The Rhythms of Our Lives ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
June 9, 2019
“Whatever beat is moving through your bones,
Whatever holy disturbance is rising in your chest…”
This much we all know about our lives, and the lives of all creatures: there is a beat moving through us, something always rising within us. Whether we’ve studied biology or simply pay attention to the seasons and tides that rise and fall, we know deep within ourselves that our lives follow cycles and rhythms. These rhythms of life flow all around us, and through us, and our lives are a weaving together of these internal and external guides, these pulls and tugs, these calls.
We begin life under the rhythm of our mother’s heartbeats. We begin unconsciously to live by breathing on our own. We begin life responding to the rhythms of day and night, of light and darkness. All creatures respond to this movement of the earth itself; we are governed by our response to light and dark, needing both equally, so that our bodies know when to sleep, to rise, to eat. We know these are our circadian rhythms, our body clocks, operating around us and within us, right down to the level of our very cells.
Ancient folklore tells us that we respond to the call of the moon as it waxes and wanes. Certainly we know that the moon controls ocean tides. But observers long have talked of the effect of the moon on human behavior. After all, that is where the word ‘lunacy’ comes from – luna is Latin for ‘moon’, and the Latin word ‘lunaticus’ means the belief that the full moon causes changes in people’s behavior. Perhaps you are aware of that within yourself, or you think you observe it in others around you. Not that we are going to call anyone here a lunatic.
Here in northern New England we are perhaps more aware than people in other parts of the world of the cycle of the seasons – the dramatic differences as we move from spring to summer, from summer to fall, fall to winter, and back again to spring. We see the changes in light, in temperature, in rainfall and clouds, in the death and rebirth of plants, in the behavior of birds and animals. The lifecycles, the rhythms of the earth, are all around us, absorbed by us, our bodies, witnessed consciously and subconsciously. The lack of light in late fall can trigger depression. The return of color and light in spring can bring us hope. And we move between these states rhythmically, over and over, year after year.
The poet Langston Hughes set out in the mid-1950’s to teach children about jazz. Before he could do that, he tackled the concept of rhythm, and wrote a children’s book called The First Book of Rhythm, in 1954. Hughes wrote, “Rhythm is something we share in common, you and I, with all the plants and animals and people in the world, and with the stars and moon and sun, and all the whole vast wonderful universe beyond this wonderful earth which is our home.” He went on to explain that rhythm doesn’t just belong in music, but everywhere, and that everything, from nature to breathing, to human tasks to sports, has its own rhythms.
The question for us, as we move through our lives following these calls and pulls from the earth itself, is how much we can control. Are we captives of circadian rhythms, unable to direct anything we do or when we do it? Are we imprisoned in the flow of life around us and in us, or is this merely a framework to support us as we find our way?
Let’s ask the question in musical terms. Do we respond to the rhythms we encounter as though they are marches – songs played by marching bands, with their strict cadence, or do we respond to life as though it’s like jazz – with basic rhythms offering structure, and serving as a framework for improvisation?
We have different needs, and respond to life’s rhythms in different ways. Many people try to escape the power of the seasons, moving to Florida or Arizona so that they can play golf year round. On the other hand, others try to live within the rhythms. I know someone who tries hard to conform to natural light cycles – making sure that she sleeps in deep darkness every night so that no unnatural light can disrupt her, blocking light from street lights, refusing night lights.
For most of us, the answer lies between any extremes and we build our lives to suit our own wants and needs, both adjusting the circadian rhythms and adjusting ourselves to them. Perhaps we don’t move to a sunnier climate but we own a light box to help reduce seasonal depression.
Jazz, born of the rhythms of drumming, different rhythms from the different cultures that arrived in New Orleans and influenced its culture, its music, and its food, is the music of evolution. Classical music, in contrast, doesn’t evolve much over time. It is meant to be played as it was written. But jazz moves. Born in the rhythms of enslaved life, the remembered cadences from West Africa, influenced by church hymns and French music, cross-pollinated by musicians who could take a ferry back and forth to Cuba, jazz evolves. Jazz responds to the relationships among musicians, borrowing and incorporating what different people and traditions bring to any encounter. Jazz includes. Jazz offers us a way to live our lives – with a rhythmic underpinning that holds steady, and enables us to improvise, to innovate, to include, to relate, to respond to what life is creating in us.
Where else do we encounter strong rhythms in our culture? Poetry is another important source. Our first exposure to poetry is often rhyming verse, with its rigid structure and rules about numbers of syllables and rhyming sounds. We are taught iambic pentameter, for example – its alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. Think of Shakespeare’s sonnets:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”
As beloved as Shakespeare is, we wouldn’t want everything to sound like that, would we? Don’t we begin to yearn for more variation, more innovation?
The late poet Mary Oliver once analyzed rhythm in poetry. She wrote, “The reader, as he or she begins to read, quickly enters the rhythmic pattern of a poem. It takes no more than two or three lines for a rhythm, and a feeling of pleasure in that rhythm, to be transferred from the poem to the reader. Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter. When it becomes reliable, we are in a kind of body-heaven.” (Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook, 1994, as cited in Brain Pickings, https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/10/mary-oliver-poetry-handbook-rhythm/). But Oliver went on to say that good poetry should also have some rhythms that are not regular. “Some variation,” she wrote, “enhances the very strength of the pattern. The singsong poem is a dull poem. Variation wakes us up with its touch of difference… Free verse is not, of course, free. It is free from formal metrical design, but it certainly isn’t free from some kind of design. Is poetry language that is spontaneous, impulsive? Yes, it is. Is it also language that is composed, considered, appropriate, and effective, though you read the poem a hundred times? Yes, it is.”
Jazz, then, and free verse, give us permission to try new things, to move beyond the limits, to explore new boundaries. Jazz and free verse tell us that there is a foundation for us, but not a box. We can grow up and out of the box, out of the music we learned in school, or out of the poetry we studied in English class, and make the music and the poems our own. We can sense the powerful rhythms of life, all those forces we talked about, and still seek out variations which wake us up.
“Take the beat
Add to it
Change it
Make it yours!…”
Travel south in the winter if you want to. Take a walk by the shore in the moonlight. Sleep until noon. Move not only to the rhythms of the earth, but to the beat within your own bones, the calling of your own heart. Listen for the music that only you can hear, and combine it with the older songs all around us to create new variations, new music. “Variation wakes us up.”
“Bring all that you are
and let it out…”
Let’s not think of the powerful forces that guide us as all there is, as all that defines our lives. Let’s remember that they are foundations, not the entire structure. Let there be room in your life for improvisation, for free verse, for new rhythms and new beats.
Let us not waste this time
Let us make a joyful noise
a more interesting sound
a fuller call
a greater yes.
My friends, I wish for all of you the chance to make more interesting sounds, to hear a fuller call above the bass notes of our earthly rhythms, and the chance always to say ‘yes’ to what you hear.
May it be so,
Amen.
