Listen to the Music of your Life
Day 5
Buechner continues pondering the invitation of music…
"[Music] is also saying, Listen to the sounds, listen to the music of your own life. Listen to the voices of the people you live with, listen to the songs that they sing. I don’t mean the song they sing—tra-la-la—but I mean listen to the music of their voices. Listen to the slamming of the screen door. Listen to the patter of feet walking back up the path. Listen to the turning of a tap in the tub, because that is in a very profound and touching way the music of your life. It is the song out of time that sings to you. Keep in touch with time, not just as rush and tumble.
“I think of rivers I’ve known. A lot of the time the river’s surface is white, it’s tumbling over rocks, but then it reaches a bend maybe, or a deep place, and then suddenly the surface stills and you can see down through it to the bottom, and what the music is saying, I think, is learn to do that somehow, to move yourself away from the tumble, the rush, the surface of time, chronological time, time as an everflowing stream, and look deep into time for whatever it is that lies at the heart of it, whatever quality it is, the mystery of time.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp27-28.
To help you reflect…
Pay attention to the sounds around you today and receive these as the music of your own life. Listen for what their songs are telling you.
And/or…
Take some time to be with Buechner’s image of time as a rushing river. Imagine peering beneath the busyness of the surface of your life and encountering the depths of time as you are experiencing it today. What do you see, notice or know about this time in your life?
