Winter, a time for reflection and rebirth

December 6, 2010

            As I feel winter approaching I am usually in a frenzy of activity trying to finish up all the things that need to be done to the house, the yard, and the cars to fortify them for winter.  I feel the need to have additional supplies on hand in case we get a lot of snow and I start to crave hearty foods.  By the time I finally wind up my list, I am taking ibuprofen because I have strained muscles in my lower back and that is actually what lets me know that I am finally done.

            I actually love the frozen beauty of the winter landscape, but it invariably signals a return to my inner life and the process of making it through the long dark nights of winter. The short days make the experience of leaving for work and returning home in darkness seem almost surreal.   Activities that would normally anchor my day are temporarily disabled such as gardening, sitting outside with my morning coffee, and walking in the evening. 

Winter does provide the perfect environment to quiet the mind from the constant push of our culture to achieve ever greater things. The increasing darkness seems to invite examination of self and finding a mood that draws me inward towards clarity and understanding. I seem to spend more time alone and like the quietness of it.  Often I will go to bed early because I love the feel of my bed linens and its warmth and comfort.  I enjoy feeling cocooned and protected.  Sometimes I just want to settle down next to the fire, with a big bowl of hot soup or chili and my two cats.  It is so dark out there and all that I want is in here.

Journeys Community Nov. 18, 2010

Paul Shoffeitt

When I was growing up we lived in Atlanta.  The church my family attended had a program one year encouraging all the members to read the entire Bible over the course of a year.  My mom and dad decided that we would do this as a family.  At the end of the year the Atlanta Constitution published a story about the program and carried a picture of the youngest and the oldest participant.  I was the youngest.

While I’m sure I slept through a great deal of the family reading sessions, I can remember either waking up or coming to attention when one night my father read the passage from one of the epistles which reads, “In all things give thanks.”

I remember thinking, whoa, wait a minute, did I hear that right, in all things?

If it had read, “In all things happy and successful give thanks” it wouldn’t have hit me like it did.  But to give thanks for things not so good, things sad and disappointing in a major way, to give thanks for such things and times, I thought, come on, really!

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“In the beginning was Sound, and the sound was with God and the sound was God… All things were made by Sound, In Sound was life;  and the life was light of men.” 

 You probably are more familiar with this Bible verse as:

 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. …. All things were made by him; … In him was life; and the life was the light of men. (John 1: 1-4, King James Version)

But in the original Greek text, legos meant not only, “Word” it also meant sound or vibration.   For me, it makes more sense that in the beginning there was a vibration.  In fact, the creation stories that begin the western traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all imply an “a priori”, a movement or vibration.

 Today, physicists, attempting to determine the precise nature of matter, have probed deeper into the realms of atomic and subatomic behavior, only to find that there is no ‘thing” there in the sense in which we normally think of matter. They describe the tiniest subatomic particles as ‘interference patterns of various sound frequencies. “They call them ‘nodes of resonance.”

In essence, every Thing is a made of vibration. 

Today we’re going to be talking about vibration in the form of music and its ability to heal us both physically and spiritually.  Without a doubt, music has a profound impact on our lives, and as you saw in the quotes this morning, music is being used all over the world in very unique ways, as a means to decrease stress and improve quality of life for all living creatures.   

You would think, being a musician, I would have no difficulty preparing a talk on the healing nature of music.  But in fact, my life is so intertwined with music, and I am so fascinated by the subject, I found it difficult to focus on what I thought were the most important elements to address today.  Finally, I remembered that all I needed to do was tell my story.  After all, that’s what we do here at Journeys, we share our stories, and I do have stories of both physical and spiritual healing through music to share.

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Hold On Wait a MinuteIt was last Christmas and all of my children, including my two adopted children, were home. They are wonderful late twenties young people and over the days we were together we found ourselves involved in some great conversations. One of them had to do with living life creatively. They were reflecting on the road ahead and thinking about how to make it a good journey. To a person they spoke about being open to the unexpected, the moments that present themselves often when we are busy with an agenda, going about completing a to do list; the kind of moments that try to interrupt us and alter our agenda and to do list, moments that offer an incredible richness to our lives if we are able to embrace them with a “Hold on, Wait a Minute” response.

Brad and Anda had recently had such a moment to which they had responded this way. Both had zipped through their professional training. Bad is a CPA and Anda a lawyer. Both had great jobs with all kinds of promise in their respective careers. They had a nice home with a swimming pool in an upscale Arizona community.

But one day they decided to pause and look at their lives, to stop the rush down the road they were on and think hard about how they were living. Out of that hold on wait a minute moment they made a decision to embrace an adventure, to quit their jobs, sell their house and set out on an odyssey to build a microbrewery. So off to Germany they went to brew master school and as we sat and talked they were moving down this exciting life path born out of a hold on wait a minute moment in their lives.

All of them talked about how they didn’t want to measure their lives against the traditional so-called good life template; the traditional conformist life path markers like career, mortgage, acquisitions. All of them talked about living consciously, consciously enough to be able to recognize opportunities to modify the to do list or even abandon it all together and set out on an unanticipated path.

All of them recognized, even at their young ages, how incredibly tenuous and short this life venue is.
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Well, what did you think of Mandelbrot’s fractal? The images we just saw were computer generated using a simple mathematical equation. What appeared to be movement was created by the equation causing energy patterns to flow through very tiny, evenly spaced points on the screen called pixels and making them glow.

What’s so important about fractals that we would want to do a service about them? Well for mathematicians it meant finally being able to visualize the possibility of infinity, once they had computers powerful enough to graph a very simple equation and repeat it billions of times. The result was a beautifully complex and complete form, which did not lose any of its essential character regardless of how infinitely large or infinitely small it became. Can you imagine how Mandelbrot felt the first time he thought that he was looking at infinity-and then to have it be so powerfully simple, visually stunning, and endless? There is not much space between infinity and eternity, which is why this particular fractal was dubbed “the thumb print of God.”
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