RECAPTURING A MOMENT LONG LOST

Sitting in my garden on this bright spring day in May, I look and I listen. Cascading spring flowers become crumpled rainbows highlighted by blooming azaleas and rhododendron. A lawn of emerald spreads like a canvas on which the colors are etched. Matched to the awesomeness of color and form are sounds. Songbirds compose new melodies on the stilled air as others frolic in the nearby tiered fountain of falling waters. My spirit basks until my mind is awakened to birthing thoughts.

No thought or feeling ever emerges apart from some stimulus. Each is sired by some event or circumstance. Usually, thoughts spring from some awakening of one of the five physical senses. Equally powerful and vivid is an awakening of emotion transferred from one person to another. As my other senses recede to give more impetus to the sounds about, suddenly I hear a muted melody in the distance of someone playing a piano. At first it seems an intrusion. Then it fades into an awakened memory. My mind catapults backward to a spring day in my home village nestled in the valleys of the Great Smokies. Here, I pastored a small church in the resort village to which people came from all over the world to discover in retreat a world that was serene and unhurried and as natural as it was on the day of creation.

Here, on that awakened day of my sprung memory, I was sitting in my church study by an open window through which I coaxed fresh, balmy breezes. My mind had become pleasantly vacant. Gradually, I became aware of singing mingling with the stirring breeze. I listened. The sounds came from a nearby room where a visitor to the Smokies had quietly slipped in, and, discovering the piano in that parlor room, had begun to finger the keyboard,

Both the piano and her voice were muted as her song became haunting and plaintive.

Brief silences wedged between fragments of her song, but even the silences were filled with expectation. Occasionally, the piano became stilled as her voice searched new levels of emotion.

There was no way for me to know what filled her mind. I only know that she released from her soul such sad emotion that I was swept into a moodiness of my own. Suddenly, her voice stilled, as it had many times before, But, somehow I knew that this time the silence would remain, that I had now lost the voice forever. Nonetheless, I waited with a faint hope that I had not let go a profound moment. I listened for footfalls that might signal her departure. There were none. It was if she had wasted away into her emotions and was wafted away by the breeze. I resented the silence that now hung heavy. I yearned for the muse that had invaded my heart for a moment.

Music is the language of the soul. It is communication when words become walls of separation. It is a corridor that brings two hearts together. It is a prayer that bridges gaps left by uncoined words.

On that day, my soul was swept into the emotions of someone I would never know, but by the beckoning sound of music which gives substance to feelings, I borrowed a profound moment from someone else.

My thoughts having lingered long enough in the past, I return to the present moment.

My garden is filled with spring flowers, wildflowers, and flowering shrubs. My garden is filled with songbirds and scampering squirrels and nose-twitching rabbits. My ponds ripple with the churning of playful fish. Breezes bring the smell of honeysuckle to my nostrils. These I can smell and see and hear. My garden is filled with more. It is filled with all the memories locked away in my past. Each ready to be brought to life with the right touch on one of my senses.

For now, I am content to slumber in the ecstasies of the moment.