Edge Spaces
There’s something powerful about the edge places in life …
The edge place of stepping into a new zone of reality, the edge place of where the shore meets the waters, the edge place that is a threshold space between what is held and released …. This morning I saw that for many years my life has been a nearly constant enlivening of these edge spaces … it’s one of the ways that sound has worked it’s powerful ways with me. As a musician, specifically a classical musician, I was often fully engaged with that which has no words but that did have ‘notes’ and specific sequences and rhythms … the magnificent felt sense of being a part of a large orchestra or chamber ensembles …. incredible to know viscerally that sense of being one with a whole and expressing something that is greater than any one individual… harmonies and counterpoints, tensions and releases over and over on a wondrous movement of sound….
These were great days – the Australian Opera, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, The Australian Pops Orchestra and countless wonderful sessions with recording artists and stage performers …. And then there is this broader and somehow indefinable world of Sound. It incorporates music and it includes everything else! Birds, winds, seas, animals, trees, heart beat and tears, words and fears ….
Sound is round and noise is jiggedy, zigzaggy, straight and bent, rather than curved and fluid. Noise has corners rather than curves I sense … Like incessant and repetitve machine actions or streams of disconnected and disturbing effects from actions that are often made by machines … but not always. Noise, if left untended has the capacity to eat into the psyche, stability or wellbeing of another – think the dentists drill. How long can we bear the sound of that action close to our nervous system?
And I have, as I often do, digressed.
I wanted to write about Sound. I want to allow words to come in where words so often fall short because words often demand us to have meaning and understanding rather than to stream in a way that is free and yet connected to something I call source or soulfulness . . .
Sound is something I find myself falling into when words or meaning has passed me by and yet some kind of engagement with other wants to happen.
I want to take you with me as I go to one of my favourite Earthly edge places … where the sea and the land meet. The shores, the cliffs, the vast expanse where I am in touch with the wider realms of a world I know so exquisitely little – the oceanic waters of our beautiful planet and her many unmeetable living beings. I want to take you to a cliff top that sees only the sun as she comes to another meeting point of her own – the distant horizon – at the time we refer to as sunset. . . a time where we can, as humans, be brought face to face with a mighty show that is always different and always and forever satisfying and luminous … a pause for giving something of myself to the many that have assisted through the day that has been lived.
It is in this moment that I will so gratefully pick up one of our beautiful bronze hand gongs or a simple hand forged singing bowl with it’s pure tones and I will play . . . offering the sounds as a way to somehow nourish and respond to the beauty of what is occurring.
I feel that these sounds, when played and lived so truly from a pure and open font of joy, are sounds that bring nourishment to the planet. They have an effect that is freely given and travels on into the wider universe forever and ever . . .
When I am blessed to be with others and have them join me in this wave of grateful showering sounds I am close to being as one with an orchestral or symphonic wave of oneness again …. and this time the other players are those of roaring and raw Nature – wind, wave, and the numerous and uncountable ‘other’ that is also Me.
Sound, when offered and played in this way seems to allow an edge space to grow and become a wider expanse where we can grow and flow into a new space of Becoming …. becoming with what is there to meet and shape with us our next moment or adventure, song or action.
It was Sagres, the south west edge of Europe that brought us to our open hearted serenade to the Sun just a couple of weeks ago and that I share here with you.
Feel the energies and know that these sounds are continuing to travel as vibrational fields and contributing to a sweet and sonorous song of Love.