This Mental Music

I usually do not listen to music while walking. I am not a nature lover, per se, or an outdoors person. I am more of a get outside person. I want to tune in to sounds of the universe around me. Of course, early morning and late evening one can hear birds calling each other and if there is enough wind, one can catches the tinkling of chimes on porches or leaves clinging to their branches as the world breathes through them. It means also the shoo-thwack of cars overhead when sitting under a bridge.

Perhaps because I have music playing during most of the other activities in my life, I often have it looping in my mind during quiet moments. This week two songs by Adam Again have made their way into my meditations, "Dig" and "River on Fire." Beautiful and dark, like the taste of coffee on a lover's lips,  they speak to the beauty of getting through as fragile beings on this confusing rock of love and hate and apathy.




scent of turned up earth
and lingering diesel fumes
as i run from dusk




Another song that made its way into my thoughts was a hymn I do not think I have heard or sung in years, "Veni, Creator Spiritus": "Come Holy Ghost, Creator blest/And in our souls take up thy rest." Not sure what prompted this to happen now, but I loved this song even before I was a Christian, so I was glad to have it come. I even sang a little.

I don't know if I should think of these things as intrusions or distractions. This mental music certainly keeps me from focusing, in most cases, on the beauty of God's world I cannot see on my computer screen or hear in endless meetings. I have trouble, even with hymns, resting my heart on the words or ideas that calm me, open me to love. Yet these are also part of the playlist of the Almighty, perhaps inviting me to merely shut up and attend to what is before and around my restless mind.