The One Word that Can Help Keep Everyone Alive Today ~ Holy Experience

Y
es is air.

In the rarefied oxygen of that one word, 'yes!', the dreams breathe deep and the body exhales joy.

I watch their lungs.

... he carves

.... she makes stars

.... together they dream

... and read story

... and recreate

...and write their own

... and the circle of days comes in color

... that we unfurl

... one stitch at time

... following patterns that have eyes

.... that see him making wonder

... and the brothers living in imagination

... and the curl of girl making her marks

in the vibrant shades

In my year of yes, I embrace glorious color and holy mess and try, (because I fail and I am the soul messiest of all), to be done with the slow suffocation of "perhaps" and "we'll see" and "maybe" -- the biding of time till the visions wither limp -- and every day I try to remember that control smothers and fear asphyxiates and even now we could trust and nod yes to God's yes of today and now and breath.

We breathe.

"I imagine that yes is the only living thing". ~e. e. cummings

Olivier Messiaen was 31 years old and a French composer when he was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

Olivier was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose his music. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote a quartet with these specific players in mind. His composition was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp.

Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire and his Quartet for the End of Time is considered one of the most profound musical compositions of all time.

Why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music in a concentration camp? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music?

And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art.

Why?

Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life.

The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art.

Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are.

Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive..."

~An address given by Karl Paulnack