From the Heart

I recently returned from a professional conference for The Music for Healing and Transition Program, The Heart-Centered Musician: Expanding Horizons, in Litchfield, CT. I am not going to tell you about my inspiring experience at this conference, but rather relate two experiences I had with strangers on the way home from this conference. Sometimes it is these experiences that validate our larger mission in a very human way.

While waiting for our flight, my traveling companion, Marcia, and I ran into four other conferences attendees. Some of us had not actually met in person during the conference. While sitting around a table in the food court one of these new friends asked me what instrument I played. When I replied that I played the lyre, she looked down at the instrument in its wooden case at my feet. I took it out of the case, and started to play. It was barely audible over the airport and food court din, so I thought. I played a few short solo lyre pieces, then broke into singing some old favorite tunes to lyre accompaniment. My musician friends joined me in three-part harmony: “I’ll Fly Away,” “Swing Low,” and “The Riddle Song.” In between songs, I looked over at the dad of a young family sitting at the table next to us. He was giving me a “thumbs-up.”

When my friends and I got up ten minutes later and gathered our things together to go to our gates, the family was also getting ready to go. The mom, holding a tiny baby, asked “Did I hear someone say they worked in hospice?”

I replied, “Yes, I do; all of us play therapeutic music.”

“Thank you so much for playing. I could feel the difference in my baby right away,” the mom commented as she cuddled her baby close to her heart.

That is the first story.

The second concerns a friendly gentleman who also commented on my lyre case, thinking it held a portfolio of paintings. I didn’t get my lyre out to play for him, but instead found out that he was returning home to Canada from the Annual Symposium of the American Association of Woodturners in Hartford. We admired photos of beautifully designed pieces, and found many other areas of mutual interest to converse about.

On our flight home, Marcia and I processed our experience of the conference we had just attended. There were many different layers to discuss, including the emotional. During this heartfelt conversation, I related how I had connected with a few people who came from Columbia County, New York, where Nina and Kirsten had gone to school in Harlemville for three months before their fatal accident. It turns out Harlemville was only one and a quarter hours from our conference location in Litchfield. The New England landscape evoked in me a bittersweet familiarity.

I found my eyes welling with tears that I could not stop when I related more of my story to Marcia. How could I ever have thought I could come so close to Harlemville and fly home from the conference without also visiting there? Even though I have found my way through the reality of life without Nina in the past thirteen years, and find fulfillment in what I do, being so close to where she last walked and danced and sang, laughed and loved her life, touched the primal heartache of loss that is deep inside me. I closed my eyes and let the tears flow.

My friend did not try to comfort me with words, but was simply present for me. My loss was acknowledged and felt by her.

As I began to come out of my overwhelming feelings of grief, I felt a hand gently touch and press my shoulder on the aisle side. I looked up to see the man we had conversed with in the Hartford terminal walking toward the front of the plane. He did not turn around.

Marcia said he had been walking the other way earlier and saw my tears.

That simple touch on my shoulder was profoundly comforting. To be seen by a stranger. To know that he understood, without the necessity of words. To be connected from the heart.

There are many ways.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.