Looking back, many a rose loses its thorns. Lead may sprout wings and petals may replace the stout. So easy it becomes to find augmentations of things long diminished by time yet refreshed by the release of time and its kinetic burdens. Potential becomes overtly paramount, and paradoxes spawned by the fancy of forgetfulness disappear as the fantasy of imagination overcomes reason. False expectations result. What lives now through technology would be dead without it, so that the fantasy past could never be prologue. Almost everyone has a defining event that parses their lives into a well delineated before and after. The after may expose or hide the thorns of the rose, but the thorns remain, nonetheless. Character is fashioned by the way we choose to deal with their presence on the stem, and soul is constituted by the way we react when the prickles draw blood. Music is the event horizon sketching the storied thorns. The notes are the story of living souls reacting to the thorns and the preening of petals. Experience writes the notes and breath phrases the accompaniment. Consciousness is the score.
We are all composers to an extent. The musicality may vary by way of content and intention, and some symphonies show up as guises of children, buildings, paintings or professions. The craftsmanship is destiny’s fruit. And in some cases, we are even lucky enough to author a hit or two. But no matter what medium the score assumes, the performance is our legacy, and the instrument that premieres it is called “chance”. Whether it be recorded in sand or lacquer is the choice of our lives, but what is left in the data is still our story. As long as we never put down our best pen, and we write like hell, the finale is never penned. If we all strive to create our own best ends, confident that the future could be a damned site better than the past, we might make today a better melody. Even if only because our best efforts are alive within it.
Love and Loss are not polar opposites, they are variations in the same theme - the Movements of our Symphony, the onstage performance, literally, of our lifetimes. How we conduct ourselves is truly the libretto of our legacy.
As I see it, hear it, feel it, Life IS Music, and Music IS Life.