We are instruments

"What we love about music is not that it sounds good. What we love about music is that it sounds inevitable. It's playing the thing that we all know is unfolding. Whether we want to accept it or not." —Jon Batiste in American Symphony

For the past few months I’ve felt drawn to watching music documentaries. Music has never been a particular interest of mine, but there’s something about these stories that have been calling to me. Last weekend I got a clearer understanding of why that might be.

It’s not the music itself I’m there for—though my goodness, am I developing a swift and abiding appreciation for the good stuff—but rather to watch how these artists do what they do: namely, how they connect with the divine, bring it into 3D reality in a way that human senses can recognize, and share it in a way that shifts things. 

Yup, the divine.

Are Beethoven, Aretha Franklin, Leonard Cohen, the Indigo Girls, Jon Batiste (the subject of the doc I’m watching now), and countless other great musicians not channeling something that is bigger than all of us? There’s no way they’re not. We know they are because of how it feels when their music lands in our bodies. We know because there are pieces of theirs we listen to again and again and get chills every time. It’s massive, and it transforms us. It’s undeniable.

It’s love, ya know? 

Anyway, part of what helped me put this together was a workshop called Portals to Wisdom, a workshop Grace Boda and I guided last weekend. Our intention was that participants would have the experience of connecting with the vast supply of beauty and power and healing we all have access to, and start to notice (and trust!) how their particular body, voice, system—their instrument—brings it into the world. We held it all lightly, never imagining that the hugeness we envisioned might actually come to pass. But my goodness, did it ever.

Enormous, important things came through each person, each in their unique ways of receiving and delivering it. Some of us saw in pictures or color or symbols, some heard things, some got flashes of knowing that defy description. We expressed it at different frequencies, lengths, combinations of words, or no words at all. However it happened, it shifted the energy of the room: with every soul seen, every heart opened, every word written, every message transmitted, something changed. 

The perfect metaphor

At one point a participant shared a story about visiting a huge cathedral with a massive organ that was played, unbelievably, by just one person. But the music they brought through vibrated the entire room, lit it up, and literally moved everyone. This story—inspired simply by her noticing the organ in the church where we were—provided the perfect metaphor of what we were up to that day.

Each of our instruments was picking up on what we saw, what we knew—about ourselves, about each other, about life—and telling it in the ways we knew how. Over the course of the day we became a little band, a little chorus, of sublime instruments transmitting truth, expressing beauty. And we could trust what was happening because of how it felt, and how it was being witnessed.

It’a love, ya know?  

What this can actually do for the world

Did you ever see the movie The Shawshank Redemption? When Andy Whatshisface manages to get his hands on a record player and blasts opera out through the whole building and out into the yard, and how—thanks to the magnificent instruments of storytelling and filmmaking—we see hearts opening, bodies softening, serenity happening in every corner of this hellscape? 

Yes, it is fictional, but as with so much fiction, it points to something very real. 

It’s love, you know? 

We’re not looking away from the pain in the world. We’re tuning our instruments so that the music of something greater, truer, washes over the whole little landscape. It might not help. But it also might. It certainly lit up the corner of the world we were in last Saturday. We all felt it: the ground, the ease, the clarity, the magic… and the love.

So much so we decided pretty immediately to do it again this spring. No doubt there are lots of ways you’re experiencing this already (in fact, I’d love to hear about them in the comments), and this is a chance to do it in the intentional, amplified way that is fostered by powerful community and an awe-inspiring setting.

What about you?

How are you already aware that you are an instrument for the divine? Please share. Also, what other movie documentaries can you recommend?