As humans, we have an inescapable relationship with the things and ideas that shape us. When we are first born, the earliest forms, languages, expressions, ideas and everything else we interact with begin the shaping of our naive minds and bodies. This continues for the rest of our lives, however the first 6 years are crucial to much of how all things that follow will further develop us. Unseen and potentially hard to pinpoint are the ways that music molds and defines us, though nearly all of us would agree that it plays a tremendous role in creating who we are and how we perceive the world. This pays homage to the body and mind as energy, impressionable even if only by waveforms. Beliefs are another invisible effect on the way we apprehend life and its endless facets. The interplay between the rich ore of the brain’s grey matter and the body bring cause to our personal beliefs which also reaches a sum of near infiniteness. Therefore, we live in a veritable sea of harmonized, dissonant and/or other viewpoints that are constantly altering the path of our individual boats of belief.

Once they are more mentally fashioned, beliefs often materialize in the world as symbols. Since the dawn of humans, symbols have enabled the perpetuation of beliefs and belief systems including language, society, technology, religion and so forth. And yet, a symbol is more of a common destination for the multitude of definitions and relationships that each person develops from his or her own backdrop of life evaluations and opinions. Never does a symbol fully encapsulate the entire complexity of one person’s judgements to another’s. So what is grasped when we collectively give weight to the same symbol? With simpler objects like a chair most of us judge it similarly. Though when applying meaning to something more connected to ritual or abstract concept it is riddled with our personal intricacies and the value systems we have nurtured throughout our lives. Do our shared concerts belittle the bigger picture which contains all of our assorted conceptions? Is there a way to even begin assimilating the interplay of crossover and extraneous ideas that which make up the collective meaning of a symbol? Not likely.

So maybe this tiring task behooves us to pause the intellect and sync with the visceral knowledge at the core of our inner selves. Deep within the body lay a treasure that each one us contains – a wealth of indescribable fortunes, formless in constitution and unbounded in capacity. The magnitude with which we can empathize and evolve our compassion knows no limits. Showing empathy reshapes our attitudes toward life and heightens the connection we have with ourselves and with others. I would say that it even begins to heal our relationship with the planet as something far beyond ourselves starts to become more apparent. We expand. We live in a concert so large that a voice never before heard unfolds and dreams permeate the living landscape. I believe it is time to awaken this chorus we all have a seat in and no longer take for granted the internal bonds that unify us toward an ultimate understanding and universal benefit. We are music. We are the resounding nature of life that can and will forgive our human nature and realign us with what we cannot and do not need to know – a purity of consciousness that pervades through all of our being and let’s us be who we truly are.

May the song and words of one of the few people who has brought so many of us together be a gentle guide for the potential that glows in each one of us.

“Redemption Song” by Bob Marley