Music is a texture that reverberates
through my entire body and flows
through all parts of my life, filling
me with sound and bringing me
into gentle attunement with Spirit.

-Deborah Pfeffer


It started as a joke. I woke one morning, early, to hear my partner breathing in an odd way, much like the soft sounds horses make when they are exhaling. I poked him gently and said, “Honey, you’re breathing funny.” Out of his deep slumber, he mumbled, “Well, I’m practicing to become a human didgeridoo.” His statement was so incongruous, so unexpected, that I laughed out loud, in total delight at his good nature, even when he’s asleep. My laughter woke him, and he murmured thickly, “What? What’s so funny?” I told him, and we laughed at the absurdity of his breathing like a didgeridoo. I thought the story ended there.

Many weeks later, at Christmas, I opened a gift from him that included a number of CDs of the kind I often use for meditation. I looked down through the stack, pleased at each new discovery. At the very bottom of the pile was a CD called “Didgeridoo: Ancient Sound of the Future.” Well, I yelped, and giggled, and burst out laughing and crying at his act of whimsy that recalled a sweet moment in our lives. But I didn’t consider the CD seriously. I relegated it to a shelf where I place the least used of my music collection. This was our private joke, a silly experience no one shared but us, nothing more.

A week or two after that, while traveling, I opened a local newspaper to find an article about a man who lives aboard a thirty-three foot boat in Sarasota Harbor and has taught himself to play the didgeridoo in order to communicate with the birds and mammals who feed from or live in the harbor he shares. This article told his story of encountering the didgeridoo a sacred instrument, developed by the Aboriginal people as a way to replicate the sounds they heard throughout creation every day. Aboriginal people believe the haunting, creaking, groaning music of the didgeridoo serves as call-and-response with the One of All Life. This young man played his instrument at sunrise and sunset to call the dolphins into the harbor. He played at the city Farmer’s Market to gather people into a community of music lovers and at the local Friday Night Art Walk to prompt their delight as they meandered the streets from one gallery to another.

Now, I was intrigued enough that the CD came off the shelf and sat within reach of the stereo, though it remained untouched. I cut the article out of the paper and sent it off to my partner, who lives a thousand miles from me, but I did not open the disc to hear the music. I glanced at it as I walked by, wondered if I would even like it, but I remained fixed in my hesitation to try something new.

The final piece of this interesting puzzle—remember those little slips of paper dropped onto our paths?—came later that week when I searched for a website to obtain a name and address, and stumbled onto an online interview with a teacher whose work on dreams I have frequently used in my years as a counselor and retreat leader. In the interview, she talked about the use of music as a meditation tool and suggested that listening, eyes closed, to a favorite piece of music for twenty minutes will cleanse us of the “static” we accumulate in the course of a day, as well as re-charge our batteries.

I have always drawn on music as an accompaniment to meditation; it eases the transition for me from the “busy mind” of my everyday life to the quiet state of calm and peace meditation brings. But I did this in the belief that I was unusual. Most people, I thought, meditated in silence. Here was a teacher I respected, who not only gave me permission to use music as the backdrop for meditation, but who explained that the tones in music actually enhance the benefits derived from meditating. Reading her words, I looked at the antique trunk on which the CD of the Didgeridoo sat, unused.

What if there is something to the idea that an ancient instrument actually replicates the elemental sounds of creation? Wouldn’t that be like listening to the heart of creation itself? I wondered. My efforts to write that morning were stalled, nothing creative coming to mind, and I was wandering through the house: strolling, without purpose, from one menial task to another. With this thought, I decided to plunk myself in a quiet spot to meditate, on the chance that there was actually something worth attention in the didgeridoo.

I was quickly entranced. It was so different from the music I generally enjoy that I listened with a keen ear. The sounds of the didgeridoo are melancholic, haunting, much like it might be if we could hear the sound as the universe itself expanding and contracting in a rhythm that penetrated every particle and form of life. I wasn’t listening so much to music as I was listening to the forces of nature exploding, imploding, groaning and sighing, birthing and dying, hundreds of thousands of times a day. I found the sounds mesmerizing. They reverberated throughout my body, and something ancient in the cellular matter of my physical body came into alignment with what I might call its Maker. The created form I inhabit, this middle-aged woman’s body, recognized the sounds of creation out of which it emerged, and quietly fell into synchronicity with them. When the music ended and I roused out of the deep attunement into which I had slipped, I seemed connected to everything around me, in harmony, at peace with the way things are.

My earlier need to make something happen, to grab a creative thought and fashion it into words, the nudgy little tasks I was using to occupy my wandering mind until something more productive caught hold in me, all seemed absurd. There was only resonance with the extraordinary beauty of a bright blue, cloudless sky in the middle of a winter’s day, the gentle sway of the treetops as the winter winds blew through, the stillness of the world around me, the stillness of my body, slowed down now to its own most elemental nature. This wasn’t what I had in mind that first morning when my partner’s breathing woke me, and we laughed in such delight at the notion of a human didgeridoo. Perhaps, I thought now, in his state of deep sleep, he actually knew something we forget in our waking lives.

The day went on, and my mood changed as the distractions of everyday life intruded and pushed aside this peaceful state of being. My visiting daughter was having an especially difficult time that day, and her spirits seemed to fluctuate with every telephone call that did (or didn’t) come in. I tried to lend her support as I also worked around her, but the day became more and more tense and frustrating for both of us. By nightfall, we were both emotionally exhausted, and inner peace was a far distant longing…though something about the haunting tones of the music, the way my body absorbed and was transformed by them, stayed with me. In a last-ditch attempt to resurrect that sense of peace I had earlier in the day, and lost, as we do so often, I put on another piece of music—this one more melodic and beautiful—and hoped that something in the air, crackling with tension, would lift or change.

My daughter was curled into the big chair in my living room, reading, the way she sometimes keeps others at bay while she recovers herself. As music filled the room, I asked her if she would mind my being there to meditate before I went to bed. She smiled from the faraway place she had sent her spirit to recuperate from a frustrating day. It was her enigmatic, friendly-enough smile, though she said nothing. I took up my favorite position on the old sofa, closed my eyes, and adjusted my body until no part of me ached from the strain of the day. I listened as the music began to perform its magic, the effects almost immediately noticeable. The tension in my tired body eased. My shoulders relaxed their hunching, somewhere around my ears, and my neck released what my daughter calls “the tight little knot of excruciating pain” that tends to locate there on a tough day.

Drawing in breath, filling my belly, I slowed my stirred-up body. The melodious sounds of the music swelled to fill my chest and open the area around my closed heart. I sensed the tiny muscles by the corners of my eyes soften like butter melting in the warmth of a summer day. I felt my mouth remember how to smile, and, in my imagination, my feet begin to dance. Sweet relief from misery of my own making.

The poet Kabir said, “The flute of the infinite is played without ceasing, and its sound is love.” I began to understand the deeper meaning of those words as I experienced my spirit returning to my body, and my body returning to its true nature. I am not—at least, my essential nature is not—that tense, jaw-clenched woman I made of myself through a difficult day. I am the one who inhabits this body with joy despite the indignities of aging; I am the one who walks through my days with heart open, extended, out-reaching. I want to remember these things about myself when I’m at risk of forgetting who I really am.

When this second piece of music ended, I was myself again, restored to my best nature. My daughter looked up from her book, and, this time, her smile was genuine. In that moment, we saw the other with fresh eyes. I thought of the countless times I have attempted to control or change something by talking it out, often to the point of complete exhaustion, most times to no good purpose. Nothing moved. Nothing improved. Yet, this time, there was an experience of gentle, genuine transformation, accomplished without one word between us spoken in haste or unkindness or frustration. Neither of us attempting to change the other; both of us simply present to the trials of a long, hard day…and to the sounds of music touching our weary spirits. The flute of the infinite is played without ceasing, and its sound is love.

In the course of this one day, I discovered that music has the power to connect me, outward, to the Heart of the Universe, whatever name I attribute to it. And, at the same time, music connects me, inward, to my own True Heart. I imagine that, whenever we face a conflict, as individuals or as a world people, we might better listen to music before we utter a word. We could let music work on our spirits, drawing us into wise, gentle alignment with our highest impulses and actions, before we work on our problems. The question that begs asking is this: How might our world be different if we agreed to one simple change: no words until the music has played to completion?

It’s been said, many times, that music is the universal language. I believe this to be true, but not the whole truth. I suspect music works on us to call out and activate a natural, inborn presence-of-resilience at the core of the human spirit. It tunes us to something deep and old at the center of our being, something in our very marrow that transcends time and even differences to align us with the knowledge that we all emerge from One Sound, and become that sound again when we depart this world. Music returns us to a condition of inner harmony, what the Dineh or Navajo people call hozrah, with the Heart of Creation. The haunting echoes of the didgeridoo are not outside us, but tones that resonate in every cell of our bodies. Is it any wonder that plants respond to music by growing more rapidly and abundantly, or that babies calm when mothers and fathers croon softly to them?

Perhaps music helps us to remember our original home, the first sounds we heard before we incarnated as these persons we call by individual names. This reminds me of my days long ago as a nurse on a neonatal intensive care unit, before medical science advanced the capacity to provide prematurely born babies with care adequate to sustain their lives. Keeping preemies alive then was always a hit-or-miss proposition. We gave each baby every tool we had in our medicine bundles, every chance at life, even though we couldn’t save every one. We could sing to them, and we did. Soft lullabies whispered in their little ears. Loud, happy songs to capture their attention and stimulate their responsiveness. We crooned to them and rocked them. When they were well enough, we held them close against our hearts and gently danced life from our strong and healthy bodies into their fragile ones.

The Native American people have a tradition of singing a laboring mother through to the birth of her child; another song is sung to the newborn infant, a way to welcome the baby to his or her earthly family and home. They sing again as they hold their babies in their grandfathers arms, raised to the sky, when the Creator’s blessing is requested on that child’s life. They sing this same song one final time, as this boy or girl, now old, dies and is returned to the arms and heart of the Creator. One song that follows him or her throughout life. A song that belongs to that one person alone. When Native Americans who are worried about a loved one’s state of sorrow or depression, the question they ask is, “When did you stop singing?”
The indigenous peoples remember that music is a soothing, healing force at our important life passages.

Some part of us knew that too. The babies we sang to seemed less prone to sudden crises and to have a better than average chance at thriving, though this was not magic and not all of them survived the perilous circumstances of their births. Our voices comforted the tiny babies. Separated in their isolettes from human warmth and touch, they responded, even when we sang off key and made up words for songs we couldn’t remember. A soft mew, an infinitessimally small movement of a hand no bigger than my thumbnail, and we knew that singing made a difference. So we sang, and sang…and sang. The doctors attending the babies began to take notice, and, after a while, they broke their own rules and allowed us to take the babies from their isolettes and hold them while we sang. Again, many more than average, improved.

This was a long time ago and, today, neonatal units routinely allow premature babies to be touched, held, and sung to by whoever will do the singing. Parents, once prevented from seeing their sick infants except through a thick glass partition, are now allowed to sit with their struggling babies and to encourage them to become strong. We were just a staff of young nursing grads, naïve and idealistic in many ways, but I like to think our silly little songs are still coded in the cells of some of those babies—now adults themselves—that we saved. Perhaps an ancient memory in each of us called to the ancient memory in each of them, and we overcame the odds conspiring against them.

So the didgeridoo, which started as a joke, has caused me to change my thinking about how to approach and endure difficulty. I think, the next time I work with a warring couple, I may ask their forbearance and play a piece of healing music before the judgments get made and the blame gets thrown from one to the other. I’m eager to see what happens. Maybe nothing will change.

But maybe everything will change. That is, when the flute of the infinite plays unceasingly…and its sound is love.


• Is there someone in your circle who needs the relief and rejuvenation of beautiful music? A troubled child, a lonely elder, a struggling friend? How can you bring the gift of music to this person? Look to see if there are local concerts, choir practices, new CDs, and make a plan to experience music with this person. If possible, make time to talk together afterward about the effects the music had on each of you.

• Using your intuition and trusting your heart to tell you what you need, spend some time looking over your own music collection. Select several pieces, preferably pieces you haven’t listened to before this (or at least for some time). Make the time to listen to them now. Notice what your body feels like as the music begins—are there places where you are tight or tense—and then notice what happens as the music plays. Are there any changes in your body or In your spirits when the music is finished?

• Create a sacred spot—it can be small—for your most restorative pieces of music. Keep them there as a reminder to value them and use them whenever your heart is heavy, your body weary, or your spirits low.