There are songs that are mostly forgotten. Once sung around hearth and fire. While cooking and before dreaming. Upon waking and at weddings. Funerals and other blessing ceremonies. Songs that could coax a full grown cedar tree from seed overnight. Songs that sung a baby into the womb. Songs that wrapped the light of the Soul as it shifted shape and left this world. Songs that sung thick skin, good blood, and resilient hearts. Songs that sung fish from the sea. And rains when we needed them. Songs that hummed the inexplicable power and magic of Love. We used to know this magic.
Our lips do not taste these songs anymore. Our lungs are starved for songs like these. It is a deep hunger. Most of us don’t even know we are starving. But the songs are not dead. They are missing. In waiting. They are circulating our atmosphere like jet stream. Hungry for mouths, hearts, bodies to drop into. Spirit is always looking for its lover – form. Songs spin over the head of a newborn. They enter us in dreams and we can taste unearthly sweetness in the corners of our mouths and skin when we wake. They can drop in while we are absorbed in some deep, good work, while making love, bowing in worship. The songs are out there. They are waiting to take us home.
In cold places, the songs really dance. The air is clean, void of particle. Life is scarce and so there is more room for them to move around. The cold songs are fierce. They penetrate like north wind and move to fill your body like 8 trillion snowflakes sparkling under your skin. They will cut through to the bone of anything. Beat the drum in the center of your chest you were hoping no one could see. The songs know the way to your heart drum.
This time of year, I can hear the cold song running towards me across the frozen lake. I can hear it for miles, days, lifetimes. There is a way of walking to the edge of the ice, in just the right place. Where you are not quite here, not quite there. On the edge. The ice makes a sound here to call the songs forward.
There is a way of stillness that calls the cold song in. Of stretching out your hands to the cold wind so you can feel how the air turns from needles to fur and back to needles again. This is the symphony. An infinite number of songs scramble, dash, and dance across the tundra each day.
When the needles turn to fur and your whole body warms, and the drum of your heart snags and skips a beat to match the new rhythm, this is your cold song. You have to know when to take hold. The song would like to keep running into vast expanse. You have to hold tight with both hands, let it dance you up where the air thins and you both spread out to become the sundog skies. Let the cold song take hold of your heart drum. It will beat wildly. Your body will shudder and then crack like sun through trees. The sky and you will change color. You will forget your stories that do not contain magic. The world is soft, malleable, and willing when we hold and offer the cold songs with our bodies. With Love.
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