The picture of unconventional wisdom

10/26/09 - I blogged about conventional wisdom.  How conventional wisdom would advise me to cut down the last remaining dead flower stalk sticking up from an aloe in my yard.  But, I decided to leave it because dragonflies found it quite attractive.

4/17/10 - I blogged about deliberately leaving a dead flower stalk in the same place, hoping that a dragonfly would rest there, and sure enough, one did.

Today - just in case you don't believe me, here are a couple of pictures taken May 21st.  Full-size versions await your click on these thumbnails...

The Flute Player

Wow - it's been a long time since I blogged!  Well, here's something, anyway...

The song scattered on the breeze, each note sailing aloft on invisible wings, alighting and reassembling so that each listener heard something a little bit different, something unique to their ear. Without a word, the simple wooden flute and battered old guitar wove a captivating story ...

Pretty girls in white dresses danced in the moonlight, their ruffly skirts swirling and swishing to the music. A few guitars sang, the pretty girls danced, the moon and stars shone all through the night. It seemed as though the air could not possibly hold anything more, as though the sights and sounds must have filled it to overflowing. But, no, the night wind swept up and down every street, in and out of every open door and window, dropping its gentle burden of sweetness. Out on the desert, las reínas de la noche chose this June night to unfold their matchless blossoms. The pretty girls twirled to the music, and their white dresses looked like flowers; the cacti opened their petals to the moonlight, and their flowers looked like white dresses.

The flute player knew that some people cannot smell the queen of the night's perfume. This made him sad; it must be like a deaf man watching an orchestra play an unmatched performance. Some of his sorrow slipped into the notes of his song, and his friend's guitar echoed their grief. But sorrow is only the dormant season when life's trees gather their energy to break out in new leaves, branches, and delicious fruits. And so it was with the song ...

Joy trembled through its branches and new life leapt forth. The pretty girls, now clothed in red and yellow and orange, danced their beautiful patterns around red and yellow and orange leaping and swaying fires. The music itself caught flame, and now the story was of a thousand guitars singing burning harmonies into a blazing July night. In the distance the mountain-jagged horizon flickered with lightning, and dull rumbles of thunder joined the concert. A summer monsoon swept across the thirsty desert, a song of rain and a new season. Now the lightning danced all around in angular leaps and skips contrasting to the pretty girls' swaying and swirling. Thunder clapped a new drumbeat while the wind swished and swept sheets of watery life over the waiting crowd. And there came on the wind a new expression of an ancient fragrance - the freshness of thousands of square miles of soaked creosote bushes.

The flute and the guitar felt the change, joined it, expounded its new theme ...

God was lightning, dancing in his world, among his children. His hand-claps and footsteps rolled a thundering new rhythm that ruled the dance. The wind and the unforgettable fragrance it bore, were nothing more, and not a bit less, than the swishing of his heavenly robes spreading the perfume of his royal and sacred garments.

And again the player was saddened. He knew that though there were many who knew a lot of facts about wind and rain and thunder and lightning, not many understood that God danced upon storms. And though there were many who knew a lot of words about God, not many believed that from time to time he danced into his creation. Not many who heard musical stories too grand for mere words. Not many who could smell las reínas de la noche on their single night of bloom, nor many who recognized the fragrance of God's robes when the wind blew full of the incense of wet greasewood ...

But the song refused to turn solemn. This was not a time for mourning, but for dancing. The greatest Dancer of all was himself leading the festivities. The pretty girls spun and soared as never before. Countless guitars sang out in melodies and harmonies and rhythms never before found by fingers on strings. The scents of flowers and rain and life filled lungs with a richness and health that felt more satisfying than oxygen.

Tears streaked freely down the player's face, and in some dimension they shone different colors - gray for sadness, purple and blue and green for joy, red and yellow and orange for passionate longing to join the dance, to hear the numberless guitars in chorus, to weave among the pretty girls, to drink the potent añero mescal, to inhale the incense of las reínas del la noche and greasewood. Was this, then, his vision of heaven?

"No," he smiled, a gentleness that flowed into the now-ebbing strains of wordless song. This song was not of heaven, it was of earth. It was as earthy as a song could be, for it was the song of an earth the way its Creator intended it to be. A song of the cosmos celebrating every footstep of her dancing King when he pays a visit. The player set his flute down. He would never touch it again, for he built it specifically to play the one song he heard in his heart. Now, that song, and the sounds of his flute, suggested new melodies and rhythms and harmonies and daring turns and leaps and spins. He would build a new flute to play this new song, and when that was done, he would lay it aside for another, and another, and another, until one day his work of building flutes and shaping music would be done. In that day, and forever after, he would always say that in his life he built only one flute, and played only one song. That each instrument he fashioned and every song he played were only single steps toward the creation of the next.

Pianos and violins and songs, oh, my...

In The Supper of the Lamb, Francis Farrar Capon tells of a musician who gave up playing the piano because so many of the notes he wanted to play lay "between" the piano keys, and therefore weren't accessible to him.  So he gave up the piano and took up the violin, which has no such restrictions, and then he was able to play all the notes he heard in his head, and was happy.

I think we tend to hear God's songs over us as though he were tuned to a piano, when in reality he is more like a violin, only ever-so-much-more-so.

Western European music theory breaks an octave into 12 tones, with equal spaces (intervals) between each tone. A "key" is defined by 7 of those notes creating a scale with a particular pattern of intervals. Musical traditions - folk and academic - around the world break the octave into more or fewer divisions, but not by any great margin. Over the years some musicians have developed experimental scales that include some of those "in-between" notes, like this example:

F, F-plus, F-plus-plus, F-sharp-minus-minus, F-sharp-minus, F-sharp.

This adds four named tones between the smallest traditional division in Western theory. But even these tiny divisions leave out a potentially infinite number of variations, most of which would be too small for human hearing to differentiate.

When God sings to us, we apply whatever system of theory we are familiar with to try and make out the harmonies. And most of the time, I think God sings to us in our own musical languages, so that we can, in fact, catch the musicality. But sometimes he just sings out a passage in full heavenly harmony, using combinations of divisions and variations that we have never heard, including many we can't hear at all - and to us it just sounds like noise. We can't figure out the chord structure. We can't discern the scale. Heck, we can't even hear the differences between many of the notes. And that doesn't even consider the pitches lying completely outside the range of human hearing.

But, we insist upon making our best attempt to fit God's symphony into our 12-note theory. In order to do so, we pick out the intervals that we can recognize as chords, and give them familiar names. The other tones we analyze as "added notes" or "incidental noises" or even "poorly-tuned instruments" and "mistakes."

Oh, yes, the complexity of God's little, whistled tunes blasts the inner workings of our analytical tools to smithereens. Unfortunately, we don't always know it.

Of course, I'm not talking about literal, audible music.  I'm really talking about how we see, hear, and experience God's revelation of himself in all the many ways he uses to do so.  We dismiss as distractions and mistakes anything that doesn't fit into the scheme of analytical theory we apply.  But those very tones may be the most critical to the beauty of God's harmony.  We need to work harder at learning more about his theory of music, than we labor at fitting his compositions into our societal, educational, denominational, human-derived systems of analysis.

Newsboys vs. the daily news...

I love the Newsboys. I mean, how can you not love a band that recognizes that God is not only "Fearsome like the sag in a fat man's chair; Sweeter than a patch of Rogaine hair," but also is "Tender as a burger in your microwave; Rarer than the air in an empty grave." And therefore declares, "I'm not following a God I can lead around..." (Who? written by Peter Furler & Steve Taylor, © 2000, Soylent Tunes)

So, the last couple of days I've found myself singing their song, He Reigns, and this morning I pulled out the Adoration CD and played it on my way to work. It's a perfect example of how three chords, twenty-four letters (no q or x), eight notes, and two hearts yielded to God, can create a transcendant message:

Let it rise above the four winds
Caught up in the heavenly sound
Let praises echo from the towers of cathedrals
To the faithful gathered underground
Of all the songs sung from the dawn of creation
Some were meant to persist
Of all the bells rung from a thousand steeples
None rings truer than this

It's all God's children singing
Glory, glory, hallelujah, He reigns...
(Steve Taylor & Peter Furler © 2003 Ariose Music)

A lot of the songs on the CD remind me of my friend, Glen Roachelle, and what he writes on his blog - http://www.glenroachelle.blogspot.com/ - about our true citizenship, and how to look on the events around us.

From Adoration, telling the story of an onlooker at the manger in Bethlehem, and the baby who "takes my finger and he won't let go...Come, let us adore him; He has come down to this world we live in..." (Steve Taylor © 2003 Ariose Music)

To Lord (I Don't Know)  :
You are the author of knowledge
You can redeem what's been done
You hold the present and all that's to come
Until your everlasting kingdom

Lord, I don't know where all this is going
Or how it all works out
Lead me to peace that is past understanding
A peace beyond all doubt
(Steve Taylor & Peter Furler © 2002 Ariose Music)
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And  Father, Blessed Father  :
Father, blessed Father
Lead and guide us for Your name’s sake
And keep us in the shelter of Your presence
‘Til we see Your face

Let us hear what You say
Let us know Your voice and all of Your ways
Take our hands, lead us home
To the refuge that we find in You alone
(Peter Furler © 2003 Ariose Music)
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Ending with   Hallelujah   :
I'm looking up, holding out,
Pressing forward without a doubt;
Longing for the things unseen,
Longing for the things I believe -
My true country.

We hope and wait for the glorious day
All tears will vanish, wiped away;
On the saints this day already shines...
(Peter Furler © 2003 Ariose Music)
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