by Amy Weiss
“There are billions of doors on your planet. Hold one open for someone. You don’t have to compose the song that solves all suffering. One note is enough.”
Kindness is the ultimate power, for everything kind is powerful. It is the greatest means of expression, a life played at its loudest. It may appear as a grace note, inessential, ephemeral—a flitting wren, a hand on a door—yet even if it seems trivial in size, even if it fades immediately from both melody and memory, it is the crescendo of the song and the soul.
Step back, the woman tells herself—or is it the higher self saying this? What is the difference anymore?
There is no wren. There is no door. There is no note. There is only easing the suffering of a fellow living creature. There is only adding more love to a world that once held less. What a beautiful basis for a person. What a resounding success of a life.
And what power!
“A crescendo is an increase in volume,” the higher self says.
In the snow, another scene, another dimension. People standing on a busy sidewalk, waiting to cross the street, turning cold as a cloud empties its contents onto their shoulders. One holds an umbrella over her head. A businessman hails a taxi and climbs inside. Behind him are two little children and their grandfather, who checks his watch again and again. A car tries to merge into the traffic ahead of the taxi. Will you let me in? The taxi driver honks his horn no. A candy wrapper skitters along the ground, chased by the wind. Somebody’s left a shopping cart outside. A mother tries to wheel her baby’s stroller to the corner, slowly shifting it from curb to pavement. A beggar sits and watches her as he jingles his cup of coins. A pigeon lands at his side, scanning the cup for a scrap of food. A little girl nibbles on her hot dog and laughs at the funny way the pigeon bobs its head.
“What do you hear?” asks the higher self.
“Not much,” the woman says.
“Turn up the volume, then.”
The sidewalk, the people, the wind, the rain. The one with the umbrella holds it high over her head so that it will shield the others. The businessman hails a taxi and notices the grandfather behind him checking his watch. He must be in a rush. The businessman motions for the family to take his place. A car wants to pull in front of the taxi. The taxi driver waves his hand. Go ahead. The driver of the car waves her hand too, in gratitude. The wrapper is picked up and placed in the trash, the shopping cart brought back to the store. The mother wheels the stroller to the curb. The beggar rushes over and lifts the bottom of the stroller so that they can lower it onto the street. The one with the umbrella sees this and smiles. She places a bill in the beggar’s cup. It is not much, but it is something. He says, “Bless you,” and she looks in his eyes, and now two are blessed where once were none. The pigeon lands by the man’s side and finds nothing to eat in his cup. The little girl laughs, tears off a piece of bun, and tosses it to the bird.
“Louder,” the higher self says.
People, rain. The one with the umbrella holds it high over her head to shield the others, to let them know that she loves them. The businessman hails a taxi and notices the grandfather behind him checking his watch. “I love you,” he says, motioning for the family to take his place. A car wants to pull in front of the taxi. The taxi driver waves the other driver in, love in another language. Someone places the wrapper in the trash, because the earth is loved; someone brings the shopping cart back to the store, because the shopkeeper is loved. The mother pushes the stroller. The beggar lifts the wheels. Together they place it on the street as the beggar says to her, “I love you and your child.” The one with the umbrella sees this, smiles. She walks over and places a bill in his cup. It is not much, but it is love. He tells her he loves her, and to look in his eyes is to tell him the same. The pigeon lands by his side, looking for a morsel of love. The little girl tears off a piece of bun and tosses it to the bird, and her laughter, like all laughter, is love. It may be the most important moment in her entire life. Or it may be just the start.
The woman does not need to step back or turn up the sound. She can hear it clearly now: the music behind the movements, the harmony behind the discord. The song that solves all suffering—it is no mere song. It is a symphony. As she stumbled through her forest of grief and ice, she’d covered her ears, wished herself dead, willed herself deaf. But the music had never stopped playing. She had just stopped listening.
“A crescendo is an increase in love,” she realizes.
The higher self nods. “What better way for us to grow?”
LESSON 14
Composition
All this time, the woman has been focused on how the music ends. It is the wrong question; the music does not end. The question is: How does it begin?
“It started long before this body,” the higher self says. “And so, to hear it, you must go beyond the body.”
“By dying?”
“That is one way to leave the body behind, but it is not the only one.”
The woman lies on her back, nestled in the snow. She catches her breath, unlocks her rib cage, and sets it free. She concentrates her attention on each limb, each muscle, each organ that belongs to her. One by one, she lets them go. Her body erases itself. She loses its contours. A force pushes her down into the earth. From the deepest place inside her comes a memory, a knowing: This is how it felt to be lotus. And with the roots of her outer self fixed firmly in place, her inner one is free to rise like a tendril toward the sun.
Once in the air, she observes herself on the ground, just as she had done when she died. This time she can see evidence of life: fluttering lids, a shiver up the spine. This time the mare is untroubled by her absence. It sleeps beside her in the snow, its chest rising and falling to the tempo of its dreams.
Or so she thinks. She hears a quiet nicker, looks up, and finds the mare sprawled across the stratosphere. It had watched, hypnotized, as she transformed into lotus, had timed its breaths to her own, and once her spirit leapt out of her body, its did the same. Loyalty and constancy cannot be constrained by the flesh; those are matters of the soul.
The two of them flow past and through each other. To the mare, who flips and spins and turns itself inside out, movement and freedom are no longer twins but one and the same. There is no barrier of skin, of species. The woman can ride on the mare, in it, as it. They immerse themselves in one another, tasting what it is to be horse, testing what it is to be human. They rest on the clouds. They coast on the clouds. A hawk passes through the mare, leaves a wing-shaped hole in its wake. At last, the mare can fly.
The setting sun drenches them both in gold. The light filters through them, and they refract it onto the world below, setting it ablaze. This also happens when they are in their bodies, though then the light is much harder to see. Bodies are dense and opaque. They shield but they shroud. Except for the eyes—that is where the light leaks out. The eyes’ true purpose is not for seeing outside oneself. It is for seeing inside someone else.
The sun does not die; nothing does. It does not disappear, and from where the woman is now, she can see that it does not even set. That is merely the perspective one has while on the ground.
Night draws near, and she and the mare ride onward to meet it. The mare is a comet streaking through the skies, running rings around the planets, its tail streaming behind it. Horizons are no obstacle; it clears them with ease. The woman relishes the feeling of velocity, of infinity. After decades spent crawling, flight is such salvation. Nothing can stop her, not anymore.
And then, unexpectedly, something stops her: the sight of her husband, watching, waiting.
She does not believe what she is seeing. Have some pieces of cloud gotten caught in her eyes?
“I must be asleep,” she says, turning her doubts into dreams, as she has trained herself to do. The mare has no uncertainty. It runs toward the husband and, in its excitement, runs inside him. Man fills with mare. The homecoming is joyous. The sky shines with their cosmic embrace, with the constellation of the centa
ur.
Her husband stands before her, dazzling, incandescent. She cannot look at him for the brightness, yet she cannot look away. How could she have thought that a houseful of flames could destroy him? It is like thinking that a firefly could extinguish the sun.
He glows with anticipation. Again and again he has crisscrossed the dimensions to be by her side, has reached through the threshold to respond when she called. Finally, she has come to see where he lives.
The mare graciously slides out of him so that the woman can take its place, but surprise has shackled her, and she cannot move. For so long, his had been more a suggestion of a presence than an actual one. He was a man who lived inside her memories, a specter wandering her sleeping mind, the faintest trace of coriander and clove. Like a ventriloquist, he threw his voice and spoke to her through animals, rainstorms. Like a magician, he disappeared into thin air each time the curtains rose. Every encounter seemed a sleight of hand. What she is witnessing now, though, is no illusion. He is far more real—and far more alive—than she has ever seen him before.
“You’re here,” she says. It is both a question and an answer.
He laughs. “Where else could I be?”
His rays of warmth surround her; she feels she might combust. “This entire time, all I had to do to find you,” she says, “was breathe in and out like a lotus and send myself into the stars?”
“Find me,” he says. “I was lost?”
After so many years in the cold, the heat of him is nearly too much. It reignites every bitter winter, reminds her of a life spent frozen in ice.
“Along with everything else. You must have heard all my songs of loss. And they were not mine alone,” she says. “Look at how much was taken from you.”
“You cry that I have been silenced, that I never became father. I cannot even begin to tell you how much I am father now. You think it is a body that makes me a parent and a husband, that love is born from flesh and blood and not the other way around?”
“But why would you leave a world in which you can hold me?”
He is the full moon, bathing her, draping himself over her as she sleeps. The fog that greets her each morning and curls upon her shoulders. The steaminess of summer, inseparable from her own skin. “My little bird,” he says, “I’ve never let you go.”
She melts as he encircles her. Her memories start to thaw.
“Don’t sing of loss. That’s much too sad. Sing me a love song instead,” he says, and when she touches his words, she finds they are made of light.
It has been a while since she has sung in that octave. A thread of sorrow unspools from her voice and winds around him. “I don’t remember how it goes.”
“I do,” he says, and entwined with each other, illuminated with each other, they drift down to earth, through light-years and lifetimes, to listen to the opening notes of their song.
In the beginning, there is no he and no she. There is no life. There is nothing. The nothing is lonely with nothing around. It sings songs that are silent with nothingness. The sound is deafening. The songs grow so long and so plaintive that ultimately something notices them, for it is not enough for suffering to be voiced. It must also be heard.
Something resonates. The something reaches through the void, searching the darkness for its mother, unaware that the darkness is its mother. A cord forms between them.
The nothing, newly pregnant, expands. The child within quickens, making a sound that is deeper than oblivion, slower than stillness. In the chasm of the womb, the fire of labor starts. Fire is the home, the source of life, not its end.
The nothing screams as it contracts and rips apart. The act is excruciating, annihilating, one of violence as much as creation. All mothers have darkness; otherwise, they could not give birth to light. And it is from this pain that the everything is born. It is both something and all things, an only child and an every child, a soul and the soul.
The newborn soul opens its eyes, delighted to find itself incarnate. Its blood will turn to rivers, its limbs to redwoods. Its mouth will become beast, its heart human. Its eyes will be sea foam, its brows the crest of waves. As its chest rises and falls, so will empires. An in-breath will beget the woman, the out-breath her husband. They are what all lovers are: pieces of the same one sigh. They are themselves and yet they are each other and yet they are something greater than any of those, just as an inhalation and exhalation cannot be considered anything other than part of a single breath, and part of the breather. There is no distinction between them; there is no them. There is simply the soul. But that is the everything.
The soul has some growing to do first, before it is ready to be people. It is still figuring out who and what it is, as all children are. It needs a canvas on which to sketch itself, clay with which to craft itself, liquid mirrors in which to examine its face. And so it melts into mud, it hardens into rock, it sinks its toes in the dirt and feels what it is to be land. This is why, when joining together millennia later, lovers feel such connection. They are reliving the time when they were not yet distant hemispheres, remembering how they once fit perfectly together, re-creating their personal Pangaea in the arch of a foot curling around the knee, a head resting on a shoulder, fingers interlaced. This is why, when the fingers slide apart and the legs disentangle, the space between them may fill with oceans, may turn the lovers into islands. This is why separation can feel seismic.
The soul spends ages exploring the terrain of its body, progressing slowly, sedimentally. It is in no rush; mountains learn as much as men. But not all rocks enjoy sitting still. The fiery side of the soul takes to the skies as a meteor, then loses its footing and slips from space. Lightning strikes, literally. It sparks the land into life. The earth seethes. It is a primeval cauldron, the kind seen only in fairy tales and fevers. It boils over into a gooey soup of molecules that will one day build the pyramids.
The land differentiates. It carves itself into continents and then countries. Breaking itself into pieces while at the same time making itself more numerous: moving from one into many.
The molecules differentiate. A protozoon emerges, has some dreamy urge toward movement, and propels itself forward in a sudden spasm of evolution. Nitrogen and phosphorus develop a bond. Iron bleeds. Calcium clots. Oxygen is a breath of fresh air.
The organism differentiates. Mitosis is unleashed and uninhibited. Primordial cells transform into liver, horn, whisker. The soul curls into a snail, unfurls into a fern. A kingdom is established and dinosaurs wear the crown, but they are tyrants who use too much teeth. Mother Nature (Mother Nothing) sees the mischief that her child is getting into, grabs the dinosaurs by the scruff of their necks, and deposits them into the bodies of birds. Is this punishment? Is this death? No. Those heavy beings now soar. Faces and forelimbs are rearranged like puzzles, eggs hatch on the inside, bees learn to dance. Tiger gives birth to tabby, then their family becomes estranged. Humans look deep into the eyes of apes and call them animals.
Sound differentiates. Legs change to arms, knees and knuckles stand up straight, and in those first footsteps rhythm is born. Sex is song, a halting, haunting bass line of heartbeat and breath and bodies brushing against the grasses. A hunter spies a bird hidden in the branches, and to coax it out he imitates its mating call. The hunter finds more than a meal; he finds melody. His sister, pounding seeds into cake, finds drums. The bird is eaten, its bones cast aside. A starving child takes them. Her lips search the bone for meat; her eager breath fills its holes. Suddenly her hunger has a sound, a sharp one, which commands everyone around her to listen. Her flute differentiates too. It learns to sing not only of the hunger of the body but of the psyche, of sorrow and fear and other things that hollow the belly.
Language differentiates. It invents time and splits it into tenses. It sorts the world into singular and plural, as though these were antonyms. It circles the one soul, examining it from every angle, on an endless quest to discover its name. The ventured guesses pile atop one another, creating a the
saurus. Hexagon. Starfish. Vermilion. God.
The soul differentiates, now more than ever. It wants to know and to be all things, because that is to know and to be itself. By dividing, it multiplies: billions of bodies hosting one soul. It colors in the outline of the tiger and seeps through the stripes. It streaks through the naked notes of the bone flute, and it bobs and weaves behind the movements of a concerto. It remains a rock because it takes pleasure in permanence, and it turns into a human because it does not. It is the woman and her husband, and it becomes the woman and her husband.
The woman differentiates. So does her heart. She can see it now outside of her, in front of her—so giant, so drafty, and so inconceivably vast that it seems to belong not to her but to some enormous whale. Surely hers must be smaller, tighter, redder, meaner. She is amazed at its size. All this time she has lived in a mansion and never left the basement.
But there is too much focus on this, on the differentiating. As if there were any distinction between stone and cell and song, between man and molecule. As if they weren’t a single soul in a single moment experiencing a single life in innumerable ways. As if the point of evolution were to branch off into many, rather than to find the way back to the one. As if union were not both the source and the destination, the first act and the final, the reason for division and the result.
As if the redwood weren’t the woman experiencing a life of tree, and foam the life of sea. As if a mist of rain were not her soul suspended in water, and a sunrise her soul spreading throughout the sky. As if a nebulous fragment of her had not melted into the Milky Way; as if, when she looked into the stars at night, she were not looking at her reflection. As if the mare were an individual entity and not the part of her that had momentarily manifested as mare. As if the old man by the lake and the lake itself and every being immersed within it, every patient she ever played for, every wildflower and every wren, were not all she, and she were not all they. As if she were just herself, and not her own daughter, and not her own husband. As if separation were anything more than a sensation.