An Echo From the Crucible
I
‘Happy Birthday’, and the journey begins. Days, weeks, months, we grow and those around us try to nurture all that we might need to live and thrive. Months, years, with language and mobility our mental and physical strengths emerge and depending on the circumstances of our environment might also be allowed to thrive and flourish. The right place and the right time are cultural or, more closely, familial aspects that conspire to help or hinder us. Years, decades, the lifespan is picking up speed as experience and relationships also expand to provide or prevent the path that we imagine, understand, or dream of. While much seems left to chance in our surroundings and the way we are impacted by them, there is a crucible that has been transferred to us at birth and its true substance is based on the materials of hope, imagination, and health constantly recombining and creating a will to be.
II
There are possibilities to find a way to encounter harmony with others and in the natural world around us. Where we look and how we conduct ourselves during this process of seeking out the kind of resonance that we experience in music - harmony of voices creating the towering radiances of instruments and sounds blending their pitches and timbres, distinct yet together at the same time- will shape the path and progress of our lives. Perhaps, the same reserve and quiet of a perceptive audience is also a method towards finding harmony around us that might also lead to conditions of radiance or a lightening of the darkness and haze that sometimes seems to envelope us.
III
The smoke of last years' fires lingers in our minds. Our sense of smell also tends to be a most memorable trace leading back to the acrid and billowing towers that rose toward the sky last summer. Parts of the planet do indeed seem to be dying with a visibility and haste that we hadn’t experienced before. The molten core of our earth is echoed in its atmosphere these days – days of industrial pollution and climate change. This too, is a kind of echo from the crucible.