Sing!

Spiritual Journey Thursday has rolled around once again and it's time to chime in with some lovely fellow bloggers and talk about our pilgrimage through life. Our topic today is music. Karen Eastland is guest host for the round up over at Live Your Poem where her topic for the day is "Face the Music."

Sing, make a joyful sound!

It's the first line of an old hymn we sang at church when I was a kid. I loved the way the verses modulated a half step up to the next key each time we sang it again and again.

Sing and make melody in your heart.

These words come from a letter Paul wrote to a church in Ephesus in the first century a.d. It's evident from the context of the letter that Paul was in prison and suffering when he wrote it. Clearly he had experience with finding a joyful heart in the middle of difficult circumstances.

...giving joyful thanks...

This phrase was the heart of my weekly meditation for my yoga classes this week. It also comes from Paul in another letter, Colossians.

It's interesting to me how these phrases intersect along the idea of joy. Joy is an emotion. We don't have immediate control over our emotions. They are feelings that seem to come and go as they please. But we do have control over our actions. No matter my circumstances, I can sing. No matter what I'm suffering, I can find many things to be thankful for.

When I was a kid, we often went to my grandparents' house in south Georgia. Between the tiny (and I do mean tiny) town of Adrian and my grandmother's sandy driveway, a bridge spanned the murky waters of the Ohoopee River. My granddaddy called it the Hoopee. Just over the bridge on the left an artesian well bubbled up.  Someone had added a pipe to the crack in the rock, but there was no pump, just a constant stream of gurgling fresh water.

It delighted me as a child. Understanding that there was enough pressure below the ground to force the water up through cracks in the rock didn't alter my fascination.

The block is under the sacrum, not the tailbone or the low back.

With my students in supported bridge pose this week, we talked about allowing the belly to be soft like a deep bowl and imagine that artesian well bubbling up from within. I think this must be my favorite picture of what joy feels like. Enough pressure created from the choice to give thanks, from the choice to make music in my heart, and as a result joy bubbles up from the depth of my being.

So, my friends, sing!