Cathedral Heart

Music has been helping me.   

With winter.
With change.
With feeling life from all sides.

And I will tell you that these days, like never before, I am waking up with a song that stays with me all day long.  I think God is talking to me through sounds and telling me to be quiet and listen.  I don't read too much into it but I used to.  Now I am letting it come exactly as its supposed to. 

This listening, in a fresh way, is brightening my world.  It is making things softer than they were before, and I so welcome this because naturally, I tend to love talk.  Listening to the world, really like you're supposed to, is learned behavior for sure, and an intentional habit that opens me up again to things I love best.  Words and conversation and new stories fill me up and if I'm not careful, there I go.  Away, distinctly, in the direction of a thousand thoughts all my own.  

But lately, reverie and listening and a certain song for a certain day.  



I think that when I get too wordy, I fall asleep inside to the things that are brilliant and alive and right in front of me.  I get stale.  That's why I like 'Awake My Soul' by Mumford and Sons.  They're right.  How fickle my heart and how woozy my eyes.  I relate.

Sometimes though, aside from the listening, I miss out because I'm not seeing the story that is beyond me.  By this I mean the one that belongs to God.  When God's story is paramount, I am more alive to creativity and nuances and wisdom and redemption and the truest things in other people.  I am talking about God's redemptive plan for all people, throughout all time, not just my own.  I'm also talking about Jesus, who is for all people and all nations.  It is there that I realize how much I love these things....all of these turns in my own story, painful though they may sometimes be. 

In short, I am a fan of Plan B.  And I really think God is too.    

I wrote about Plan B a few years ago here.  What I thought it might mean, and that everyone around me was shifting and moving in their deepest hearts about what life really could be.  It was a 'ragey' time for a lot of people I know.  So much angst!  Now, not so much. 

I think the practice a lot of people adopt in their 20s is 'getting good' with what they know and don't know about the world.   I think it doesn't mean giving up on what you want, but instead a shift.  Haven't I been saying that all along?  You don't get perfect, and what you thought things could be falls away.  And there's some unexpected peace there.  I had to face it in my own world, and then I too 'got good' with Plan B. 

I'm saying it like that because my good friend, someone past me in age and down the road a little in life experience, gave it to me like that, and I believed him when he said it.  It stuck with me.

And now I'm living in it. 

It doesn't mean I know what's coming, or that I've decided major things about myself. But there's a calm before that comes with listening more, and knowing your own preferences, and letting people breathe.  And it all came back when I heard 'Every Teardrop is a Waterfall' the other night at a Caribou.  It was there that I was deep deep deep into writing, not like a letter writer or hopeful writer of essays or books, but as a diarist. 

You know why?  It brought old me back to new me and once again, some stuff made sense. 

"Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall"

I turn the music up, I got my records on
I shut the world outside until the lights come on
Maybe the streets alight, maybe the trees are gone
I feel my heart stop beating to my favorite song

And all the kids they dance, all the kids all night
Until Monday morning feels another life
I turn the music up
I'm on a roll this time
And heaven is in sight

I turn the music up, I got my records on
From underneath the rubble sing a rebel song
Don't want to see another generation drop
I'd rather be a comma than a full stop

Maybe I'm in the black, maybe I'm on my knees
Maybe I'm in the gap between the two trapezes
But my heart is beating and my pulses start
Cathedrals in my heart

As we saw oh this light I swear you'll,
Emerge blinking into to tell me it's alright
As we soar walls, every siren is a symphony
And every tear's a waterfall

I suddenly remembered being 25.  (Was I really 25?  That's how it felt.)  I remembered summer, and that this good amazing person I used to teach with and know well and still miss took time to talk with me about the lyrics.  She liked the part that said, 'I'd rather be a comma than a full stop.'  I liked the part about cathedrals and hearts and unexpected symphonies.  That points back to Mads and Jessie time, part of it in D.C. with a bunch of 8th graders milling around with us in museums.  It made me smile in the coffee shop. 

I remembered too that at that time in my life, I also held on tightly to a specific quote by Emerson.  It was obviously and intentionally hanging up in my classroom, about living life deeply and feeling it from all sides, which is always the thing I want.  Probably I loved it too because teaching middle school for 8 hours can sometimes feel like you've lived through a century.  (No offense to them, but seriously.)  It was a positive spin on something I was constantly learning and readjusting to fit my life.

“I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred.  I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
I NEEDED those words.
I also needed the Coldplay song.

I do wish for great big dregs of life you know, and now life in Plan B.  Symphonies, big change in the seasons, real thoughts from good people in my world, many wonderful books, time to ramble around and time to be busy and throes deep in what I know is my purpose.  I want to go on living, happily awake to the creative nuances my little mind would never first suspect.

For the record here, this Coldplay song is not sad.  At least not to me.  Every teardrop is a waterfall?  There's depth there.  What's so wrong with a tear or two?  I want a cathedral in my heart.  Have you been to a cathedral??  I have.  They're amazing.
The breadth of life like a cathedral will make it raw sometimes.  But I find there that I'm all in, all authentic, living true.

So again Plan B is raw.  It's bigger than I thought.  It points to God.   I want life like that.   
This little moment in the coffee shop brought old me and new me together as soon as it started playing.  I saw it plainly because my life did change a lot in the last year.  A lot.  So I quit writing and just sat there and felt the song.  Felt it.  Words, sound, where I was.  I was obscure in this coffee shop, anonymous, not so public.  It was great big dregs of life, centuries, loaded, fragrant.  That song always is.  I loved that I had figured out that I am a soul that needs obscurity to combat my natural bent toward the world.  That I could hear the voice of God so much in song lyrics.  That it reminded me somehow so deeply of redemption.  Music is amazing like that.  It knits you together again when you didn't even know you needed it.   

Maybe sometimes you're in the gap, between the two trapezes.  Isn't that ok?  Plan B says so.  I think so too.