The Song of Life / Which Raindrop is Best?
The song of life and the petty struggles that prevent us from seeing the world — and life — as the miracle it truly is.
Note: Today I share with you something that has been in my head for some time. It’s very much a stream of consciousness, and I present it to you here as it came out of my heads , to my hands and the keyboard, with no editing or tampering, in order to preserve whatever truth may be buried within. I ask your indulgence to ready this short passage, and take from it what you will.
I once heard a story that moved me to tears with its beauty, truth and simple majesty. Perhaps it will move you as well.
There is a tribe in east Africa in which a child’s birthdate is not represented by the day of its physical birth nor even the day of conception as happens in most human societies. For this particular tribe the birthdate is derived from the first time the child is a thought in its mother’s mind.
Once she becomes aware of this intention to conceive, the mother then goes off to sit alone under a tree. There she sits and listens until she can hear the song of the child that she hopes to conceive. Once she has heard it, she returns to her village and teaches it to the father so that they can sing it together as they make love, inviting the child to join them.
After the child is conceived, she sings the song to the baby in her womb. Then she teaches it to the old women and midwives of the village, so that throughout the labor and at the miraculous moment of birth itself, the child is greeted with its song. After the birth all the villagers learn the song of their new member and sing it to the child when it falls or hurts itself. It is sung in times of triumph, or in rituals and initiations.
This song becomes a part of the marriage ceremony when the child is grown, and at the end of life, his or her loved ones will gather around the deathbed and sing this song for the last time.
We each have a song, a vibration that sets us apart from every other person, every other player in the symphony of life. Our conflicts and our disagreements do not occur because our songs are incompatible. They happen because we allow our own egos to engage in pointless debates about whose song is better. During these conflicts, we’ll hide behind words and artificial constructs — religion, resources, politics, science, race — but what we’re really doing is arguing over whose song is better, whose song is the right one.
The fact is, they all are.
There will be those who will read these words and snort with derision, laugh or otherwise dismiss all of this as ‘new age silliness,’ taking comfort in the so called ‘truth’ of science, and the future of progress. Fair enough. But we’ve been on that path for over a century now, what have the results been?
Greater poverty and racial strife than almost any point in history, the means to efficiently and ruthlessly strip the planet bare of natural resources AND the bloody-minded will to do so. Smarter phones, smarter bombs… dumber people. Willful ignorance is on the rise, while tolerance and understanding are shrinking like the polar ice caps. Compassion is becoming an endangered species.
And still… our songs go on, rising and falling in perfect harmony… whether we can hear them or not. We can continue arguing over which raindrop is the best one, or we can take in the rain as a whole; open our eyes and see how it makes everything grow.
Every piece of life has a vibration, a song, a voice in the vast complex orchestra of the Universe. Put another way, every living thing, every element is part of a delicately balanced, symbiotic ecosystem.
Hearing the song is not matter of belief. It’s a matter of choice.
