamoring Oliver and laundry It is cooking and sweeping and love--the way it sways through days if it only has time and room and presence to visit to land softly to be It is the same as the birds and purple grass for me this song and all mornings Feed yourself Tend to others in your care Spread out the warmth of you Generous and unused to the grasping air Open and gaping and stretching toward no end at all but to the light of moments to the melody of flowers to the fragrance of days that never race to their end but sing, whole-hearted not outside, but Within Within the Welcome, the nesting layers of time Questions for meditation: Do you have a song? I don't mean a favorite popular song. I mean are your days a song, familiar, comfortable, honest? Do they reflect the truth of who you are? Do they have a rhythm that tends and cares for yourself, your loves, your creatures and plot of Earth? Does this song of you fit with the work you do? How could thinking of yourself as a familiar song to be played every day enrich your everyday life, enrich those around you, enrich the world? A prayer using words: Great Song of Life who sings quietly in the depths of ourselves, whose rhythms and notes float like fragrance into our lives, help us notice you, abide in you, claim you. Help us live out the rhythm of Life in the concrete minutes, the concrete tasks that move steadily across days. Heal us with the song of all you are; all we are. Heal us with the electricity between us. Amen.