Last Spring the Diminished Chord of Nature Went Unheard
The other day I was attending a Sunday worship service through the Zoom app. Due to the new normal of social distancing, most of the Churches in the urban areas have gone online. Many are airing their Sunday worship service live on Facebook or YouTube. Still those with a relatively smaller congregation have opted for apps such as Zoom for conducting service online. It offers an option of being able to see and interact with the other members of the congregation. The pandemic has brought in many things we would not have imagined just a few months ago.
During the Sunday service we sang a song by Kurt Kaiser called ‘Pass it on’. It is a song about God’s love and uses the imagery of how ‘It only takes a spark to get a fire going, and soon all those around, can warm up in its glowing’. The song went on to say ‘That’s how it is with God’s love’. After the worship service, the song lingered on in my mind, but I wandered away from the main theme of the song. The imagery in the second verse took me back to my favorite season of the year: spring which I sorely missed this year due to the pandemic lockdown.
The song reminded us ‘What a wondrous time is spring, when all the trees are budding, the birds begin to sing, the flowers start their blooming’. Every year I look forward to spring to see the leaves bud and flowers bloom. There is so much freshness in the air. It exudes hope for a future. It invigorates new energy to an ever slumping stressful life. It offers an opportunity to tell my children of the song the nature is singing. But alas the spring time came bang on during the pandemic lockdown. We were confined to the four corners of the house located in the midst of a concrete jungle. I could only imagine how the vegetation in the city must be so vibrantly happy with the lesser human disturbances. Spring must have really sung its heart out in joy!
Talking of the spring season singing its song, I remembered a music teacher who once told me of the ‘Diminished Chord’. It is an awkward sounding note. It sounds very weird and off tune when heard in isolation. It can sound funny like a note coming from a cracking throat of a teenage boy. It is a ‘searching’ key, searching for its dominant or home chord and always resolves to its tonic chord. A musical note does not usually end with a diminished chord but in its search for the root key to end that note, it enriches the music immensely.
So the other day, after the Church, I was thinking of the spring season gone by. As I went through the pictures I clicked at Deer Park in Delhi, I wondered how the bright yellow Cassia fistula commonly called as golden shower, must have bloomed. I actually missed out on the Silk Cotton trees undergoing changes last spring. I thought of all the tender budding leaves of the vegetation of the park in particular.
Coming to think of it, the tender budding leaves at spring are like the diminished chord of vegetation. They differ from the matured leaves in their texture, color, fragrance, tensile strength and so on. The tender leaves are not the end of their growth. They are always leading the plant or the tree as though searching for space to move forward. In their growth they appear to be in search of the home chord which is the matured leaves. They seem to be the ‘diminished chord’ of a huge musical nature note because they are searching to be that tonic chord, the matured leaves. And in that process the vegetation gets livelier. It enriches the foliage immensely.
Last spring during the lockdown, the diminished chord of nature went unheard. But be assured that the vegetation sang their heart out undisturbed.
