Green Light

As a young child while riding in my ma's car, I would point my finger at the red stop lights we approached and many times they would actually turn green.  This didn't occur every single time, of course, but I noticed that it most often did when I poured my direct energy and concentration into changing the red into the green.  I'm not really sure why I started doing this at about age nine but I now believe I was tapping into something hidden deep within myself that I didn't yet fully understand.

I was a very musical child and was constantly singing in the car, as well.  I was very nervous and high strung as my parents did a great deal of drinking and drunk driving.  This was always quite terrifying for me so singing calmed me down.  I would begin very softly and the more frightened I became the louder I would sing.  My parents thought it was just charming and enchanting but for me it became survival by distraction.  This worked for me until one day my father teased me about it in the car in front of some of his friends and attempted to cajole me into singing for them.  I was so very embarrassed by him pointing and smiling and laughing at me in front of those men that I deeply reddened in shame.  I was locked in the car with them and there was no escaping.  I grew very angry and refused to sing.  That was the last time anyone ever heard me sing alone, outside of chapel with the parish hymn singing. 

I did, however, continue to sing when I was alone.  It was so soothing to me and I could feel the music fill my heart with love and longing.  How I loved those feelings!  It was like I was born to feel them, to join myself to them so they would never end, like I was born from song itself and lived upon its wings of freedom.  Music and I were one and no amount of embarrassment or shame could ever  destroy our special song.  It was born into my blood, from the blood of Ireland.

My aunt and uncle had a grand piano in their great room and from the time i was two I would beg to

be lifted up to its bench so I could pick out tunes.  I was mesmerized by how my index finger could press upon a key and a lovely tone would sound, and then with more fingers more sounds.  I could sit at that bench for hours on end, experimenting, discovering the backbone of melody, rhythm, song.  I could not yet read the notes but I could find their sounds.  I was in sheer heaven.  I begged to get a piano for home but I never did get one, not even a toy piano, so I never did fully learn the proper way to play it with either hand or both of them.  I did learn, though, that one finger could create a tune.  I could still feel that vital connection between my heart, my finger and the tune, even though I had no words for it then.  It was only an intrinsic understanding that I could not explain to anyone then.

There was this power in my finger that felt like warmth, a soft lightning that flowed out the center of
my chest into my hand.  I could feel it pulsing and when I relaxed I could feel every single finger on
my hands filled with this silent love so that when my fingers touched the instruments they sang. They sang in their own voices even when I played them poorly, the viola, the French horn, the oboe, the
saxophone, the flute.  It was flute who fully came alive inside my hands, like a new baby was born and I breathed life into its lungs so it could breathe all on its own.  Something deep within me learned about my breath and how to send it out into another form.

This breath was like returning to another time, a timelessness, before I knew I was remembering that I was breathing, when I was sitting with my gran beside the shore of Lake Chelan and we were watching how the rays of sun were breaking through the clouds and evaporating rain.  I was only five then and those rays of light flew down into my little open heart and I just knew I loved them anwhere they came from for how they made me feel inside, they were a silent music all their own and so I breathed them in, all the way into my lungs and blood and hands.  I felt like I was glowing and knew
I was being gifted by them, these timeless golden light streams.

Now I sit in silence listening to the warm and point my finger at the light to turn the red into the green. I breathe in rhythm to the rays and I am flying on their wings of song into an ancient place in Ireland, the mountains of Cuchullaine.  There I send this song into the brooks and streams and trees and mists and rain to join it with another song that rises also in the wind, the blood, the heart, the green.