Dear Hearts,
Pick Up Your Guitar and Play.
If you refuse to pick up your guitar to play, if you close your throat and hold back every note that lives for an ear canal… well, this is what I’ve done, or haven’t done for years. I have not touched those strings. I have forbidden my heart to lilt or wail. The effect, when that hallowed trial comes, is the swift standing of body hairs desperate to run from the room.
The guitar sounds like 6 cats meowing, mostly Ow-ing in tones so flat and sour it makes the tympanic membrane pucker. And if, for a decade, you have refused to sing, the throat becomes a little briar patch. The wind sucked through those prickles sets thorns sailing through the pipe. The esophageal sphincter pinches tight. Air scrapes the throat making a stop and go sound, something between a rasp and the echo of a hollowed-out tin can.
Your whole body is surprised by what it has just emitted because in your mind there is a memory of the CD you cut 25 years ago, and the way you were able to bend notes into butter where hearts plopped and softened and sighed.
I was always so critical of myself, shy and self-conscious. That, like the disappearing singer was response to the trauma years. All those ballads were associated with hurtful memories. The ego’s means of protection is through attack and deprivation of what you love and what you are.
To identify with the ego is to attack yourself … everyone who identifies with the ego feels deprived… (exchanging) Self-love for self-hate…T-12: III.6
I knew singing through those wounds would pull me from the painful illusions of my past. But I couldn’t do it. Not then. I chose instead to pay the ego’s ransom, retaining all those little scraps of fear to prevent the expression of God’s gifts.
Hey! I am not telling you this for sympathy. I am in joy as I write because last night I picked up that guitar. I held him as tenderly as a baby. I sang a few songs.
It was okay with me if MB croaked or strummed the chords wrong. Somehow, just the act of pulling that sweet Martin close to my chest, those broken phrases and strained notes; oh God, it was beautiful, not the sound, but the experience.
I wept happy tears. I laughed and felt victorious as if I had won a great race. Joy came with a feeling of breaking out, breaking through, a freedom from old fear and doubt. Whole-hearted love was dribbling through my mouth again.
There was also this: acceptance of the cats and can, forgiveness for all that I am in smallness, forgiveness I’ve withheld so long! And gratitude, because I know my fingers and throat will grow stronger, become more supple as love is welcomed.
It’s not that I expect to recover my old voice. I will have a new voice, a perfect instrument of the deeper love I hear in the ear of my soul. I will have new words and new feelings and another way of extending all that God is which cannot be contained. I will create as God creates.
To create is to love. Love extends outward simply because it cannot be contained… T-7: I. 3 My songs, my sharing will be as God is, the expression of infinite Spirit. God does not limit His gifts in any way. You are His gifts, and so your gifts must be like His. Your gifts to the Kingdom must be like His gifts to you. ibid 4
Children of God make monsters of nothing. They bow to guitars, to Alexa, to the vacuum. Before fright, Electrolux was a friend humming a happy harmony. Post fright it became a lifeless cleaning machine. Children take cues from the world, folding other’s judgments into their hearts, making them into pain bodies.
Will I let the monsters go? Yes, I decide. Yes, with Jess as my bridge to forgiveness.
Across this bridge… are all dreams of evil and of hatred and attack brought silently to truth. They are not kept to swell and bluster, and to terrify the foolish dreamer who believes in them. (She) has been gently wakened from (her) dream by understanding what (she)thought (she) saw was never there. WB 134
Hey peeps! There are no monsters in the closet, only guitars for playing and voices for Love. You who are the choir in which I am a voice, gather now. Angels bring accompaniment, violins, tambourines and drums. Pick Up Your Guitar and Play Your Heart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LYekeK0HWo
All Love,
MaryBeth
ACIM Zoom meets Thursdays.
Please bring the song of your heart.
Register in advance for meeting: July 15, 7:30 pm.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZclfuuprjsqEtafGTeU…