Veelia oh Veelia, the witch of the woods….. a beautiful piece of music that still haunts my very soul. I think it’s from The Merry Widow and it’s a song that I remember my father often singing. To this day when I hear a version of the song I feel tears welling up as it invokes so much emotion within my soul. My father is no longer on this earth but lives on in my memories and the meager mention of the songs name Veelia, gives me a rush of vivid memories shared with my father and I, in a stage of life when everything seemed to be so simple.
I love music. It can make me irritated, it can make me sad, but most of all it can make me feel happy and content. Happiness and contentment is the feelings I aim for right now so I like to fill my life with feel-good music. I’m sure you all know what I mean. It’s the music that lifts our soul and takes us to a place that only we can go to when we hear it. All sorts of music from different genre’s can do this to anyone and I wonder why we are not filling our lives with more music all the time.
I am not a rap fan. I find it gets me feeling tense and feeling like I want to punch the wall. The lyrics generally seem to be so aggressive and as I’m in my car a lot, I get to hear the songs occasionally and have to change radio stations to wait for the song to pass. But I can’t generalize, as there are some rap songs that I do actually like, I thought I’d share the lyric section with you here, because it invokes a beautiful sense of tranquility within my soul.
‘Beautiful girls , all over the world, I could be chasing but my time would be wasted, they got nothing on you baby, nothing on you…’
What am I trying to get to here? Well, I think it’s important to realize that generalizations are not good. We can find such beauty in the most unexpected places and at the same time use them to our own advantage to motivate us to look, and dig deeper, within ourselves and through sharing with others! Maybe we should take a chance on looking where we’ve never looked and discover things that enlighten our souls to a happier sense of feeling that we all seem to be in search of.
I do believe that you should never leave any stone unturned. Taking the time to discover myself again, I have found that there is so much joy to be found in places I’ve never looked, because I closed my mind to what I generalized. I suppose it goes back to the labels that I spoke about the other day. I am trying to look into those generalizations to discover and find true gems that I previously missed.
Music has made me relook at everything I took for granted previously. I am opening my mind to discover new adventures and delve within to research myself and the feelings that are brought to surface with these new discoveries. One of the true loves of my life often says: there are none so blind as those who do not see. I’ve always found it to be such an interesting saying, but until yesterday when I listened to the rap song on the radio, do I think I understand the depth of the saying.
We take so much for granted and miss so much because we do not take the time to look. We rush by in our lives and seem to look at things as we do through a car window that’s rushing along the highway at 120kms. Quick flashes of life that look like any other flash of life we pass, yet when we slow down, turn off the road and take the time to look closer at those flashes of life, we find a new source of inspiration.
They are all around us; in the food that we don’t want to taste, in the books we don’t want to read, in the music we don’t want to hear. In the smells we don’t want to sniff and I think in the people we don’t want to associate ourselves with. Are we depriving ourselves of one of the best discoveries we may ever make, because we are too scared to take a chance?
Are we actually not putting our own life’s recipe together? Should we not be like Jamie Oliver, and discover new ways to our own life’s pastry with the array of wonders that we are all surrounded by, and not taking time to see, hear, feel touch and smell? Some of the ingredients may be out of season but the music can still continue if we take a chance to find other unique ingredients that we’ve never tried before. Let’s all aim to take a chance on a new song in our life, just one. Take the time to discover the emotions within ourselves – good or bad – and open our minds to understanding and creating new and wondrous feelings, and then remember those new emotions being evoked.
Wouldn’t it make our life so much richer and fulfilling? I know I have a new haunting rap-song in my life, and it makes me feel good, sad, lonely, happy and most of all alive!
Let our own life’s music help us discover the beautiful arrangement that is better than Brahms or Bach, because it is uniquely or own score!
Beautiful, Maurice....and inspiring!!!! I felt an opening up and a lifting, as I read it. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteRushing through life as if in a car on the highway is so true.. nowadays I 'get myself grateful' for a long traffic light or traffic jam, and use it as an opportunity to enjoy the trees.
How amazing to discover our very own life's score....something that takes time, learning to come back to ourselves instead of looking to others for the the next note. Calling us to mindfulness I suppose. But what creativity and abundance when we become more and more of our very own song!