Always excited to hear that Springsteen has a new album out, I immediately clicked through to hear the title track. And found myself melting, and smiling, and weeping.
None of that is unusual. I’ve never buried my emotions very deep.
Sometimes I weep for the music we shared, and sometimes for the music Clive would have loved and never got to hear. When I spoke of this, one of the truly good guys in my life sent me a virtual hug and talked about something he had read that suggested music becomes even more important in the next life.
It was comforting. It was a gift. I looked up the book he mentioned and it is not one that I will read.
Whatever wisdom it may hold within it is couched in a belief system to which I don’t subscribe – and the couching will obscure the wisdom. I still count the signposting as a gift, because discovering what does not sit well with us is as important, perhaps more important, that discovering what does.
Belief. Faith. These are very personal things.
Wise words only work their magic when the listener is ready to hear them and when they are presented in a language the listener can understand. Consider music and song: some people listen to the melody, others to the rhythm, others again to the words. We have to find our own way into the song of wisdom. True wisdom doesn’t rest in any one faith, and science is still in its infancy. We do not yet know very much at all.
It is heartening though that we are still asking the questions: the scientists, the philosophers, the poets, the story-tellers, the researchers, and those of us living more ordinary lives far from the front line of the search for global answers. So long as we keep asking the questions and listening for the answers and asking again, testing, questioning, questing, the search for wisdom, for truth, for beauty, for joy, for whatever it is that we don’t yet have a name for, so long as we come back from every pause, every set-back, every wrong-turn and ask again, experiment further, wonder…so long as we keep doing all of that, tiny bits of glittering knowledge and insight accumulate.
My friend spoke of his response to Letter to you: goosebumps on his arm. I thought of Clive. Whenever we were listening to a piece of music that spoke to him, he wouldn’t say anything, he would simply hold out his arm to show me. Of course, he would often have to nudge me, because when the music was speaking to me I would have my eyes closed in order to listen more fully. Even if I was on my feet and moving (I call it dancing, you might think otherwise) I would still be likely to be doing so in the dark, a dark of my own making. Clive used to like to watch me on the dance floor, in the old days of the Fez, getting lost in the old music. He said it was when I was most free, most truly me.
Someone else, a very long time ago, said there was something incredibly sexy about the way I kicked off my high heels and stomped into the middle of the floor when Freebird was played. That compliment has stayed with me for nearly 40 years. I think what was sexy was the freedom. The abandon. I think we are at our most attractive when we are most ourselves, when we get out of our own way and go with our own flow.
I was touched by my friend’s words, telling me, I think, that I can still share the music with Clive even though he’s no longer here. The mystics might tell me that Clive is speaking to me through the only musician still in my life, the substitute poetic soul holding space for the person who will eventually take on that role. I don’t believe that either. I think it’s simply a musician thing, the physical reaction to tonal emotion.
I hold it dear though, treasure the offering, because it was a reminder of a detail I might have lost, re-cementing that very particular aspect of the man in my mind, helping me reclaim part of the soul that is gone.
I don’t believe our souls survive as complete entities, rather that fragments of them become embedded in the souls of those who knew and loved them. We need to have a care of these fragments of others that we hold. We may be the only ones able to pass them on down the line or out into the wild.
I don’t believe in a next life. I believe that this one life is all we have. That is precisely why it matters how we spend it, what we do with it. There will be no second chances. We need to treasure our time and the paths we choose to follow and the people we meet along the way – and the pieces of themselves that they gift us. We need also to be free in the giving of our self.
The degree to which we survive our passing hinges entirely on the degree to which we are willing to share our soul while we live and breathe and work and play and dance and create and sing and teach and raise children and tend animals and grow plants and look out beyond our self to the impact we are having.
I know many people struggle to understand the concept of a ‘soul’ outside of the religious connotations. To me it is simply the essence of who we are. It goes deeper than behaviour or personality, it transcends values and visions, it encompasses instincts and inclinations and all the things we are drawn to and repelled by. It is our intangible self. And it is only constrained by the limits we choose to set upon it. It may be small and frightened. Or it may be immense…and still more than a bit scared.
Clive used to say that if you weren’t nervous before going on stage, you weren’t doing it right. I believe that if you’re not at least a tiny bit fazed by the potential of your life, you’re not doing that right either.
The idea of giving our self away is an unnerving one. It gets confused with the idea of becoming a doormat, allowing people to take and take and take. There is no giving in a situation where someone is taking something you have not offered freely: with informed consent.
Where we do give freely, knowingly, consciously, we are not diminished when we give of ourselves, we are strengthened. The soul is intended to be worked and shared. We are intended to shatter it into fragments, into the tiny pieces of our own glitter, and throw them around like confetti, sparkles of knowledge or skill or happiness or insight or humour or warmth or love or whatever it is we have gathered in from those who are or were generous enough to sprinkle their gleanings on us and whatever it is we have created by our own living in the world.
We give ourselves in kindness, in love, in inspiration. We give ourselves in fighting for a just cause, and also by stepping back from the anger in the world and choosing not to fan the flames. We give ourselves in our work, whatever that work is. We give ourselves in open, honest conversations. We give ourselves whenever we learn, whenever we change our mind in the face of new information that colours our understanding. We give ourselves in a smile, a compliment, in the simple act of noticing. We give ourselves in saying ‘yes’ and in saying ‘no’. In action, and in restraint.
We receive the same way. If we are open to the gifts of the world: again I say it: beauty, wisdom, joy, warmth, love, insight, then we are walking through a shower of glittering raindrops of the souls who surround us or who went before us. It doesn’t matter if we receive them directly or indirectly, in the moment or decades, centuries, millennia down the line, we simply need to catch them and look at them the right way to see how brightly they shine. And hold them lightly, ready to let them on their way.
I used to think that we live for as long as we are remembered. This is why we build monuments and carve names in stone: this was a person, with a name, who lived a life, who mattered. I am beginning to understand that it goes deeper than that. We live for as long the smallest part of our glitter reflects light, however dimly, in someone’s heart or mind.
We can never know which fragments or droplets will be held and treasured and passed on. We cannot know for certain that any of them will. A smile might be all it takes to get someone through the worst of days, holding them long enough for them to pick themselves up again. A creation may languish unappreciated until someone sees something in it that you never intended to put there. A memory of music and youth can soften grief. The ripple of your pebble in the pond of creation may touch a heart or a mind that can never know of your existence, but that is still you ‘living on’.
I don’t believe in the transmigration of the soul. I don’t believe in afterlives. But I do believe that the more of our true selves we are willing to put out into the world, the more we are also passing on the legacy of those who came before, the more we remember the details, the more we share our own idiosyncratic spirit, the better chance we have of making the world a better place, and living on within it.