This Week’s Study: Vincent

Our Thursday evening series, Songs That Hear Us, returns to the world of the singer-songwriter this week with Don McLean’s Vincent—the song the world knows by its opening image of a starry night. The full contemplative reading is published here on Substack—A Great Fire in the Soul—and I encourage you to read it before we gather on Thursday, September 3.

I will say plainly, as I did in the article: this one asks for tenderness. It opens with a story from my own early years as a therapist, and it carries a loss to suicide at its center—Vincent’s, and one closer to my own life. Please read it gently, and please know that if anything in it touches something deep in you, you do not need to carry it alone. Talk to me, or to a professional, or to someone you trust, or call or text 988, where someone is waiting at any hour.

The article follows the song from the autumn morning in 1970 when Don McLean, in a dark season of his own, wrote its lyrics on a paper bag to argue that Vincent was not crazy but ill; through the life of a pastor’s son dismissed from ministry for too much love, who painted the overlooked, asked for help, and painted the heavens ablaze from an asylum window; to the woman who spent her life turning the world around to see him, and the song that now keeps vigil beside his brushes beneath the museum where millions finally look. Its teaching is the one Vincent gave us himself: that in every life there is a great fire, and the passers-by too often see only smoke.

Below is our practice and the questions we will sit with together. Please answer them before Thursday.

For Contemplation

Before Thursday, listen to the song twice, as is our practice. For one of your listenings, follow the lyrics and sit with an image of The Starry Night before you—let the song and the painting hear each other. And this week above all weeks, be tender with yourselves; if the song touches grief or despair in you, let your tender heart be known, by someone. Then sit with these questions:

• Who are those in our culture and time judged as less than, not enough, unheard, unseen—and how can we all see beyond the smoke to the fire?

• Who in your life carried a great fire that others saw only as smoke? Was it hard for you to see their fire?

• Is there someone you could not reach? Can you lay down the guilt, and keep the love?

• Whose fire near you now needs your seeing—before it is too late?

• Where does your own fire go unseen? Who is allowed to come warm themselves at it?

The Takeaway

Somewhere near you is a fire the passers-by have mistaken for smoke—and somewhere in you is one too. This week’s song is a pair of new eyes: to see the beautiful ones while they are here, to speak what we see out loud and in time, to forgive ourselves for the ones we could not reach, and to trust that every act of love, however late it seems, is received by the One who binds up the broken-hearted and calls every star by name.

And I will meet you there.

Meditation and Study Group

The Coherence Circle, our meditation and study group, meets every Thursday at 5:30pm MST at the Unitarian Church in the Meditation Room.

You may also join us on Zoom via this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5054120010?pwd=aWoPgmIYXkOMdpPHKvASKlE6BapNAD.1

All are welcome—no musical knowledge is needed, only a willingness to listen with the heart.

With gratitude, and see you Thursday,

Tom

Link to the Song

I would suggest you go to YouTube and search for the following:

Don McLean – Vincent (Starry, Starry Night) With Lyrics

The Painting

If you would like to sit with The Starry Night as you listen, search for:

“The Starry Night, Museum of Modern Art”

The museum’s page shows the painting in full and at high resolution.

In this week’s reading on Don McLean’s Vincent, I shared something I have rarely spoken of publicly: that a little more than a decade before that waiting room radio played its song for me, in the very town where I grew up, I had been deeply suicidal. I wanted to end my life, and somehow, I did not.

Years ago, I wrote a poem about that season, and it was published in my book of poems, A Present Moment Embrace. I offer it here, lightly polished, as my own testimony to this week’s theme—that the feeling which keeps us alive can visit us through the humblest of vessels, even a little white sports car, until we discover the Source it was coming from all along.

As with this week’s article, tread tenderly. And if anything here touches despair in you, please do not carry it alone: talk to me, or to someone you trust, or call or text 988, where a caring voice is waiting at any hour.

This Car, This Feeling

When I was nineteen, I bought a car. It was only a year old, quite new. It was a classy little convertible sports car. White with a black stripe down the side And it said “Special” on the back side panel.

The interior was suave—with dark leather seats. Wood paneling on the dashboard. And fancy little knobs on the instrument panel. It had three small windshield wipers to wipe the rain.

I loved that car, many wanted to ride in it, and all admired it I finally had something that others wanted to be a part of. This special car... made me feel so special.

The feeling I had with this car was a new feeling. It made me feel alive. This sensation was very strong, striking me intently. In a wonder-filled dynamic. Coursing through me with hope-filled anticipation.

It felt very good to have something so sleek and luxurious. So that I was optimistic about myself and my future. About who I was and where I was headed. For the first time in a while, maybe ever.

And I savored this feeling within my beleaguered heart. Holding it tightly in a dear and personal place. It felt good and made me feel stronger.

All of this helped when my world began to fall apart. And my hopeless despair slid ever so frightfully into suicidal intent. I parked this cute little white sports car with a black stripe on the crest of The Bluffs in the town of my childhood. Very close to Buck Owens’s house on Panorama Drive. With the resolve to drive off the edge. Careening down this steep glide to what waited below. More than once I sat there pondering this. How to end what felt like a worthless life.

But for some reason I did not do this—I did not kill myself. The despondency was great enough to desire death. But the guts and the resolve to accomplish something so permanent was not in me.

I remember thinking that I probably wouldn’t die. And I would end up broken for the rest of my life. Which would make matters worse. So I backed my little car away from that cliff edge. Experiencing another form of failure, and I drove home.

Not long after this the engine in my cute sports car died, I lost something else that was important to me. And my hopes were dashed... once more.

I now know that the hopeful feeling my car provided had nothing to do with the car, it’s just a feeling we get, when we encounter a transcendent space in our large and empty souls.

The material object can provoke an internal state. In a way that gives hopeful repose. And I sure needed that... I think that’s what kept me alive.

My car died, but I didn’t. The engine died, but my motor sputtered on through life. From a Source I had yet to apprehend.

Somehow, I made it through this time. Something grabbed a hold of me from the clutches of a mysterious force.

Now I have an ugly car, and it doesn’t give me that feeling. No object can really, at least in a way that is enduring.

But I do receive those sensations from other sources. From bare spirit, when I sit in quiet surrender and peaceful solitude. So that I am sent to that certain enchanting place within, that we all have.

That feeling is a sensation that sustains me and vivifies me. It helps me transcend in those glorious moments when my soul is provoked by a force larger than me, that I feel and sense in every aspect of my being.

And I am able to go on, and live... some more. As I back away from the cliff edge, of these plummeting mood states. To enter again this eventful life that I have been given.

Afterword

I was nineteen, and I thought a car was keeping me alive. I understand now that it was never the car. It was the feeling the car awakened—the visitation of a transcendent space in a large and empty soul—the same fire we spoke of this week in Vincent, the one the passers-by mistake for smoke. The vessels change: a sports car, a paintbrush, an unfinished symphony, a song on a hallway radio. The Source does not.

If you are sitting tonight where I once sat—parked at some edge of your own, pondering—hear an old man who long ago backed the car away: the engine of your circumstances may fail, and the feeling may leave for a season, but you are not the car.

There is a motor in you that runs from a Source you may have yet to apprehend, and it is not finished with you. My car died, but I didn’t. Stay, remain, and find out what that Source has in mind.

And I will meet you there.

Tom

He heals the broken in heart, and binds up their wounds. He counts the number of the stars. He calls them all by their names. — Psalm 147:3–4

Making the Choice to Leave

I want to begin this week with a story from my own life, one I have carried for a long time. I will tell it carefully, with details altered to protect confidentiality, and I will tell you at the outset that it involves the loss of a life to suicide. Please know that if anything in this week’s reading touches something deep in you, please do not carry it alone. Talk to me, or a professional, or to someone you trust, or call or text 988, where someone is waiting at any hour. I do not want anyone to sit alone in the dark after reading this article.

Many years ago, early in my career as a psychotherapist, in another state, I worked with a mother and her teenage daughter, whom I saw separately and together. Much of our work concerned the challenging relationship each had with the man of the house, the husband and stepfather. The mother longed for him to get help, and he declined her every request. She finally asked if I would call him myself, so I said I would.

I don’t believe I would do that now—people need to take that step on their own initiative—but I was a young therapist then, with fewer boundaries, so I called, and we talked. We had a nice conversation for awhile, yet he declined to come in to my office. But at the end of our conversation, he said something kind, yet striking: that if he were ever to see someone, it would be someone like me.

It was, for this woman, the last straw, so she made the decision to leave him. One Saturday she spent the entire day moving her belongings out of the house. He did not help her, and he did not protest. He only watched her from the bed in their bedroom, never rising, never speaking. On her final trip to the house, she discovered that he had taken his own life.

When she came in the following week, we sat with the enormity of his choice and what she saw, and I helped her begin to process what can barely be processed. And then, as she was leaving, I opened my office door—and heard the radio in the waiting room, the one kept playing outside my door to muffle the sound of voices so that no one could overhear private matters spoken inside.

The song that was playing, at that exact moment, was Vincent, by Don McLean. A song that holds, at its center, a death like the one this woman and I had just been sitting with. We simply stared at one another for a moment, and then she left.

When she returned the next week, I mentioned the song and the astonishing timing of it playing when our session ended. She said she hadn’t noticed it at all. Well, I guess it was just for me.

I have thought about that encounter for over thirty years. She walked past the song untouched, held safely inside the work we were doing together. I’m sure she had other considerations to carry. But I was the one carrying a discernible heaviness—the phone call, the words if it were anyone, it would be someone like you, the weight of the one I could not reach. And the song was waiting outside my own door, for me. The synchronicity was uncanny.

Perhaps it was because these events occurred in my hometown, the town I grew up in, where a little more than a decade prior, I had been deeply suicidal. I wanted to end my life, yet somehow, I did not.

Our series is called Songs That Hear Us, and I have had quite a few instancec in my own life where I have been heard by music. The songs do not play for everyone at once. They arrive at our particular threshold, addressed to the wound that is ours alone. The song on that radio was something that has been held for over three decades.

This week, our circle takes up Vincent, by Don McLean—the song the world knows by its opening image of a starry night.

The Paper Bag on the Veranda

In the autumn of 1970, Don McLean was not yet famous. He was doing humble work—traveling through the Berkshire school system in Massachusetts, singing and playing guitar for children in classrooms—and living through a dark season of his own; he later described the marriage he was in at the time as one that tormented him.

One morning he sat on a veranda reading a biography of Vincent van Gogh, and by his own account, he suddenly knew he had to write a song with a very specific argument: that Vincent was not crazy. “He had an illness,” McLean said, “and so did his brother Theo.”

From this we find that the song was not conceived as simply a tribute. It was conceived as a correction—a defense of a man who was incorrectly labeled, by himself and others, as a madman. McLean sat down with a print of The Starry Night before him and wrote the lyrics to the song on a paper bag.

The song appeared in 1971 on the album American Pie, and was released as a single the following winter, rising to number one in Britain. It has always lived in the shadow of its enormous sibling—American Pie, the loud elegy for a nation’s lost innocence, eight minutes of riddles the whole world memorized. And beside it, this: three and a half quiet minutes about a painter dead for eighty years, written on a paper bag, asking one question—did anyone ever really see him?

The Fire No One Came to Warm Themselves At

Most of us know Vincent Van Gogh by only the swirling sky and the severed ear and the word madman—which is to say, we know him the way his neighbors and associates did.

Van Gogh was a pastor’s son from the Dutch countryside, born in 1853, and the first fire in him was not painting. It was God. He tried to follow his father into ministry, failed the examinations, and finally took a post as a lay evangelist in the Borinage, a brutal coal-mining district in Belgium. There he took the Gospel literally: he gave away his clothes, gave up his comfortable lodgings to sleep in a hut on straw, nursed the sick through a typhoid outbreak, and descended into the mines to sit with the men in the dark.

And for this, the church committee dismissed him. The reason recorded was, in essence, excessive zeal—undermining the dignity of the ministry. I find that intriguing, and even maddening. He was removed from ministry for resembling his Master too closely. The church saw the smoke of an unkempt, intense, embarrassing young man. It could not see the fire.

It was only then—past the age of twenty-seven, poor, dismissed, and directionless—that he turned fully to drawing and painting. And what did he paint? The very people no one else would look at: the miners, the weavers at their looms, the diggers of potatoes with their knuckled hands and lamp-lit faces. He painted the overlooked because he knew, from inside, what it is to be overlooked.

In one of his letters to his brother Theo, he wrote that in the eyes of most people he was a nonentity, an eccentric, an unpleasant man—someone who had no position and never would—and then he added: very well, then, one day I should like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.

This is the miracle inside the tragedy: for eighteen years, Vincent wrote to Theo—hundreds of letters, among the most beautiful ever written in any language—and in them we can hear exactly what the world around him could not. In one of the letters he wrote: “There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.” A great fire in the soul, and the passers-by see only smoke. That is Vincent in the Borinage and Vincent at the easel. That is the man in the bedroom, watching and unable to rise.

Chasing the Light

In ten years, Vincent produced roughly nine hundred paintings. He sold one in his lifetime. In Arles, in the south of France, where he had gone chasing the light and dreaming of a community of artists, his health broke—the crisis with Gauguin, the wound to his own ear, the hospitalizations. A desperate man in desperate conditions.

And in May of 1889 he did something that deserves more honor than it receives: he committed himself, voluntarily, to the asylum at Saint-Rémy. He knew he was ill. He asked for help—not everyone does, but he did. And it was there, in June of 1889, looking out the window of his room before sunrise, that he painted the canvas the whole world now knows: the cypress rising like a dark flame, the village dreaming below, and above it all the heavens swirling with enormous stars.

The Starry Night was painted from inside an asylum. Record the lineage in our series: Freddie’s courtroom, Paul’s darkened bathroom, Martin’s walled city, Beethoven’s silent inner chamber—and now a barred window at Saint-Rémy, through which a suffering man looked up and saw the sky ablaze with the glory of God. The enclosed place, again, became the portal.

The following summer, in July of 1890, in the wheat fields north of Paris, Vincent wounded himself fatally. He died two days later, with Theo at his bedside. He was thirty-seven. Theo, whose own health was failing, followed his brother just six months after. Among Vincent’s last reported words to his brother were these: the sadness will last forever.

We Could Have Told You, Vincent

McLean’s song opens inside the famous painting: a starry night, the blues and grays of his palette, that observe the summer day, the artist’s eyes that saw what others could not. It moves tenderly through his canvases—the trees and the flowers, the wheat under morning light, and above all the faces: the weathered, pain-lined faces of the poor, soothed beneath the painter’s loving brush.

Those around Vincent would not listen; they did not know how, perhaps they never will. Because, simply put, they could not love him, even though his love was true. And when hopeless despair became unbearable, on that starry night, he ended his life. That’s what lovers do, and Vincent was a lover. The world, as McLean proclaims, was not meant for someone as beautiful as dear Vincent.

We have spent these weeks learning reverence for the suffering mind: Syd with his unexpected decline that destroyed genius, Dolores with her the fluctuating rageful moods, and Beethoven despairing at Heiligenstadt, held back from the edge by the unfinished music stirring in him. This is the week that reverence becomes a commission: the beautiful ones, really are meant for this world, and we are meant to make it livable for them. We do this by seeing not only the smoke, but the fire, and responding to them graciously before it is too late.

Perhaps many of us carry the weight of someone we could not reach. The man in my story declined every hand extended to him, including mine, and his wife’s. Vincent’s family and friends did try; Theo spent his whole life and livelihood trying; the asylum tried; Vincent himself tried. And still, the lover buckled under the pressure. It was just too much.

This must be stated, to those who carry such a person: the limits of your reach are not the measure of your love. The woman in my story moved her belongings out of that house because she had to save her own life and her daughter’s—that was not abandonment; that was survival. I made the phone call and could not close the distance—that was not failure; that was love operating at the edge of what love can do against an illness in another’s sovereign soul.

We are not given the power to make another soul come back from the dark. There is often only so much we can do. Many of us may need to lay down the guilt and regret: and keep the love.

The Time Capsule Beneath the Museum

When Theo died, six months after Vincent, he left behind a young widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger—Jo—with an infant son named Vincent Willem, and an apartment stacked with hundreds of unsold, unwanted paintings by a dead brother-in-law the world considered a failed madman.

Nearly everyone advised her to throw away the paintings. Instead, this young woman—a schoolteacher, not a dealer—spent the rest of her life as the keeper of the fire. She organized exhibitions, placed paintings with patient strategy, and above all she gathered and published the letters, translating them herself, so that the world would meet not only the paintings but the soul—the fire and not the smoke.

Nearly everything the world now knows and loves about Vincent, it knows because Jo refused to stop showing him to people until they finally saw. She is this story’s Caroline Unger: the world stood facing the wrong way, and she turned it around by the arm.

Her son grew up to found the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where millions now stand before the canvases every year. And beneath that museum, sealed in its foundations, lies a time capsule—and in it, alongside brushes that belonged to Vincent himself, rests the sheet music to Don McLean’s Vincent. The song is played in that museum to this day.

Imagine, a song written on a paper bag by a heartsick young man in Massachusetts now keeps vigil beneath the house of the painter it defends, his brushes beside its melody, while overhead the crowds stream past the effervescing stars—looking, at last. The passers-by no longer see a wisp of smoke. Jo held the door open until the whole world came in to warm itself at the fire. The world now sees Vincent!

The Divine One, using Beethoven’s title and borrowing from a psalm, heals the broken in heart and binds up their wounds. And, in the very next breath—the transcendent One counts the number of the stars; calling them all by their names. The broken-hearted and the stars, held in adjacent verses, as they were held in adjoining brushstrokes on a June night in Saint-Rémy.

The Force in all things who numbers the stars knew the name of the man at the asylum window, and the name of the man in the bedroom who was assaulted by an unbearable life, and knows the name of everyone this week’s song will bring to your mind. We are all seen, heard, and known, by a Universe whose imprint is registered in our DNA. The fire, at last, always, somehow, in some way, burns brightly for those who choose to see.

For Contemplation

Before Thursday, listen to the song twice, as is our practice. For one of your listenings, follow the lyrics and sit with an image of The Starry Night before you—let the song and the painting hear each other. And this week above all weeks, be tender with yourselves; if the song touches grief or despair in you, let your tender heart be known, by someone. Then sit with these questions:

• Who are those in our culture and time judged as less than, not enough, unheard, unseen, and how can we all see beyond the smoke to the fire?

• Who in your life carried a great fire that others saw only as smoke? Was it hard for you to see their fire?

• Is there someone you could not reach? Can you lay down the guilt, and keep the love?

• Whose fire near you now needs your seeing—before it is too late?

• Where does your own fire go unseen? Who is allowed to come warm themselves at it?

The Takeaway

Vincent was written in the autumn of 1970 by a young singer in a dark season of his own, sitting on a veranda with a biography and a print of The Starry Night, setting down on a paper bag a song with one purpose: to argue that Vincent van Gogh was not crazy but ill, and not a failure but a man on fire whom the world mistook for smoke.

It tells the truth about a pastor’s son dismissed from ministry for too much love, a painter of the overlooked who sold one canvas in his life, a sufferer who asked for help and painted the heavens ablaze from an asylum window—and it grieves the ears that would not listen and wonders if ours have finally opened.

I find it interesting that Vincent was not fully seen through the eyes of onlookers or through the ears of those near enough to hear, so he cut off one of his ears. Why the ear? What is the message in that? What emotion was behind the action? He may have been demoralized by people hearing without listening, as we learned in The Sound of Silence. What is it like to not be seen or heard? Many of us may know.

His letters survive to tell us what the fire knew; his brother’s widow spent her life turning the world around to see him; and today his song keeps vigil beside his brushes beneath the museum where millions finally look.

Through the lens of this portal, Vincent stands as:

• a summons to the moral act of seeing—to look past the outward smoke to the fire in the soul, looking deeply at the heart

• a defense of the suffering mind: not crazy but ill, not doomed by beauty but failed by a world that is under instruction to become exacting with its most tender souls

• a release for all who carry someone they could not reach: the limits of your reach are not the measure of your love

• a testimony that late love still arrives—that seeing, honoring, and speaking to the ones who are gone is not undeliverable mail but living correspondence in the field

• and a portrait of faithful keeping, in Jo and in Theo: that one person who refuses to stop showing a soul to the world can turn the whole world around

Somewhere near you is a fire the passers-by have mistaken for smoke—and somewhere in you is one too. This week’s song is a pair of new eyes: to see the beautiful ones while they are here, to speak what we see out loud and in time, to forgive ourselves for the ones we could not reach, and to trust that every act of love, however late it seems, is received by the One who binds up the broken-hearted and calls every star by name.

And I will meet you there.

Please click on the link below, or search on YouTube:

Don McLean - Vincent ( Starry, Starry Night) With Lyrics

I am a follower of Yeshua because…
the Teacher who spoke Aramaic on Galilean hillsides taught a kingdom already within and among us, and I choose to walk the road he walked rather than the road built around him.

I am a former Christian because…
what began as a Way became a wall, and I could no longer confess a creed that asked me to believe about him what he never asked anyone to believe.

I am a Gnostic because…
I trust the knowing that arises from direct experience of the divine spark, as the early Christians of Nag Hammadi did, over any knowledge handed down by authority.

I am an Essene because…
those desert communities on the shores of the Dead Sea kept the light in simplicity, healing, and shared life, and their old practice of preparing the way still prepares mine.

I am a Taoist because…
Lao Tzu taught that the Way that can be named is not the eternal Way, and I have learned to yield like water and let the ten thousand things move as they will.

I am a Spiritualist because…
the veil between the living and the departed is thin, and I have heard from the other side often enough to know that love does not end when the body does.

I am human because…
I was born into skin and hunger and grief, and this fragile, aching, wondering form is the container where the sacred and the eternal are held.

I am soul because…
something in me remembers what I did not learn here, carries a field of intention across lifetimes, and keeps the record of who I am becoming.

I am spirit because…
the breath that moves through me is the same ruach that hovered over the waters in the field’s deep dark abyss, and it was never mine to own, only to carry.

I am a light being because…
what the mystics saw and the physicists now measure is the same truth: matter is slowed light, a denser form, and I am light learning to remember itself.

I am eternal because…
I did not begin at my birth and will not end at my death; what I am was here before the stars and will be here when they are done.

I am an emanation of Source Consciousness because…
the One does not create from outside itself but pours itself out, as the Neoplatonists and the Kabbalists taught, and I am one of its iridescent rays.

I am whole and complete because…
nothing was ever missing; the wound was only forgetting, and healing is simply the return to what was always true.

I am the Witnessing Presence because…
before the thought arises and after it dissolves, something remains that was never disturbed, and the Upanishads, the Buddhist teachers, and Jung's Self all point to this same still watcher behind the eyes.

I am pure consciousness because…
beneath every thought, feeling, and story there is an awareness that watches, unchanged, and the Vedic seers called it the Self.

I am one with Universal Consciousness because…
there is only one mind dreaming all of this, and the separation I felt was the dream mistaking itself for the dreamer.

I am love because…
Rumi said the wound is the place the light enters, and every wound I have carried has opened into the same tenderness that holds all things together, so that love is not something I do, but is the substance I am made of.

I am a divine being because…
the image I was made in was never lost, only veiled, and the Christ, the Buddha, and the Tao each spoke of the same unveiling.

I am the I Am because…
when Moses asked the name at the burning bush, the answer was not a name but a being, and that being is not elsewhere, it is within.

And, as I am…
I know I came forth from Source
and to Source I will return
when my ascending is done.
Yet I have never really left
this place of Origins.

...because all is one,
and there is no separation.

I am.

Freude! (Joy!)
Freude! (Joy!)

This Week’s Study: The Ode to Joy

Our Thursday evening series, Songs That Hear Us, takes its boldest turn this week: from rock songs to the headwaters of them all—the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the movement the world calls the Ode to Joy. (link is below) The full contemplative reading is published here on Substack—Joy Out of the Chaos—and I encourage you to read it before we gather on Thursday, August 27.

This week’s music came to our circle through my son Andrew, an exceptional flute player, who named it in a few spare lines. He texted me that this was the first symphony ever to call for a full chorus; the bass baritone who stands and sings the word Freude—joy—coming out of chaos in the strings; a composer who could no longer hear, conducting a music he carried only within.

The article follows that deaf man from the despairing letter he wrote at Heiligenstadt—pulled back from the edge by unfinished music—through the thirty years he carried Schiller’s poem like a seed through winter, to the night in Vienna when a twenty-year-old singer had to turn him around by the arm to see an ovation he could not hear: an entire theater waving hats and handkerchiefs so that a deaf man could receive his applause with his eyes.

And it walks, movement by movement, through the music itself: the terror fanfare of chaos, the review from the depths that finds every old refrain insufficient, the Joy theme rising bare from below like the first hints of light before dawn, and the human voice that finally stands up—the first ever sung in a symphony—to refuse the old sounds and choose a new one.

Below is our practice and the questions we will sit with together. Please answer them before Thursday.

For Contemplation

Our practice adapts this week, because this “song” runs about twenty-five minutes. Before you listen, sit for two full minutes in complete silence—and then listen once all the way through, and if you are able, watch a filmed performance rather than only hearing a recording.

It matters this week to see it: the chorus rising to its feet, the baritone standing to sing the first word, the sheer number of human beings moved to perform joy.

If you wish to listen a second time, return to the opening minutes alone—the chaos, the deep strings answering, the bare theme being born—and follow the sequence like a map. Then sit with these questions:

• Where are you in the music right now—the chaos, the review of old refrains, the quiet new theme, or standing up to sing?

• What old pattern in your life is ready to be honored, and set aside?

• When has joy come to you out of chaos—not after it, but out of it?

• Who witnesses your joy? Who is your chorus?

• Who has turned you around to see a love you did not know was present? Who near you may need you to turn them?

• What is the unfinished music in you—the gift you still need to give?

The Takeaway

The finale of the Ninth Symphony was composed by a man in total silence—deaf for years, sick, alone, and once brought to the edge of despair at Heiligenstadt, where the conviction that unfinished music remained in him was reason enough to stay. He carried Schiller’s poem of joy for thirty years through the collapse of nearly everything, and when he finally set it down, he broke the symphonic form itself: for the first time in history, a human voice stood up inside a symphony—singing words Beethoven wrote himself, a refusal and a choice—not these sounds—before the word around which everything turns: Freude. Joy.

The music maps the soul’s whole passage: chaos honestly heard; the old refrains reviewed from the depths and found insufficient; the new theme rising bare from below, a gift and not an achievement; and the voice that must finally stand and go public.

At its premiere, the deaf composer had to be turned around by a young singer’s hands to see the ovation he could not hear—an entire theater translating sound into sight. And the music has outlived its silence: sung by thousands across Japan each December, made the anthem of once-warring nations, and raised in Berlin when the Wall came down, with one word changed—Freiheit, freedom. From joy to freedom.

Through the lens of this portal, the Ode to Joy stands as:

• a testimony from the edge when it felt like you were done: that the gift still inside you—the unfinished music—is reason enough to stay

• a precise map of joy’s arrival: chaos honestly heard, the old refrains kindly refused, the new theme rising unbidden from the depths, and the voice standing up to make the private theme public

• a teaching that joy is not happiness: it is what happiness becomes when it has been assaulted by life’s tumultuous rhythms and risen to tell its story—chaos reconfigured, born from the very depths that held the pain

• a structural revelation that joy cannot be performed alone: it required the first chorus in symphonic history, because joy is inherently communal, not fully itself until shared—and on Thursday evenings, we are one another’s crescendo and concluding refrain

• and a portrait of grace in Caroline Unger’s hands: the ovation already filling the hall, and the beloved who must be gently turned around to perceive it

Somewhere in your life, the applause is already sounding—the love of the Divine One filling the infinite spaces outward and within—while you stand facing your score, still counting time, certain the hall is silent. This week’s music is the turning: joy, coming out of chaos, rising from your own depths, asking for your voice and for your chorus, until every wall falls and the millions are embraced.

And I will meet you there.

Meditation and Study Group

The Coherence Circle, our meditation and study group, meets every Thursday at 5:30pm MST at the Unitarian Church in the Meditation Room.

You may also join us on Zoom via this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5054120010?pwd=aWoPgmIYXkOMdpPHKvASKlE6BapNAD.1

All are welcome—no musical knowledge is needed, only a willingness to listen with the heart.

With gratitude, and see you Thursday,

Tom

Link to the Song

I would suggest you go to YouTube and search for the following:

Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No 9 ‘Ode to Joy’ // Sir Antonio Pappano & London Symphony Orchestra

Or use the link below:

https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tDP1TcwNK3IM2D0kkhKTS3JyC9LzVMvVrAsyVAorswtyMjPqwQAzKgMIw&q=beethoven%27s+9th+symphony&oq=Beethoven%27s+9th+sy&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqDQgBEC4YkQIYgAQYigUyEAgAEAAYkQIY4wIYgAQYigUyDQgBEC4YkQIYgAQYigUyDQgCEAAYkQIYgAQYigUyDQgDEAAYkQIYgAQYigUyDQgEEAAYkQIYgAQYigUyDQgFEAAYkQIYgAQYigUyBggGEEUYOTIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABNIBCjI5MDc5ajBqMTWoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&source=chrome.rb&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:efb21db8,vid:fzyO3fLV5O0,st:0

Beethoven’s Complete Heiligenstadt Testament

For my brothers Carl and [Johann]* Beethoven,
O you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me, you do not know the secret causes of my seeming so, from childhood my heart and mind were disposed to the gentle feelings of good will, I was even ever eager to accomplish great deeds, but reflect now that for six years I have been a hopeless case, aggravated by senseless physicians, cheated year after year in the hope of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady (whose cure will take years or, perhaps, be impossible), born with an ardent and lively temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society, I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness, when I at times tried to forget all this, O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing, and yet it was impossible for me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf. Ah how could I possibly admit such an infirmity in the one sense which should have been more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in highest perfection, a perfection such as few surely in my profession enjoy or have enjoyed - O I cannot do it, therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I would gladly mingle with you, my misfortune is doubly painful because it must lead to my being misunderstood, for me there can be no recreations in society of my fellows, refined intercourse, mutual exchange of thought, only just as little as the greatest needs command disposition, although I sometimes ran counter to it yielding to my inclination for society, but what a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life - only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence - truly wretched, an excitable body which a sudden change can throw from the best into the worst state - Patience - it is said that I must now choose for my guide, I have done so, I hope my determination will remain firm to endure until it please the inexorable parcae to break the thread, perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not, I am prepared. Forced already in my 28th year to become a philosopher, O it is not easy, less easy for the artist than for anyone else - Divine One thou lookest into my inmost soul, thou knowest it, thou knowest that love of man and desire to do good live therein. O men, when some day you read these words, reflect that you did me wrong and let the unfortunate one comfort himself and find one of his kind who despite all obstacles of nature yet did all that was in his power to be accepted among worthy artists and men. You my brothers Carl and [Johann] as soon as I am dead if Dr. Schmid is still alive ask him in my name to describe my malady and attach this document to the history of my illness so that so far as possible at least the world may become reconciled with me after my death. At the same time I declare you two to be the heirs to my small fortune (if so it can be called), divide it fairly, bear with and help each other, what injury you have done me you know was long ago forgiven. To you brother Carl I give special thanks for the attachment you have displayed towards me of late. It is my wish that your lives be better and freer from care than I have had, recommend virtue to your children, it alone can give happiness, not money, I speak from experience, it was virtue that upheld me in misery, to it next to my art I owe the fact that I did not end my life with suicide. - Farewell and love each other - I thank all my friends, particularly Prince Lichnowsky and Professor Schmid - I desire that the instruments from Prince L. be preserved by one of you but let no quarrel result from this, so soon as they can serve you better purpose sell them, how glad will I be if I can still be helpful to you in my grave - with joy I hasten towards death - if it comes before I shall have had an opportunity to show all my artistic capacities it will still come too early for me despite my hard fate and I shall probably wish it had come later - but even then I am satisfied, will it not free me from my state of endless suffering? Come when thou will I shall meet thee bravely. - Farewell and do not wholly forget me when I am dead, I deserve this of you in having often in life thought of you how to make you happy, be so -

Heiligenstadt, October 6,1802, Ludwig van Beethoven

Heiligenstadt, October 10, 1802 - thus do I take my farewell of thee - and indeed sadly - yes that beloved hope - which I brought with me when I came here to be cured at least in a degree - I must wholly abandon, as the leaves of autumn fall and are withered so hope has been blighted, almost as I came - I go away - even the high courage - which often inspired me in the beautiful days of summer - has disappeared - O Providence - grant me at least but one day of pure joy - it is so long since real joy echoed in my heart - O when - O when, O Divine One - shall I find it again in the temple of nature and of men - Never? no - O that would be too hard.

*The brackets indicate that the name of Beethoven’s brother, Johann, is not on the manuscipt (the space is left blank.)

Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy

O friends, not these tones!
But let’s strike up more agreeable ones,
And more joyful.

Joy!
Joy!

Joy, beautiful spark of Divinity,
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Heavenly one, thy sanctuary!
Thy magic binds again
What custom strictly divided;
All people become brothers,
Where thy gentle wing abides.

Whoever has succeeded in the great attempt,
To be a friend’s friend,
Whoever has won a lovely woman,
Add his to the jubilation!
Yes, and also whoever has just one soul
To call his own in this world!
And he who never managed it should slink
Weeping from this union!

All creatures drink of joy
At nature’s breasts.
All the Just, all the Evil
Follow her trail of roses.
Kisses she gave us and grapevines,
A friend, proven in death.
Ecstasy was given to the worm
And the cherub stands before God.

Gladly, as His suns fly
through the heavens’ grand plan
Go on, brothers, your way,
Joyful, like a hero to victory.

Be embraced, Millions!
This kiss to all the world!
Brothers, above the starry canopy
There must dwell a loving Father.
Are you collapsing, millions?
Do you sense the creator, world?
Seek him above the starry canopy!
Above stars must He dwell

German Lyrics

German Lyrics to ‘Ode to Joy’

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen,
Und freudenvollere.

Freude!
Freude!

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Wem der große Wurf gelungen
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein;
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!

Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Küsse gab sie uns und Reben,
Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben
und der Cherub steht vor Gott.

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen
Durch des Himmels prächt’gen Plan
Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn,
Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
Brüder, über’m Sternenzelt
Muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?
Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
Such’ ihn über’m Sternenzelt!
Über Sternen muß er wohnen.

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. — Psalm 30:5

In this series we have progressed from the confession of Bohemian Rhapsody’s stitched together soul, to Pink Floyd’s wishing for presence when there is absence, to Zeppelin’s gratitude when love and light enter the room, to the dead thing that still walks in and among us through the Cranberries’ Zombie, to the friend called darkness that visits us all in the sound’s silence, to nature’s plea to come away among the trees and remove the layers, and now, an ode to joy.

For several weeks now I knew I wanted to represent a piece of classical music, so it is here that we take a turn from our usual focus on rock songs. I asked my son, Andrew, to help us. My eldest son is an exceptional flute player and has played classical pieces of music in many a concert hall. I asked Andrew if there was any classical music he found moving, and he said: the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He wrote that this is the first symphony ever to call for a full chorus; the bass baritone who stands and sings the word Freude, joy, coming out of chaos in the strings; a composer who could no longer hear, conducting a music he carried only within.

For six weeks we have listened to rock songs as spiritual mirrors—songs made in rupture, in some cases carrying more than their writers knew. This week we go to a place and time before there was a radio, a phonograph, Pandora, or Spotify, to a time long ago when a deaf man in Vienna wrote twenty-five minutes of music that begins with the unsettling sounds of chaos, only to enter a finale featuring several hundred human voices singing the word Joy that reverberates through the concert hall. This is a strikingly superb presentation of musical sound that enters the human soul to provide hope for any turbulent time.

What we have considered throughout this series is that the stories of the creator’s lives, even when postmarked by trouble and chaos and searching and pain, are the gateway to something sublime that settles in the human heart to provide a deeper meaning that could not have been known except through the onslaught. If you know me well, you know that I love to quote Kahlil Gibran, the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

This week, our circle takes up the finale of the Ninth Symphony, by Ludwig van Beethoven—the movement the world calls the Ode to Joy. And if you know Andrew’s story, you know why he finds deep meaning in the striking progression from chaos to joy in Beethoven’s offering.

The Man Who Could Not Hear

Beethoven began losing his hearing in his late twenties, at the very height of his powers as a composer and virtuoso pianist. Sound was his livelihood, who he was, the language of his soul—and it was leaving him, year by year, with no cure and no mercy.

Imagine it in your own terms, the very thing that offers your life identity and purpose each day, has been carelessly taken from you. I once knew a woman in my childhood who had a beautiful voice and sang tender songs at the church of my youth. When I was in my late 20s she became my client because something life shattering happened to her. She developed throat cancer and could no longer sing. That which provided her life with hope and comfort and meaning was thrusted mercilessly from her. I often wonder what happened to her.

In 1802 Beethoven retreated to the village of Heiligenstadt outside Vienna, and there he wrote a letter to his brothers that he never sent. The letter was found among his papers after his death, and we know it now as the Heiligenstadt Testament.

In this letter he wrote that for six years he has been in a hopeless state, a “wretched existence,” aggravated by physicians he referred to as senseless. He proclaimed that he felt cheated year after year in the hope of any improvement, stating plainly, “I am deaf.” In his humiliation when others were able to hear a flute in the distance, he heard nothing, or if others heard the shepherd singing, he heard nothing.

Admittedly these incidents brought him to despair, such that he considered ending his life by his own hand. What held him back was neither comfort nor hope of healing, but rather unfinished music. “It seemed impossible,” he wrote, “to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce.”

Beethoven felt as if the Divine One was looking deeply into his inmost soul. As we have seen in our weekly appraisal of these songs is that some version of tragedy and soul searching led to a depth of experience not before known, so that what often emerges is an evolved self, a version that is more essential and true. He then lamented at the end of this testament, “farewell, and love each other.”

Beethoven’s testament is one of the great heart-felt cries in the history of the human spirit: a man at the edge of self-destruction, pulled back not by the promise that his suffering would end—it would not—but by the conviction that something was still in him that had to be given. You may have stood at this edge. You may have felt the despair of not wanting to go on. Yet this cry of the soul from Heiligenstadt says: the gift still inside you is reason enough to stay.

An die Freude, To Joy

And there was something this great composer had been carrying for a very long time. As a young man in Bonn—still a teenager, by some accounts—Beethoven had fallen in love with a poem by Friedrich Schiller called: An die Freude, To Joy, published in 1785.

He kept this poem with him and told friends across the decades that one day he would set it to music. He carried that intention for roughly thirty years. He carried it through emerging deafness, illness, isolation, poverty, and the collapse of nearly everything else in his life. He carried his ode to joy, intent on finding some useful purpose for it. When you carry the hope of joy for that length of time and breadth of intensity, it is sure to find its landing place.

When he finally composed the Ninth Symphony, between 1822 and 1824, he was in his fifties, sick, alone, embattled—and completely deaf. He never heard a note of this symphony with his ears. He heard it the only place left to him, in an inward place that only knows the vibration and frequency of a certain quality beyond the typical senses.

Freddie Mercury was in a courtroom. Paul Simon was in a bathroom. Martin Gore was in the suffocating metropolis. Beethoven was in total silence, yet he composed one of the greatest hymns of joy in the history of music. He did so from the memory of the sound he once knew intimately, and what his anguish of soul did was bring forth something deeper than memory.

The music was already whole inside him; he only needed to endure his despair to locate it. The outer faculty was gone; the inner faculty had become like a concert hall. Every contemplative tradition knows this exchange—when the outer senses close, the inner senses open. We meet God, the mystics insist, in the inner room, the holy inner chamber. Beethoven lived the last decade of his life locked inside that room, and what he found there, of all things, was joy.

The Night She Turned Him Around

The Ninth Symphony premiered on May 7, 1824, at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna. Beethoven had not made a stage appearance in twelve years. The theater was packed, full of onlookers who came to marvel at the virtuoso’s masterpiece. Beethoven was unable to conduct, and it was the theater’s kapellmeister, Michael Umlauf, who directed the performance. The musicians were quietly instructed beforehand: follow Umlauf; ignore the composer.

But Beethoven insisted on being there, on stage, and right next to the conductor. The score was open before him, he set the tempos, turned the pages, and hurled himself into music. Yet there was just one thing, he couldn’t hear anything. One of the violinists said later that Beethoven threw himself back and forth like a man who was possessed. He extended himself to his full height, or was seen crouched on the floor, or flailing as though he wanted to play every instrument and sing every part himself. This was a deaf man, who was conducting a symphony that existed, for him, only within himself. The actual musical progression resounded in the space around him, yet symphonic sound moved with an overture only he could sense.

And then, as the concert came to a close, there was an eruption of applause from the audience. People leapt to their feet, cheered, wept, moved at what was seen as an astonishing display of musical genius. Sadly, Beethoven could not hear the concert he produced, nor could he hear the adoration that swept through the hall. He continued to face the orchestra, with the applause behind him, still turned toward his score, still counting time in the silence. He had no idea that what he offered to the world moved the crowd with such intensity.

Yet in the choir, a twenty-year-old contralto soloist named Caroline Unger, moved toward Beethoven. She gently took this brilliant man’s arm, and turned him around. He was only then able to see with his own eyes, even though he could not hear, everyone in the theater on their feet, raising their hats and waving their handkerchiefs in the air.

Everyone present knew he could not hear them, so they made their applause visible. An entire theater, in an instant of collective tenderness, translated sound into sight so that a deaf man could receive his ovation. Five times they rose for him. Accounts differ on the smaller details, as they always do with sacred stories, but the heart of it is well attested. The man who painstakingly offered this anthem of joy had to be physically turned around by a young woman’s hands to discover that the joy was filling the auditorium.

The Music Itself: A Map of the Soul’s Passage

Let’s look more closely at this music itself. Its movement begins with chaos. Wagner later called the opening the terror fanfare—a cacophonous, incongruous blast in the winds, as if the orchestra itself were bellowing. This is the tension and chaos of the crisis resonating in the depth of a soul in crisis. The music reflects when things fall apart, as the mind reverberates at three in the morning when despair and anguish are visiting. Beethoven felt this very deeply in an inward place, as if the Divine One was forging a new way into his inner being.

Then something extraordinary happens. Out of the chaos, the cellos and basses—the deeper sounds in the orchestra, begin to provide a hallowed resonance in the atmosphere, filling all space. Beethoven presented this so that the harrowing strings answered the terror that had hung in the air.

The orchestra then recalls the themes of the symphony’s three previous movements—the striving, catapulting first movement; the frantic, incongruous, driving cadence of the second; and the achingly beautiful slow movement of the third—and one by one, the deep voices consider each, answer each with a phrase, and set each aside.

Listen, and hear what is happening: the soul, in crisis, is reviewing its own contents—its old refrains, its familiar patterns, even its unsuspecting calm—none of them finds an answer to the chaos. Striving cannot. Distraction cannot. Even beauty, alone, cannot. It is one of the most honest passages ever composed: the sound of a soul discovering that everything it already knows is not enough. Something else must enter, somehow.

And then quietly, in something that begins to encompass it all, in the low strings a new theme is born. The Joy theme—Freude. It is in this movement that Beethoven makes the most eloquent choice of his life. The melody that will soon be sung by hundreds of voices and shake the walls of the theater enters bare and without harmony. Barely more than a whisper in the cellos and basses, like something rising from the floor of the sea, like a fog building and extending to cover the valley floor, like the first hints of white light before dawn.

Joy does not arrive in triumph from an external force, or something perceived to be greater and other. It arrives from below, non-descript and solitary, in the same tone where the chaos became climactic. This is because true joy is not imported from something foreign; it is born out of the very depths that held the pain. The theme rises through the orchestra, gathering voices, growing golden—and then the terror fanfare crashes back in. The chaos returns. Of course it does; it always does. And this time, the orchestra alone cannot answer it. And then someone stands up, and a voice rises from the deafening silence.

The Voice

For the first time in the history of the symphony—an instrumental form, always and only instruments, for as long as the form had existed—a human voice enters. The bass baritone rises, and the first words ever sung in a symphony are not Schiller’s. Beethoven wrote them himself, his own personal address, placed in the mouth of the singer: Oh friends—not these sounds! Let us strike up something more pleasant, more full of joy.

Oh friends. The first sung word in the history of the symphony is, in effect, friends. And the first sung sentence is a refusal, and a choice… not these sounds. As though the deep Self, having heard the chaos twice, finally stands up inside the concert hall of the psyche and says: the music will be silenced! We know it by heart; we honor what it survived; and we are choosing another sound now, a new sound. Then the baritone sings the word around which everything turns—Freude! Joy!—and the chorus thunders it back, and Schiller’s ode begins at last; the haunting whispers in the soul of a man carried thirty years breaking open in public display.

And because Schiller’s poem is two hundred and forty years old and belongs to all of us now, I can give you his words directly, in plain English: Joy, beautiful spark of the divine, daughter of Elysium—we enter, drunk with fire, your sanctuary. Your magic binds together again what custom has strictly divided; all people become brothers and sisters where your gentle wing abides. And then the verse that leaps every wall ever built: Be embraced, you millions! This kiss is for the whole world! Brothers—above the canopy of stars, a loving Father must dwell. Do you fall to your knees, you millions? Do you sense the Creator, world? Seek Him above the starry canopy; above the stars He must dwell.

That is what several hundred voices sing at the top of their range in the final minutes: joy as the dynamic ground of being within every person; joy as the force that pervades and invades all that life is, has become, and ever will be. Every human now family; and above the whole starry night sky, the love of the Divine One presiding. A deaf man, who believed the world had excluded him from the common courtesy of life’s pleasures, wrote of life’s inevitable trajectory from the darkness of despair to the light of joy.

The Mirror

Now the mirror—and I will simply unfold what Andrew’s intention already contains. My son knows it, the truth about joy’s origin, and now you do too. Joy, coming out of chaos.

Not after the chaos. Not instead of it. Out of it. This is the whole distinction between joy and happiness, and our language is careless with it. Happiness depends on circumstances and people and possessions and exploits; it arrives when things go well and departs when they do not. Joy is something else entirely—the psalmist knew it, Beethoven knew it, and everyone in our circle who has grieved and somehow found themselves singing again knows it too.

To put it plainly, joy is what happiness becomes when it has been assaulted by life’s indiscriminate and tumultuous rhythms, and risen to tell its story. It rises in the low strings, out of the same depths where the terror lived. It does not deny the chaos; it is chaos reconfigured, the way the pearl is composed of the wound’s response to what invaded the shell.

Our series has been walking toward this for seven weeks: we learned that gratitude is a developed form of grief; we learned that lament is the funeral that lets the dead thing rest; and now we arrive at what waits on the far side of the funeral. Joy is when the trajectory of grief has concluded its circuitous course.

And notice how the finale says joy actually comes, because the sequence is precise, and it is the same sequence I have watched with myself and others for decades. First, the honest hearing of the chaos—not flinching, not pretending, not with spiritual bypassing; the terror, acknowledged and embraced, is allowed to run through its sequences.

Second, there is a review from the depths: the deep voice examines every old energy and conditioning—the striving, the nervous motion, even the radiance we hide inside—honoring each, and setting each aside. This is the most courageous moment in the inner life: the refusal, made kindly and from the depths, of the music we have always played.

Third, the new theme rises from below—unbidden, unearned, small at first, a gift and not an achievement.

And fourth—the voice must stand up. The inner music is not enough; someone must finally embody it, out loud, in front of others, at the risk of breaking the form. Every recovery I have ever witnessed follows this score. And every one of them, without exception, required the fourth movement: the standing up, the voicing, the moment the private theme went public.

The Witness

Which reveals the finale’s deepest teaching, hidden in plain sight in its very structure: joy cannot be performed alone. It needs a witness, a gathering, as we have admitted previously in being stripped down to the bone. It is the alone journey that finds fulfillment with others.

Beethoven wrote symphonies for thirty years with instruments alone, and when the subject was finally joy, instruments alone could not carry it. He had to break the form and call in a chorus, because joy is the one music that requires multiple voices.

Sorrow can be faced alone—excruciatingly so, and is often held in the private chambers. Joy, on the other hand, requires witnesses; inherently communal and not fully itself until it is shared. All people becoming brothers and sisters is not a triviality on the Joy theme; it is a structural necessity.

As you know, this is why our circle exists. This is why we do not simply send each other articles and listen alone in our separate homes. Joy needs a chorus, and on Thursday evenings, we are one another’s crescendo and concluding refrain.

Being Turned Around

And then there is the turning. It was Caroline Unger who guided the architect to face the opposite direction. Beethoven stood in the presence of a thundering ovation—five risings, a sea of waving white—and could perceive none of it. The love was already there, filling the hall, responding to his brilliance. He simply had no faculty to receive it, and he was facing the other direction.

I have come to believe this is a portrait of our lives. The applause and fanfare are all around us. The grace and acclaim have been given. The love of the Divine One fills the infinite spaces outward and within, providing a timely ovation, yet we too often stand deaf to it, facing our score, still counting time, certain the hall is silent.

We must do for one another what the young contralto did: gently take an arm, and turn a beloved around. Sometimes another person is the only instrument grace has for showing us what we cannot hear when we are looking away. Every one of us has been turned by someone.

And someone near you, right now, is still facing the orchestra, unaware of the ovation. They are being applauded and don’t know it. You may be the one sent to turn this person around to view what is there to honor them.

The Song That Outlived Its Silence

Beethoven died three years after the premiere, in 1827. He never heard his Ninth Symphony, in the outer sense, at all. But no music in history has been more heard.

Prisoners of the First World War carried it to Japan, where it took root so deeply that performing the daiku—”the Big Nine”—at year’s end became a national tradition. Every December, across Japan, choruses of hundreds, sometimes thousands of ordinary citizens, gather to sing Schiller’s German verses about the millions embraced.

The melody was made the official anthem of a union of European nations who had spent centuries at war with one another. And on Christmas Day of 1989, weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Leonard Bernstein stood in Berlin and conducted the Ninth with an orchestra and chorus assembled from both sides of the vanished Wall and from nations east and west—and for that performance, he changed one word: the chorus sang Freiheit, freedom, in the place of Freude, joy.

Remember where we stood last week: a young songwriter inside walled West Berlin, pleading to get past the concrete and the wire, out into the trees. Long after Beethoven’s death—and three years after Stripped was recorded in the shadow of that same Wall—the Wall came down, and the music the world reached for, standing in the rubble, was this. The song written by the man who could not hear it became the sound humanity makes when its walls fall.

The vision, softly planted, still remains. Joy, coming out of chaos—for him, and if we consent to the whole sequence, for us.

And I will meet you there.

The Book That Is Coming

For several years I have been preparing what I believe may be the most important work of my writing life. It is nearly ready, and I intend to bring it to major traditional publishers rather than publish it myself, as I have done many times before.

But there is one thing standing between this book and a publisher’s desk, and it is not the writing. Publishers today want to see a platform — an audience already gathered. The numbers they look for run anywhere from ten thousand subscribers upward. At this moment, I have 247 of you here on Substack, thirteen of whom generously pay.

I am not asking you to pay. A free subscription counts just the same. What I am asking is this: if anything I have written here has mattered to you, would you pass one article along to one friend, and ask if they would be willing to subscribe? One reader, one friend, one article. That is the whole request. You can also find me on YouTube at youtube.com/@tomsteward, where a subscription helps in exactly the same way.

The Books That Are Already Here

While the new book makes its way into the world, the books I have already written are listed below at the bottom of this page — some digital, some in print. If any of them speaks to you, contact me directly and I will get it to you. And here is the part I most want you to know: when you purchase a book directly from me, every dollar goes to the work I describe next.

Uganda

For some time now I have been involved with the Ryan Rehabilitation Foundation in Uganda, named for my son Ryan. The foundation rescues women and children off the streets who are caught in sexual trafficking. Our aim is simple and urgent: to give these individuals a place to live so they never have to return to prostitution, and to build programs of rehabilitation, counselling, and trade skills so they can earn an income of their own.

If you feel moved to help directly, you may give here: Uganda Fund on GoFundMe. Every contribution goes directly to this work.

In Gratitude to You

Whatever you are able to do — subscribe, share, purchase, give, or simply keep reading — I am grateful you took the time to sit with this letter. The work ahead is larger than any one of us, and it is carried forward one reader, one friend, one open heart at a time.

And I will meet you there.

P.S. — If you would like to share this Substack with a friend but aren’t sure what to say, feel free to copy the note below and send it along with any article of mine that has stayed with you:

I’ve been reading a writer named Tom Steward — a psychotherapist in New Mexico who writes about the inner life, grief, faith, and healing in a way I think might speak to you. This piece in particular made me think of you. He’s working toward publishing a book with a traditional publisher and is trying to gather readers, so if it resonates, a free subscription would mean a lot to him — and I suspect his writing might come to mean something to you, too.

In kindness,

Tom Steward 505-412-0010 tomstewardpa@gmail.com www.tomsteward.com www.becomingyourtrueself.com www.essential-self.com

My Books

Digital Books

• When the Field Remembers — Understanding the Inner Structures That Shape Your Life

• The Field Between — Understanding the Hidden Structures That Shape a Committed Relationship

• The Field Within — Internal Family Systems and the Ten Structures of the Inner Life

• The Breath Beneath the Words — A Contemplative Reading of the Beatitudes in the Language Yeshua Spoke

Self-Published Books

• Into Solitary Places — One Father’s Journey of Faith Through His Son’s Struggle with Psychotic Mental Illness

• True Mind — How Truth Can Change What You Believe and How You Live

• Holy Pride and Love of Self — The Untimely Death of a Son and the Unanticipated Revelation of Heaven

• Spirit Code — The Healing of Energies in the Body’s Subconscious

• A Present Moment Embrace — The Breath Within the Breath and the Music Between the Notes Love’s

• Unrelenting Course — One Woman’s Secret Life of Bondage to Sexual Trafficking and Abuse and How She Found a Way Through to Freedom

• Greater Things — Living the Life of Miracles Just Like Christ Said We Would

• The Process — An Engaging Program That Explores Why You Behave the Way You Do and What You Can Do About It

• Living Well — Nutrition and Lifestyle for Psychological Wellness

A Desire For You

May you know love, be love, and express love, from your heart to those around you

This morning I sat with my coffee and noticed something I suspect you have noticed too, though perhaps neither of us has said it out loud: a low hum of unease that seems to come from nowhere in particular. Nothing was wrong, exactly. Nothing pressing. The sky over the mountains was doing its usual blue extravagance. And still, underneath the surface of an ordinary Tuesday, there was that familiar weight — part boredom, part dread, part fatigue of the soul.

I have come to think of this as the ache of existence. Not the sharp grief of loss, which announces itself and demands our attention, but the dull, unnamed burden so many of us carry through our humdrum days. We are anxious and cannot say why. We are nervous, restless, vaguely afraid — of what? Of nothing we can point to. The calendar is full or the calendar is empty, and either way something in us whispers, is this all there is?

If that whisper sounds familiar, I want you to know two things. First: you are not broken, and you are not alone. This ache is nearly universal, and it may be the most honest thing about us — a homesickness for a depth we sense but have not yet entered. And second: the doorway out of the blah is not somewhere else. It is not in the next accomplishment, the next purchase, the next scroll of the feed. It is closer to you than anything in this world could ever be. It is riding in your chest right now.

The Ache Is a Messenger

We tend to treat our low-grade anxiety as a malfunction, something to be medicated, distracted, or powered through. But what if the ache is not a malfunction at all? What if it is a messenger?

The mystics of every tradition have said essentially the same thing: the restlessness of the human heart is the soul’s memory of its Source. Augustine called the heart restless until it rests in God. The Sufis speak of the reed flute crying because it has been cut from the reed bed. The Buddhists name the subtle unsatisfactoriness that shadows even our good days. Different vocabularies, one diagnosis: we ache because we are living on the surface of ourselves, and something in us knows there is more.

The humdrum, then, is not the enemy. It is the knock at the door.

The Practice: One Breath, Fully Inhabited

So here is the practical movement I want to offer you today, much in the same way I often present. It requires no cushion, no app, no belief system, and no more than a few minutes. You can do it at your desk, in your parked car, standing at the kitchen sink.

Wherever you are, pause. Let your shoulders drop. Let your jaw soften.

Now turn your attention inward — not to your thoughts, but beneath them, not to your feelings, but beneath them — and simply find the breath that is already happening. You do not need to manufacture anything. The breath has been breathing you all day, all night, all your life, asking nothing, waiting patiently to be witnessed.

Follow the next inhale as it descends. Feel it, or see it, or simply sense it — whatever way of knowing comes naturally to you — as it moves down through the chest and settles into the belly. Let the belly be soft and let it receive the breath the way dry ground receives rain. No effort, only receiving. Then follow the exhale as it rises, ascending gently up and out, carrying with it a little of the weight you have been holding.

Descending, ascending. Down to the belly, up and out. Three or four rounds of this, unhurried.

And then, the turn — the small, quiet shift that changes everything. Stop watching the breath, and become it. Let the line between the one who breathes and the breath itself grow thin, then disappear. You are no longer a tense person observing an exercise. You are the rising and the falling. You are the rhythm itself.

Stay there a moment. Something meets you in that place. Or perhaps, Someone, more You than you may realize. Or not, who knows? You may have a profound moment, or an ordinary one. You may notice something shift, or not. No need to judge it, simply let it be.

The Breath That Breathes You

It is no accident that in Hebrew, in Greek, in Aramaic, in Sanskrit, the word for breath and the word for spirit are the same word. Ruach. Pneuma. Ruha. Prana. (I know I say that and write that often) The ancients were not being poetic; they were being precise. When you descend into the breath and allow yourself to become it, you discover that the breath is not merely air moving through tissue. It is Spirit — Divine and yet intimately personal, vast and yet closer than your own heartbeat — breathing you into being in this very moment.

This is what captivates. Not an idea about the transcendent, or God, but the felt presence of the Life within your life. People who touch this place, even briefly, often say the same thing afterward: I found something I had not known before. The ache does not always vanish, but it changes its architecture. It was never telling you that life is empty. It was telling you where the fullness lives.

The blah of existence, it turns out, is simply life waiting to be breathed all the way down, moving through all that is known, until you arrive in the depths and core of who you are. Something unknown, now known, and your breath guided you there. Or as the anonymous English author referred to as the cloud of unknowing, you have pierced the veil and entered the cloud, and found it is in you, and it is you.

So today, when the hum of unease rises — in the checkout line, in the meeting, in the fatigue of the afternoon, in the quiet of the evening — let it be your signal to be mindful and present. Pause. Descend with the breath into the belly. Rise with it. Become it. And let the Breath that has been breathing you since before you had a name, remind you who you are.

The doorway is open. It has always been open. Enter in!

And I will meet you there.

Our Thursday evening series, Songs That Hear Us, continues this week with Depeche Mode’s Stripped. The full contemplative reading is published here on Substack—Come Away With Me, Into the Trees, Just for One Day—and I encourage you to read it before we gather on Thursday, August 20.

This week’s song came to our circle through my son Daniel, who shared it with me in an afternoon conversation—and who pointed me toward the remarkable secret hiding in its sounds. After I posted the above article, Daniel informed me that Depeche Mode is more synthpop than rock. I stand corrected.

Stripped is a song the world largely misunderstood: its whispered intimacy was taken for mere seduction, when in truth it is an invitation in the lineage of the Song of Songs—a summons to leave the noise and glow of the metropolis, come into the trees, and be seen all the way down to the true essential self.

It was written from inside the walled city of West Berlin, recorded in a studio in the shadow of the Wall itself, and built—astonishingly—out of the very machine sounds it pleads to escape: a real car ignition opening the song, an engine slowed down until it becomes a heartbeat, real fireworks blooming over a studio car park.

The article follows that engine out of the city and home again, through the stripping away of our layers and glittering images, to the Sabbath truth that one day away sanctifies the six we return to.

Below is our practice and the questions we will sit with together. Bring them with you on Thursday, in your heart or on paper.

For Contemplation

Before Thursday, listen to the song twice, as is our practice—and this week, the practice has a third movement. Listen once for the story: the walled city, the engine made heartbeat, the invitation into the trees.

Then—before your second listening—accept the song’s invitation in miniature: go outside, if you are able. A backyard is enough; a single tree is enough; ten minutes is enough. Leave the phone indoors. Stand or sit on the actual ground and let the hours loosen their grip even slightly. Then come back and listen again, and notice what the song sounds like once you have obeyed it. And finally, sit with these questions:

• What are your layers? Name your costumes honestly—the professional one, the family role assigned before you could speak, the defenses sewn on in the years when you needed them. What is your glittering image—and which layer has been on so long you have begun to mistake it for your face?

• Who witnesses you stripped? Is there any person, any presence, any place in your life where every layer comes off and your true essential self is met with tenderness and kindness? If the answer is no one and nowhere, what would it take to begin?

• Where is your “one day”? The song does not ask for your whole life; it asks for a single day among the trees. What would a true Sabbath look like for you—a real retreat from the tasks, the obligations, the nervous activity—and what keeps deferring it?

• The engine, slowed down, became a heartbeat. What machinery in your daily life—the commute, the routine, the clanking obligations—might reveal a hidden pulse of the sacred if you slowed it down and truly listened, instead of only trying to escape it?

• Where does the television still make your decisions? Last week we named the neon god; this week the song asks directly: is there one choice you could reclaim this week and make in quiet stillness, on your own ground, as bare essence and not costume?

The Takeaway

Stripped was written by a young man living inside a walled city, recorded in a studio in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, and released into a world that mistook its intimacy for mere seduction. It is in truth an invitation in the great lineage of the Song of Songs: rise up, come away from the big city, into the trees, just for one day, and let yourself be seen with every layer removed—known all the way down, in your bare essence, as the true essential self.

Its makers built it, knowingly or not, as a parable in sound: a real ignition turning the key on the journey, an engine slowed until the heartbeat hidden inside became audible, fireworks ascending over a car park—the very blare of the city transfigured into pulse. The machinery of our confinement became the vehicle of freedom: use what you have, to gain what you want. And the engine that carries you out carries you home again, changed.

Through the lens of this portal, Stripped stands as:

• an invitation in the lineage of allurement—the Beloved calling the soul out of the noise and glow of the city, into the trees, just for one day, so that tenderness can finally be heard

• a teaching on the way of subtraction: that we come to the true essential self not by adding but by removing—persona, glittering image, performance, defense—until what remains is what was always real

• a parable of consecrated matter: the engine slowed into a heartbeat, proof that the world need not be escaped, only attended to until the pulse of the sacred emerges from inside it

• a portrait of true intimacy—utter nakedness before a witness, without adornment or performance, met with tenderness and kindness

• and a Sabbath teaching: one day among the trees, framed by the engine that carries us out and carries us home, sanctifying the six days we return to—so that we come back to the life we know with a different presentation

Somewhere beneath your layers is the self that was there before the costumes—the face that was you before you were born, the one the Beloved has been asking to see all along.

This week’s song is the hand extended: come away, just for one day, out from under the neon god, out past the wall, into the trees, down onto the grass, where the hours loosen and the layers can finally fall—and what is left when everything false is removed turns out not to be nothing, but the very thing that was loved from the beginning.

And I will meet you there.

Meditation and Study Group

The Coherence Circle, our meditation and study group, meets every Thursday at 5:30pm MST at the Unitarian Church in the Meditation Room.

You may also join us on Zoom via this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5054120010?pwd=aWoPgmIYXkOMdpPHKvASKlE6BapNAD.1

All are welcome—no musical knowledge is needed, only a willingness to listen with the heart.

With gratitude, and see you Thursday,

Tom

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come. — Song of Solomon 2:10–12

Earlier this week I had a conversation with my son Daniel about songs, like the ones we have been using for our Thursday evening study. He mentioned a song that he admitted is perhaps his favorite rock song of all-time. We then took a moment to play this song, hear its sounds, and reflect on the lyrics. It is a song with significant depth and would be a great addition to our study, so I decided that this would be our song for this week.

The song Daniel gave me is one the world has largely misunderstood. When it was released forty years ago, its whispers of intimacy led most listeners to interpret it as a song of seduction. It is a song of seduction; I’ll give you that, but likely not in the way you may have assumed. Rather, it is an invitation extended to every soul suffocating in the noise and glow of the modern world—an invitation to leave, just for one day, to be seen and known, all the way down.

The song for this week is Stripped, by the rock group Depeche Mode. Be careful now, because you may not be stripping down in the way you think.

A Song Written Inside a Wall

When someone beckons you to come, to come away, to come with them, this could be for any number of reasons. In its finest forms it means to be together, to do something together, to enjoy each other’s company. It holds a sense of belonging, connection, bonding, and even love.

Yet there are times when this beckoning comes from within, because it is you who is sending out the invitation. You may feel the tug to do something different, to be something different, or to be in a different place. It may come from the allure of entering the natural world outside, or the inner world inside. It may be to know something else, to experience something else, to feel something else, to sense something else, other than what you normally encounter.

The band Depeche Mode (meaning “fashion dispatch” or “fashion update”), was formed in 1980 by four young men from Basildon, Essex, England. In 1985 their songwriter, Martin Gore, was living in West Berlin, and the band recorded much of their album Black Celebration at the Hansa studio that stood in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.

As you listen to this song, hold the picture of this metropolis in mind, the one big city that for decades provided a demarcation between east and west Berlin, between the communist and democratic regions of the country. The song’s entire plea is to escape the vast sprawling city that was encircled by concrete and wire and watchtowers, and to travel into nature on the other side of the barrier.

Stripping Back the Layers

Stripped was released in February 1986 as the album’s lead single, and it was clear to those in the band’s circle what it meant. Dave Gahan, the singer, said the song came from a period when Martin Gore was engaged in deep self-reflection. His aim was to strip back the layers of himself to see what remained. Andy Fletcher, the band’s keyboardist, explained that the song was about getting away from the hustle and bustle of the city for one day, to get back to something fundamental, which was “two people stripping down to their bare emotions.” Not clothing. Layers. The song’s bare nakedness is the utter barrenness of the soul, stripped down to what is essential.

In the song’s own imagery, the listener is enticed to leave the city, come out among the trees, lie down in the grass, and be immersed in the unending rhythms of the physical world. The singer extends a hand: come back to the land, away from it all, for a single day in which the hours belong to no one but the two of you. As a lover would proclaim, let me see you with all your layers removed, all the way down—and let me do the same.

The clanging sounds of madness of your typical contexts cannot compare to this grandeur. The city, the song observes, has its lovers inhaling exhaust—tasted even in a kiss. And then the pleas arrive, each more intimate than the last: make one decision without the television’s counsel; speak for no audience but me; let even your tears be witnessed by love alone. And beneath them all, the plea that names the song: let me see you with every layer gone, all the way down. The stripping down results in being seen for who you are in your bare essence, something I refer to as the true essential self. In this way you are known for who you really are.

The neon god we met last week in The Sound of Silence is here again—but where last week’s song diagnosed the disease, this week’s song writes the prescription. Leave the glowing city. Go into the trees. Strip down. Let something unknown rise from within you. Let your unfiltered essence be seen.

The Machines Made Holy

Daniel alerted me to something remarkable in this song. It is the sound offered as the song begins, and then as it ends.

In the opening seconds of Stripped you will hear an engine turning over. That is not an effect from a sound library. That is the actual ignition of Dave Gahan’s Porsche 911, recorded by engineer Gareth Jones in the studio car park. The clacking sound that carries the entire song that everything else rides upon is the sound of an idling engine, slowed down, as if gasping for breath. The explosive bursts that electrify the track are real fireworks, recorded on Guy Fawkes Night with a row of microphones placed across the car park to capture the rockets as they ascended into the night sky. And as the song comes to a close, the engine returns, idling, until its revving escapes quietly into silence.

With Stripped we have a song that pleads for escape from the world of machines and clanking noise, constructed entirely out of machine sounds and fireworks. This is a reminder of what we want by revealing what we have. We want silence, but we have noise. There could have been many ways to measure this impact, yet Depeche Mode did something quite profound. It’s possible they didn’t fully know it, which is precisely the premise of our series. They took the very blare of the metropolis—the engine, the explosion—and allowed it to express its intent. And when the engine slowed down, it stopped sounding like a machine. It started sounding more like a heartbeat.

I find this to be brilliant. The pulse of this song about being stripped to bare essence is an engine slowed until the beating heart hidden inside becomes audible. That is not an escape from technology; it is the redemptive revelation every mystic eventually arrives at—matter is not the enemy of spirit; it is the curtain that opens to express spirit.

We do not need to run from the world we live in; we simply need to slow down and listen to the deeper tones until the pulse of the sacred emerges from inside it. The contemplative does not reject the city; this seeker learns to hear the core essence beneath the traffic and the bleating sounds of ordinary life. Every spiritual tradition that begins by renouncing the world ends, as it matures, by sanctifying it.

The ignition, the very first sound, reveals its direction. The song opens with a summons, and the first thing we hear is the key turning as the engine begins its roar. And it is this clanging motorized vehicle that is driven out of the walled city toward the trees. The machinery of our confinement is used to drive away toward freedom. Use what you have, to gain what you want.

And when the engine returns at the end, it tells the other half of the truth, the part every retreatant knows: the day in the trees is meant to end, and we drive back. The invitation was never to abandon the world but to leave it just for one day—and that one day is not an escape from the other six. It is the impetus that sanctifies them, providing a mellifluous sonnet to unmelodious racket. And after breathing in this mystery, you are now able to bring quiet serenity back to the clanking and clanging sounds of the concrete jungle where you live.

The Sabbath is one day in seven—shabbat shalom—precisely so that its holy reverberations can amplify the rest. The engine at the beginning carries us out; the engine at the end carries us home, and it is this very process that transforms us.

The Song as Mirror: Stripped Down to the Soul

Now hear the song through the mirror, because it is an invitation addressed to you. You are invited to strip down, to the bone. This needs to be more than a song about going into nature to enjoy the sounds and scenery, although that is very helpful. It needs to reflect how you calm the inner noise of racing thoughts, discordant emotions, and time-worn patterns that require reconditioning. You are being urged to remove the layers, to strip all the way down, so your bare essence is allowed expression, even if just for one day.

Every one of us is wearing layers, and not all of them were chosen. There is the professional costume—the competence, the credentials, the calibrated voice. There is the family role assigned before we could speak: the strong one, the funny one, the peacemaker, the problem. There are the defenses, sewn on in the years when we needed them: the armor of achievement, the camouflage of agreeableness, the padding of irony that keeps the true self from being known.

In the 1980s when I was, perhaps for the first time, contending with my external image, something a friend of mine at the time called imaging management, I read a few of Susan Howatch’s novels. These writings were about the false images projected by clergy and parishioners in the context of the high church of England. Among her book titles are the following: Glittering Images, Glamorous Powers, Scandalous Risks, and The Heartbreaker. I identified with the external façade that led to scandalous behavior as I read these books. I knew I had constructed an image, yet it seemed hollow and shallow, and I was searching for ways for it to be deconstructed because I knew there was something else inside that was truer and more real, and I just had to find it.

Depth psychology calls the outermost layer the persona—the mask turned toward the world. The facade is not the problem; it is useful; but the great danger of a persona worn too long is that you have identified with it. You forget it comes off. You become the costume. You forget there is a face beneath it, and the face beneath the costume is the face that was you before you were born. It has been there all along, unrecognized and unsolicited.

And then the song teaches something else that is equally notable, the stripping is not meant to be done alone. The plea at the center of the song is relational. The plea is simply and profoundly, let me see you with everything removed, and let yourself be witnessed. Isn’t that what we all want, to be seen, to be known, to be valued, for who we are, for the true self beyond form and false presentation to be expressed? Find a place to be in the quiet, discover who you are, and allow someone to be a witness to this unveiling.

This is where the world’s misreading of the song brushes against its actual depth, because the interpretation is not entirely wrong. This is a song about disrobing and intimacy. But intimacy in its root sense, although terrifying, is the longed-for experience of being known all the way down. This is utter nakedness before a witness, without fancified adornment, without performance, without the facade of our fabricated self-presentation, to be met with tenderness and kindness.

The song offers that the stripping cannot happen in the busy motion and noise of life as you typically know it. It happens in the trees, on the grass, away from the manufactured existence that would tell you to be something other than who you are in your bare essence.

I would encourage you to find a place, a safe respite from the noise and racket of life. It must be a context that allows quiet stillness, a retreat from your normal life full of tasks and obligations and nervous activity. Let it be a retreat from the people and events in your life that you allow to distract you. It may be an escape from yourself, your glittering image, that part of you that keeps busy on the outside, and on the inside.

Let the context of nature be the catalyst to discover inner nature, true nature, who you really are beyond the commotion of the life you have come to know. Allow the true self, the essential self, to emerge. Strip down, all the way down, until there is nothing left, but you.

Then begin to represent this finer essence to those around you as you come back to life as you know it. Whatever vehicle you used to take you away, let it return you to the context of your life, changed and transformed. You have responded to the invitation to come away, and you now come back with a different presentation.

And I will meet you there.

Two years ago this month I had a Bufo session. This is toad medicine that activates a deeply transformative inner state. My experience resulted in a shift I have not known in any other way.

As soon as I had finished this session, I knew my friend Ivy would benefit. I’m not completely sure why, simply instincts. I called her as I drove home, told her about my experience, and let her know I scheduled an appointment for her the following afternoon.

Ivy had an amazing experience, which resulted in improvements in her depression and anxiety. Her thyroid, which had been defunct and not operational, being aided by thyroid hormones, suddenly went online and started producing hormones for this organ. Her doctor noted she needed to begin reducing her thyroid prescription, so she did, under that doctor’s care. Since then Ivy has had two other Bufo sessions.

On August 1st, less than two weeks ago, Ivy woke abruptly at 1:00 in the morning with a message she felt she was “told” to send me. In it she reminded me of a toad medicine session she had undergone a year ago — an experience so intense, she said, that she wasn’t sure she would come out of it alive. She then told me that two medical specialists in two different fields, twenty-six tubes of blood, revealed she had no sign of the lupus that had shadowed her for years. She wrote that someone in the spirit realm insisted she tell me, and gave me her blessing to share what she texted me.

I have been sitting with her message ever since, and I want to share Ivy’s story with you. I want to do it honestly, which means holding two things at once: the wonder of what happened to her, and the truthful limits of what we can claim about it.

This is one story. It is not proof, and it is not a promise. But one story, told carefully, can open a door worth walking through. So let us walk through it together: what these medicines are, what the research actually supports, what conditions like lupus really are, and where the mystery still outruns our science.

The Return of the Medicines

We are living through a remarkable reconsideration of substances that indigenous peoples have held sacred for millennia and that Western medicine banished for half a century. Four of these medicines belong in this conversation.

Ketamine is the one medicine here that is fully legal in American medical practice. Originally an anesthetic, it has been used off-label for depression for two decades, and a nasal-spray form (esketamine, sold as Spravato) is FDA-approved for treatment-resistant depression. Ketamine works quickly — sometimes within hours — where conventional antidepressants take weeks, and it appears to promote neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to form new connections and, perhaps, new patterns of being. Its effects often require repeated treatments to sustain, and it is best held within a therapeutic container rather than administered as a mere infusion.

Psilocybin, the active compound in sacred mushrooms, has been studied at Johns Hopkins, NYU, Imperial College London, and elsewhere for depression, end-of-life anxiety, and addiction. The FDA has granted it “breakthrough therapy” designation, and late-stage trials are underway. Oregon and Colorado have created regulated access programs, and here in New Mexico, the Medical Psilocybin Act signed in 2025 made us the first state to establish a medical psilocybin program through the legislature — a program still being built, but a sign of where the river is flowing.

MDMA, studied primarily for post-traumatic stress, showed strong results in Phase 3 trials — a majority of participants no longer met criteria for PTSD after treatment — though the FDA declined approval in 2024 and asked for further study. The research continues, and Australia has already begun allowing psychiatrists to prescribe both MDMA and psilocybin under strict conditions.

5-MeO-DMT — the “toad medicine,” or Bufo, secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad and also produced synthetically — is the least studied and the most intense of these. It typically lasts under an hour, yet people consistently describe it as among the most profound experiences of their lives: a complete dissolution of the separate self into something vast. Early survey research and small clinical studies suggest meaningful reductions in depression and anxiety following ceremonial use, and pharmaceutical trials of a synthetic form for treatment-resistant depression are now in progress. But make no mistake: this medicine remains a Schedule I substance in the United States, and sessions happen outside any sanctioned medical framework. Ivy’s words — I didn’t think I would come out of it alive — are not decoration. They belong to the truth of this medicine as much as her gratitude does.

What the Research Can Honestly Say

For the conditions of the psyche — depression, anxiety, the long shadow of trauma — the evidence, while still maturing, is genuinely encouraging. Across studies, a few threads keep appearing. These medicines seem to loosen the grip of rigid, self-punishing patterns of thought — what researchers call the default mode network quieting, and what mystics might call the softening of the small self. They open a window of neuroplasticity in which new learning becomes possible.

And, crucially, the mystical or unitive quality of the experience itself — the felt sense of connection, forgiveness, belonging — predicts the degree of healing better than the dose does. The medicine, it seems, is not merely chemical. It is experiential. It is relational. This is why every serious researcher insists on the same triad: preparation, skilled accompaniment, and integration afterward. The session is a doorway; integration is the walking through.

For trauma specifically, MDMA’s mechanism appears almost pastoral in nature: it quiets the fear centers of the brain enough that a person can finally turn toward the wounded places without being overwhelmed — can revisit what happened while feeling safe, accompanied, and compassionate toward themselves. Those of us who sit with trauma survivors know how precious that combination is, and how rarely it can be reached by willpower alone.

What Lupus Is — and What It Is Not

Now to the harder, humbler part. To honor Ivy’s story, we have to tell the truth about her illness.

Lupus — systemic lupus erythematosus — is an autoimmune disease, meaning the immune system, whose sacred task is to distinguish self from not-self, turns on the body’s own tissues: skin, joints, kidneys, heart, brain. It affects women far more often than men. It is diagnosed through a combination of symptoms and blood markers, and treated with medications that calm the immune system’s misdirected fire.

And here is the essential truth: lupus is a relapsing-remitting disease. It flares and it quiets. Some people experience long remissions; a smaller number experience remissions so complete that even their blood work clears. Medicine does not fully understand why. So, when Ivy’s twenty-six tubes of blood came back clean, that is real, and it is wonderful — and honest medicine would say: remission happens, its causes are often mysterious, and no study has shown that 5-MeO-DMT or any psychedelic cures lupus. Ivy and I believe that Bufo assisted her in having “no signs of lupus,” using the words in her text.

Ivy stands in a lineage of conditions that seem to define our era. Rheumatoid arthritis, where the immune system attacks the joints. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and Graves’ disease, where it attacks the thyroid — one slowing it, the other racing it. Celiac disease, where gluten triggers an immune assault on the gut. Multiple sclerosis, where the target is the insulation of our own nerves. Fibromyalgia, which is not autoimmune at all but a condition of central sensitization — a nervous system turned up too loud, often in people carrying histories of trauma. And MASH (metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis), a liver disease rooted not in immunity but in metabolism and the way we live now. I name these distinctions because respect for suffering begins with accuracy about it.

What do these conditions have in common? Most are more prevalent in women. Many are rising. And nearly all of them show documented associations with chronic stress and early adversity — the landmark research on adverse childhood experiences (ACE) found that childhood trauma measurably raises the risk of adult autoimmune disease. The body keeps the score, as we now say so often that we risk forgetting how radical it is. The immune system and the nervous system are not separate kingdoms; they speak to each other constantly, in the shared language of inflammation.

Is there, then, any scientific thread connecting psychedelics to the body’s diseases and not just the mind’s? A slender, early one. Laboratory research has found that certain psychedelic compounds have potent anti-inflammatory effects in animal models, acting on serotonin receptors found on immune cells themselves. A few human studies have begun measuring inflammatory markers after psychedelic sessions. This research is in its infancy — cells and mice, mostly, not clinical trials in autoimmune patients — and it would be dishonest to claim more.

But it is not nothing. It suggests that the old wall between “mental” and “physical” healing may be less a wall than a curtain, and that science may one day have language for what traditional healers have always insisted: that the medicine works on the whole person, because there is only a whole person.

Holding Her Story

So how shall we hold Ivy’s 1 a.m. message? Not as evidence, and not as nothing. I would call it testimony — a category older than the clinical trial and different in kind. Testimony says: this happened to me, and I cannot fully explain it, and I am changed. She went through an experience of ego-death and surrender that she describes as the most intense of her life.

A year later, her body shows no trace of a disease that is not supposed to simply vanish. She attributes her healing to the medicine. Her doctors, I suspect, would say: unexplained remission. Perhaps both are true. Perhaps neither is the whole truth. I am content — more than content, I am moved — to let the mystery remain a mystery, and to receive her freedom with gratitude rather than explanation.

But let me say one thing with complete clarity, because I believe it needs to be stated: if you live with lupus or any autoimmune condition, do not stop or reduce your medications because of this story, or any story.Immunosuppressive treatment is often what stands between a person and organ damage. If Ivy’s story stirs something in you, bring that stirring to your physician and, if you feel called, to legitimate research and integration-minded clinicians. Let hope inform your care, not replace it.

My Own Doorways

In my Bufo sessions I also had tremendous experiences. For me it was like being in a dream state with faint awareness of certain events occurring. Yet most of the time I had no recall because I was experiencing a reality unrecognizable to my conscious mind. There was an awareness of my ancestors, in particular my maternal grandfather who I was named after, and my son Ryan.

At one point I saw a scene of my den, and I was lying on my back. People were around me and I heard them talking. I gained the sense that there were emergency response workers moving around me, and my wife and my son, Daniel. I gained the impression that my wife was very upset and that I had done something or experienced something that was upsetting to her.

It seemed odd that none of those people in my den were talking to me. I just knew this was a scene of devastation and something awful happened. After this session, I did ask those on the team that administered Bufo if they were talking during my trip. They said no, and that they are silent so the recipient can have their own experience without interference.

In the days that followed, during my integration, I came to understand that I had died in that scene. This was representative of an essential “death” of my ego or some version of my lower self. This event in my consciousness was important and a catalyst for my growth and development as my true self became more established in my personality and being. Since that time, I could say that my true nature and essence is more representative in my life.

During another Bufo session, with Ivy and our friend Elizabeth present, I sat up from my position lying on my back and said, “I am a shaman!” I then returned to my position on my back. Ivy told me that later, yet I did not remember that experience. So, I’m a shaman. Since then, I have a clearer understanding of what that means.

I have also had quite a few ketamine sessions. With ketamine there is an awareness the entire time, yet the conscious mind’s ego is in the background. With ketamine I am able to view very wild hallucinogenic visuals displayed before me, including scenes that held messages, and divine beings who were present that I could see. With Bufo there is little conscious awareness and only a few scenes are recalled.

A Word on Microdosing

I am also, in this season, exploring the world of microdosing — the practice of taking sub-perceptual doses of psilocybin or LSD on a regular schedule, not to journey but to subtly support mood, presence, and creativity.

I want to be honest with you about the state of the evidence here, because it is humbling: the placebo-controlled studies conducted so far have generally found that people who believe they are microdosing improve about as much as people who actually are. Expectation, it turns out, is itself a powerful medicine — which is either deflating or fascinating, depending on how you hold it.

Many thoughtful practitioners report real benefit; the science has not yet caught up to confirm or deny them. And the substances involved remain federally illegal, which shapes what any licensed professional can and cannot do. What I can offer, and what I believe belongs squarely within ethical practice, is preparation, harm-reduction education, and integration — helping people make meaning of experiences they have chosen on their own terms.

The Cautions, Offered as Care

I place the contraindications last not because they matter least but because I want them to be the note that lingers. These medicines are powerful, and power is never one-directional.

Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder should approach classical psychedelics with great caution or not at all, as these medicines can precipitate destabilization in vulnerable nervous systems. Cardiovascular conditions and uncontrolled high blood pressure are serious concerns, particularly with 5-MeO-DMT, which places real demands on the heart. Medication interactions are not a footnote: combining these substances with MAOIs can be dangerous — with 5-MeO-DMT, potentially fatal — and SSRIs, lithium, and other psychiatric medications interact in ways that require genuine medical knowledge, not internet forums.

Ketamine carries its own cautions: bladder damage with frequent use, dissociative distress, and a real potential for dependence when used outside a structured setting. Pregnancy rules all of these out. And beyond the pharmacology lies the setting itself: unregulated ceremonies vary wildly in the skill and ethics of those who hold them, and a facilitator’s character matters as much as the medicine’s. Screening, preparation, sober accompaniment, and integration are not accessories; they are the vessel without which the water spills. I do trust the team I work with in my Bufo sessions, which are led by a psychiatrist whose team is thoughtful, knowledgeable, and careful in the administration.

Two further honesties. First, legality: apart from ketamine under medical supervision, these substances remain federally illegal, whatever their spiritual pedigree, and nothing in this article is a recommendation to seek them out — I write as a witness and a student, not as a prescriber.

Second, the toad itself: the Sonoran Desert toad is under increasing pressure from the very demand this renaissance has created. Synthetic 5-MeO-DMT is chemically identical, and choosing it is an act of reverence for the creature that carried this medicine to us.

The Stone on the Doorstep

Ivy ended her message with love, and with permission to share. I end mine the same way. Whatever explains her clean blood work — remission’s own quiet grace, the medicine, the spirit realm she heard from at one in the morning, or some braid of all three — a woman who suffered is suffering less, and she woke in the night needing to say so. That is where I choose to stand: grateful, careful, curious, and unwilling to diminish the mystery to fit either a laboratory or a wish.

May you find the doorways that are yours to walk through, may you walk through them accompanied and prepared, and may whatever heals you leave you freer to love.

And I will meet you there.

This article is offered for education and reflection, not as medical advice. Psychedelic substances other than ketamine remain illegal under U.S. federal law. Never stop or change prescribed medications without consulting your physician.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous reflection on absence and missing a loved one comes from a letter written on Christmas Eve 1943 from Tegel prison to his niece Renate and her husband Eberhard Bethge. He wrote that:

“… nothing replaces a missing loved one, instead of trying to fill the empty space, God leaves the gap open to keep the real bond alive through pain.”

And in the real bond of that open gap through the pain, the heart drives deeper into itself, to know a love not before known. It is in the breaking of the heart that love is known in its greatest measure. Mercy to those who know this widening.

Blessing for the Brokenhearted

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
—Henry David Thoreau

Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.

Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.

Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this—

as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,

as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,

as if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.

—Jan Richardson

Our Thursday evening series, Songs That Hear Us, continues this week with Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence. The full contemplative reading is published here on Substack—The Friend Called Darkness—and I encourage you to read it before we gather on Thursday, August 13.

After the heavy listening of Zombie, this week’s song is a gentler companion, though no less deep. It is a song about silence—and about the two kinds of silence we all know: the holy silence our circle enters every Thursday, and the hollow silence of things unsaid between people.

The stories behind it are among the most remarkable in the series so far: a twenty-two-year-old writing in a darkened, tiled bathroom, an anchorhold he didn’t know he’d built; a song that died, broke up the partnership that made it, and was raised to number one by other hands while its makers were absent on separate continents; and the story of Art Garfunkel and his blind friend Sandy Greenberg—the friend to whom Garfunkel gave a chosen name, Darkness, so that the darkness itself would arrive each day sounding like love.

The article also follows the song into our own moment, where the glowing neon god now lives in our pockets, and closes with its latest resurrection through a former cantor’s voice, blessed by Paul Simon himself.

Below is our practice and the questions we will sit with together. Bring them with you on Thursday, in your heart or on paper.

For Contemplation

Before Thursday, listen to the song twice, as is our practice—and if you wish, listen to both the Simon & Garfunkel original and the Disturbed version, and notice what each voice finds in it.

The first time, listen for the story: a young man alone in a dark room; a song that died and was raised by other hands; a friend who named himself Darkness so that his blind companion would never be alone in it. The second time, listen as prayer—and this week, before you press play, sit for two full minutes in complete silence, and let the song rise out of that silence rather than interrupt it. Then sit with these questions:

• Which silence do you know best in your life right now—the holy silence that fills, or the hollow silence that separates? Where in your home, your family, your friendships does the hollow silence live, and what truth is waiting inside it to be spoken?

• What is your relationship with darkness—the unlit places of your life, your griefs, your unknowing? Have you fled it, filled it with noise and glow, or have you ever entered it deliberately, as the young songwriter did, and asked it to speak? What might it mean to greet your darkness as an old friend?

• Where have you bowed to the neon god? What has your attention been worshiping—and what would it cost, and give, to lay your attention somewhere else?

• Is there someone in your life sitting in darkness—illness, blindness of any kind, despair—for whom you could become the voice that reads aloud? And is there a place where you are the one in darkness, waiting to let another’s voice reach you?

• What have you created, offered, or spoken that seemed to fall dead to the ground? Can you entrust it to the field, remembering the song that was raised while its makers were absent—and believe that some resurrections do not require your attendance?

The Takeaway

The Sound of Silence was written by a young man of twenty-two who took his guitar into a dark room to listen, in the grieving winter after a president’s death, and addressed his song to darkness as an old and trusted friend. It failed, broke apart the friendship that sang it, and lay dead in a vault—until other hands raised it without its makers’ knowledge and sent it out to number one, resurrecting both the song and the partnership.

Its singer, all the while, was living its opening line without anyone knowing: Art Garfunkel had named himself Darkness for the sake of a blinded friend, becoming the voice of love in another man’s night for more than sixty years.

And the song has gone on being reborn—through a cantor’s metal hymn half a century later, blessed by its writer—still warning us about the god of glowing light, still pointing us toward the prophets in the low places, still teaching us the difference between the silence that entombs and the silence that gives birth.

Through the lens of this portal, The Sound of Silence stands as:

• a teaching that darkness, entered deliberately and greeted as a friend, is not the enemy of the soul but the ground where visions are planted

• a living parable of grace: the work that fails, is abandoned, and is raised by hands not our own—proof that the field keeps working while we sleep

• a witness, in Art and his friend Sandy, that love can take the very name of the darkness it enters, and that a song can know the singer better than the writer ever could

• a prophecy against the neon god, more piercing now than the day it was written, asking each of us where our attention kneels

• and a map of the two silences—the hollow silence that separates and the holy silence that fills—which are one room, transformed the moment we dare to enter it awake

Somewhere in your life there is a silence you have been avoiding and a darkness you have refused to greet. This week’s song is an invitation—to stop filling the quiet, to turn off the glowing god, to enter the unlit room on purpose, and to greet what waits there as an old friend you have come, once more, to talk with.

On the far side of that greeting is the still small voice—the one that was never in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, the one that has been whispering in the silence all along, waiting only for someone to come in and sit down and listen.

And I will meet you there.

Meditation and Study Group

The Coherence Circle, our meditation and study group, meets every Thursday at 5:30pm MST at the Unitarian Church in the Meditation Room.

You may also join us on Zoom via this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5054120010?pwd=aWoPgmIYXkOMdpPHKvASKlE6BapNAD.1

All are welcome—no musical knowledge is needed, only a willingness to listen with the heart.

With gratitude, and see you Thursday,

Tom

And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains... but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. — 1 Kings 19:11–12

Contemplative Silence

I have been a student of the contemplative tradition, often referred to as mysticism, for decades now. I have a collection of books on the top of my bookshelf from mystics who were frequently a threat to the ruling religious elite. These simple souls, in some cases, were arrested and imprisoned by church hierarchy because they directed the masses to what was inside of them rather than to external religious structures. Their message has been that the divine is within, and not in an institution that demanded submission to ecclesiastical authority.

These spiritual adepts practiced solitude, silence, and stillness, and were known as Quietists who practiced Quietism. I wonder where the Quietists have gone. What I see instead is a noisy culture, as gathering places offer a cacophonous racket that is ubiquitous. You may be like me, longing for a safe retreat into silence that seems difficult to locate.

There is another version of silence that anyone who has lived in a family knows. It is the silence at the dinner table where the real things are never said. The silence between two people sitting in the same room, each alone inside a glowing screen. The silence of the friend who stopped calling, the truth no one will name, the apology that was never offered and the grief that was never spoken. This silence is not full; it is hollow. It does not connect; it separates.

So, there are two kinds of silence. One that allows a retreat into the heart of the contemplative who seeks to regulate internal systems and find inner peace. It is the silence Elijah discovered on the mountain: after the wind, after the earthquake, after the fire, the still small voice that speaks only when everything else has quieted. The other silence is when we don’t articulate important truth meant to enrich the bond of connection with others. This leaves us feeling distant from those we are closest to.

This is where the song, The Sound of Silence, by Simon & Garfunkel, enters the conversation. Paul Simon was a young man barely into his twenties in the 1960s when he wrote this song. He sat alone in a dark room and wrote down words about the second silence—a lament for a world where people had forgotten how to speak to one another and how to listen. He presented the song, cryptically and elegantly, to darkness itself, greeting it the way one greets an old companion, approaching it for one more brush with its enigmatic essence.

The Cell of Darkness

Yet to write these words in the way Simon did he needed to enter the first silence. He wrote the song alone, over several months, beginning in the shadowed season after President Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963. The imagery came together in February of 1964, when Simon was still living in his parents’ home in Queens. He has always resisted tying the song to any single event; when asked what it was about, he has pointed instead to something more pervasive—the failure of human communication, the inability of people to truly reach one another, a loneliness he felt inwardly as his adulthood blossomed—a loneliness of restless dreams and solitary walks, of words falling unheard into deep wells.

But it is the way he wrote it that is important to underscore. Simon’s habit was to take his guitar into the bathroom, turn off the lights, and sit in the dark. The tiled walls made a natural echo chamber; sometimes he ran the water for the sound of it. There, in the darkness of a small enclosed room, with water flowing in the rich acoustics of his private studio, the song came.

The contemplative traditions have names for that room, and inner room is what is offered most. Yeshua taught to enter your inner room, or chamber, close the door, and pray to divinity’s unseen essence. The desert fathers called it the cell—”Go, sit in your cell,” said Abba Moses, “and your cell will teach you everything.” Mystics like Teresa of Avila called it the interior castle, the inward caverns of the heart.

Every tradition knows that certain things can only be received in darkness and enclosure, with the world’s lights turned off. A twenty-two-year-old from Queens, knowing none of this, built himself a quiet place out of a tiled bathroom and went into the dark to listen—and out of that darkness came a song that begins by greeting the darkness as a friend. When darkness is befriended, light is near.

The song reveals a vision ushered softly, planting itself in the mind while the ordinary self was asleep, and abiding there. That is as precise a description of how the deep speaks to us—in dream, in image, in the dark—as you will find in scripture or in Jungian archetypal psychology.

This is the first teaching of the song. A young man did not flee the darkness or fill it with noise. He entered it, intentionally, with parents in a nearby room, and he asked it to speak. Darkness, approached this way, is not the enemy of the light. It is the moment before the light’s unveiling.

Dead, Buried, and Raised by Other Hands

Simon & Garfunkel—two boyhood friends from Queens who had sung together since the sixth grade—recorded the song in March 1964 for their debut album, in a spare arrangement of two voices, acoustic guitars, and an upright bass. The album was released that October into the roaring crest of Beatlemania, and it disappeared. It sold roughly two thousand copies. The failure broke the partnership: Paul Simon moved to England to play folk clubs alone, and Art Garfunkel returned to his studies at Columbia University. The duo was finished. The song was dead.

Except that it wasn’t. In the spring of 1965, with no promotion and no one’s permission, the song began to stir on its own—radio stations started playing it, and listeners kept calling to ask for it. The producer Tom Wilson noticed. And on June 15, 1965—on the very day he had just finished the session that recorded Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone—Wilson pulled the shelved track from the vault, called in electric guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer, and overdubbed a folk-rock arrangement onto the original recording. He did not ask the artists. He did not even tell them. Simon was in England; Garfunkel was in New York; the two were estranged; and their song was being polished by someone else.

The remade single was released that September. Paul Simon learned what had happened when he opened a copy of Billboard magazine in Denmark and found his dead song climbing the American charts. On the first day of 1966, The Sound of Silence reached number one. The two friends reunited to follow where the song was leading, and everything we now know as Simon & Garfunkel—the whole catalog of harmony that would carry a generation—exists because this one song refused to stay buried.

I find this process fascinating. There was an attempt, a failure, an abandonment, and a separation. There was no hope of anything coming of the creation, and everything that was to become of this duo was threatened by a premature ending. And then there was a quivering, a movement, the crowds noticed, and a producer did his job, he produced. There you have it. A song rising from cloistered darkness, addressing the sound of silence in a muffled room, now breaks through to the dawning of a new light. This reminds me of one of my favorite phrases from the Tao Te Ching: practice doing nothing, and everything will fall into place.

The Friend Called Darkness

When Art Garfunkel was an undergraduate student at Columbia University, his closest friend and roommate was Sandy Greenberg. Sandy was a scholarship student from a poor family in Buffalo—brilliant, ambitious, working his way up from nothing. In their junior year, Greenberg’s sight began to fail; misdiagnosed and mistreated glaucoma destroyed his eyes, and at twenty years old he went completely and permanently blind. He fell into despair, left school, and prepared to surrender every dream he had envisioned—until his roommate refused to let him.

Garfunkel reorganized his life around his blinded friend. He read his textbooks aloud to Sandy, hour after hour. He walked him to class, guided him through the city, rearranged his own habits so that Sandy could return to Columbia and finish. And when he came into the room to read, he would announce himself with a name he had chosen for this service. “Sanford,” he would say, “Darkness is going to read to you today.” Darkness. He named himself after the very thing that had swallowed his friend’s life—and in doing so, he transformed it. The darkness that had taken everything now had a voice, and the voice was love, and it arrived every day carrying the textbooks of each of his classes. Greenberg has said plainly what that friendship did: it lifted him out of the grave.

Sandy Greenberg returned to Columbia and graduated at the top of his class, as class president. He went on to Harvard and to Oxford, served in the White House, built a career as an inventor and philanthropist, married his childhood sweetheart, and in his later years established a multimillion-dollar prize dedicated to ending blindness itself.

In 2020, at nearly eighty years old, he published his memoir, with an introduction written by Art Garfunkel and a foreword by his longtime friend Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He titled the book Hello Darkness, My Old Friend. The two men remain best friends to this day, more than six decades later.

Paul Simon wrote the words—alone, in his own darkness—and he has never said that his opening line had anything to do with his partner’s blind friend. The versions of this story that circulate online, claiming the song was written about Sandy Greenberg, outrun the evidence. Yet the true story is more touching than the legend. Because here is what is true: for sixty years, Art Garfunkel stood before the world and sang a greeting to darkness, addressing it as a beloved old friend—while he himself was Darkness, the voice that spoke light into a blind man’s darkened chamber.

The writer put words into the song; the singer’s life poured meaning into them that the writer never placed there. The song heard Art Garfunkel. It knew more about the man singing it than the man who wrote it could have known. And if that is true of him, it may be true of you—that the songs which seize you, the ones you cannot stop singing, know something about your life that their makers never intended and that you yourself may not yet have seen.

So, keep singing, from your shadow-laden inner room, do nothing, in your own sound of silence, and the unseen essence of something transcendent will cause what is needed to fall into place.

The Song as Mirror: The Two Silences

The song unfolds as a dream-vision, in the old prophetic genre: the dreamer walks alone down narrow cobbled streets under a halo of lamplight, until a flash of neon splits the night—and he sees. What he sees is a vast crowd, thousands upon thousands, and among them a threefold sickness: conversation emptied of communion, so that words are exchanged but nothing is ever truly spoken; hearing emptied of listening, so that sound arrives but no one attends; and songs written that no voice ever dares to share aloud. And no one dares to break the spell.

This is the second silence—the hollow one—and the dreamer cries out against it like a street prophet, warning that such silence is not neutral, not restful, but malignant: left untreated, it spreads. He offers his words to teach and his arms to reach—and his words fall unheard, like rain dropping soundlessly into deep wells.

Then comes the image that stops the breath, written in 1964 and reading like this morning’s news: the crowd bows down and prays to a glowing god of neon—a god they made themselves. An idol of light without warmth, radiance without presence. The people are not communing with the light; they are worshiping it, silently, together and utterly alone. And when you worship something, someone, you distance yourself from it.

Paul Simon was looking at the flickering televisions and buzzing signs of his age, but the song, as ever, knew more than its moment. We now carry the neon god in our pockets. We bow to it at the table, in bed, at the stoplight, in the pew. Our households can sit in one room, each soul bathed in its own private glow, talking without speaking, hearing without listening—the very congregation of the song’s nightmare, gathered nightly in our own living rooms. I say this with no contempt because I bow to the glowing god too. I’m using it to write this article, and you are using it to read it.

The song is not an accusation from outside; it is a mirror held up inside, and the question it asks is the one the prophets always ask: what are you worshiping? Where has your attention—which is the only offering you truly possess—been laid down?

And then the song’s final, astonishing move: the idol itself flashes out a warning, and the warning says that the words of the prophets are not found in the temples at all. They are scrawled in the subway stations and the hallways of tenements—written in the low places, among the poor, the passed-over, the anonymous—and whispered inside the silence itself.

The echoing voice haunts from the margins, from the stone the builders rejected, from the still small voice that speaks only after the wind and the earthquake and the fire have exhausted themselves. The song ends by telling us where to listen: not upward toward the glowing god, but downward and inward in the spaces of the heart. It is toward the graffiti of the discarded, toward the hollow silence itself, which, if we will finally turn and face it, begins to whisper. So tenderness toward the lowly, after all, is an aspect of transcendence.

This is the secret the song carries in its bones, the reconciliation of our two silences: the hollow silence and the holy silence are in the same room. What makes the difference is whether anyone dares to enter it awake, aware, more conscious than unconscious. The silence of the dinner table where nothing true is said, and the silence of an inner room where everything true is present—these are not two different substances. One is silence fled from; the other is silence entered. One is darkness denied; the other is darkness befriended. Hello, darkness—as Sandy Greenberg titled his memoir—my old friend.

The song’s opening greeting is therefore not a symptom of despair but the whole cure in miniature: turn toward the dark thing, address it directly, call it friend, and come to it—again and again—for a sacred conversation, wherever it may be found. That is what Paul Simon did in a lightless bathroom in Queens. That is what Art Garfunkel did when he walked into a blind man’s room and gave the darkness a voice and made the voice love. And that is what we practice every Thursday evening: entering the silence on purpose, until the tomb reveals itself to be a womb.

The Cantor’s Resurrection

In 2015, the heavy metal band Disturbed—known for ferocity, not tenderness—recorded a slow, thunderous, orchestral version of The Sound of Silence. Their singer, David Draiman, had trained in his youth as a cantor, one who leads the sung prayers of a Jewish congregation, and for this song he reached back to that long-unused mellifluous voice.

The performance they gave on the Conan show in 2016 stunned millions; the cover climbed the charts and was nominated for a Grammy. Paul Simon himself, watching, wrote personally to Draiman to praise the performance, and shared it with his own audience. Half a century after a young man wrote a lament in the dark, a cantor returned the song to the liturgy, and the writer gave it his blessing.

You will remember this pattern from our last gathering—Dolores O’Riordan’s lament reborn through Bad Wolves after her passing. The great songs keep finding new bodies to live in, each generation adding meanings the last one could not have carried. The vision, softly planted, still remains. It is planted in us now.

And I will meet you there.

Our Thursday evening series, Songs That Hear Us, continues this week with The Cranberries’ Zombie. The full contemplative reading is published here on Substack—The Dead Thing That Still Walks—and I encourage you to read it before we gather on Thursday, August 6.

I will say at the outset what I say in the article: tread carefully with this one. The song was born from the deaths of two children in the Warrington bombing of 1993, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and it is the heaviest listening we have done together.

Yet it is also, I believe, one of the most healing—because Zombie is a lament, the forgotten prayer of protest, sung in the tradition of the keening women of Ireland by a twenty-two-year-old who tore up a million-dollar check rather than be silenced.

It carries a teaching our circle knows well: that trauma left ungrieved does not die but walks, passed from generation to generation, until someone finally turns to face it. The article also holds the story of what became of Dolores O’Riordan, the redemption that flowed from her song, and the Brothers Grimm tale of The Shroud—a reminder that grief must be fully felt, and then released, so that the dead can rest and the living can live.

Below is our practice and the questions we will sit with together. Bring them with you on Thursday, in your heart or on paper.

For Contemplation

Before Thursday, listen to the song twice, as is our practice—and I will say plainly that this is the heaviest listening we have done together, so be tender with yourselves. The first time, listen for the story: Warrington, the two boys, a young woman tearing a check to keep a lament alive. The second time, listen as prayer—and this week, let it be the prayer of lament; let the keening in her voice give permission to whatever in you has needed to cry out and never has.

Then sit with these questions:

• What is the dead thing that still walks in you, or in your family line—the inherited grievance, the untransformed pain, the silence that keeps feeding on the living? Can you name where it came from, and whose it was before it was yours?

• Where in your life have you been offered payment for silence—belonging, comfort, peace at any price? What did you do, and what would you do now?

• Have you ever truly lamented—wept a wound out loud, before God or another person, without softening it? If not, what has kept the sorrow in? What funeral in your lineage was skipped, and what would it mean to finally hold it?

• Are you willing to be the one in your line where the transmission stops—the one who turns and faces what staggers behind the family, grieves it fully, and lays it down? What would that ask of you?

The Takeaway

Zombie was written alone by a young woman of twenty-two, out of devastation at the deaths of two children she never met, in protest against a violence carried out in the name of her own people. She was offered a fortune to silence it and tore the check.

The song became a worldwide cry, an Irish keen carried on distorted guitars, naming the truth that war is an undead thing that lives in human heads and feeds on each new generation—until someone grieves it fully enough that it can finally die. She sang it for a nation; four years later, the peace came.

And when she herself crossed over—on the eve of singing it one last time—the lament she had sung for other mothers’ children returned as provision for her own.

Through the lens of this portal, Zombie stands as:

• a modern psalm of lament—the forgotten prayer of protest, the howl that names the wound out loud and refuses false comfort

• a precise teaching that violence and trauma are undead things, walking in heads and bloodlines, transmitted wherever they are not transformed

• a witness to the cost and the power of the prophetic voice—the torn check, the truth kept, the world fed by it

• and an assurance that lament is not despair but the beginning of healing: the funeral that lets the dead thing die, so that the living can finally live

Somewhere in your lineage, something is still walking that should long ago have been laid to rest. This week’s song is permission—permission to stop running from it, stop feeding it, stop passing it down; permission to turn, and face it, and wail over it at last, until it lies down in the earth and the ground grows quiet.

On the far side of that funeral is the peace the treaties can only ratify: the peace that begins, as the war began, inside the head—and deeper still, in the heart, where the Mother has been waiting all along, crying beside us, refusing to be comforted until every child comes home.

And I will meet you there.

Meditation and Study Group

The Coherence Circle, our meditation and study group, meets every Thursday at 5:30pm MST at the Unitarian Church in the Meditation Room.

You may also join us on Zoom via this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5054120010?pwd=aWoPgmIYXkOMdpPHKvASKlE6BapNAD.1

All are welcome—no musical knowledge is needed, only a willingness to listen with the heart.

With gratitude, and see you Thursday,

Tom

A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted, because they were not. — Jeremiah 31:15

This week I have chosen another song that has deep meaning, with a background that you may not have heard before. I would encourage you to tread carefully here, because this song references the senseless deaths of children for religio-political reasons.

Songs of protest have been offered for decades, particularly since the 1960s during the civil rights movement. This is true in America, yet it is also true in other countries. There have been songs that protest war, religious domination, political corruption, and cultural injustice.

In the above passage from the Hebrew Bible, Rachel wept for her children and was inconsolable. This is the conviction that the injustice must be named, with the unshakable assurance that some greater force is listening and will respond.

In September of 1994, one of the greatest protests of the modern age entered the world through a simple song sung by a young Irish woman with a voice that could move in a single breath from lullaby to war-cry. The world called it an alternative rock hit, yet heard through the mirror of this series, it is something older. It is a mother’s howling over the bodies of children, and a cry against a dead thing that would not stop walking.

This week, our circle takes up the song Zombie, by The Cranberries.

Lament for the Children

On Saturday, March 20, 1993, in the English town of Warrington, the IRA planted bombs in trash bins on a shopping street crowded with families. The following day was Mothering Sunday—Mother’s Day in Britain—and the street was full of families, including children seeking to honor their mothers.

At one preplanned moment the bombs detonated and two boys were killed. Johnathan Ball, three years old, died immediately, and Tim Parry, aged twelve, was gravely wounded and died five days later. Dozens of bystanders were also injured.

The bombing was carried out during the Troubles. This was a thirty-year violent conflict in Northern Ireland involving Protestant unionists/loyalists, Catholic nationalists/republicans, and British security forces. This struggle centered on whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom or join the Republic of Ireland. Religious people with political loyalties fought for their cause, and the result was that children were killed.

Dolores O’Riordan was on tour in England with her band at the time, near where this event happened, and this news was devastating to her. At the time she was just twenty-two years old, and the thought of innocent children pulled into that ancient quarrel struck her to the core. She was Irish, Catholic, raised in County Limerick, the youngest of a large family, a girl who had grown up singing in church.

The bombs had been planted in the name of her people. And out of that devastation Dolores wrote lyrics that refused to align with the madness of these culture wars. Hers was a cry insisting that this violence belonged neither to her nor to her family; that the same weary quarrel had been grinding on since 1916; that the guns and the bombs were taking children, while the ideas that justify bloodshed stagger forward like a corpse that does not know it is dead.

The meaning of the title, Zombie, is the violence itself: a dead thing that still walks, moving forward in time with an unyielding momentum. This was a conflict whose original combatants have been in their graves for many decades. Yet they are still rising, still feeding on the living. Hatred and disgust and anger are the inheritance. This longstanding war is a ghost that captures every new generation.

And where does she locate this undead thing? Not in the streets. Not in the arsenals. The refrain drives it home again and again, in that voice breaking into its wild Celtic cry: the war lives inside our heads. The war persists because it is lodged in minds, in inherited grief and hatred handed down through the collective consciousness of ancestral trauma. Trauma, unhealed, becomes undead. The battle is fought, and lost, and endlessly renewed, in memory, in grievance, in the stories we ingest before we are old enough to discard them.

The German word, Zeitgeist, ghost or spirit of the age, describes this adherence to group consciousness represented in culture and time, yet what happens when prevailing ideas clash? The result is the conflict of war—the senseless battle of ideas and allegiances that keeps the multitudes in opposition.

Dolores saw, at her young age, what the contemplatives and the depth psychologists have always seen: that the root of outer violence is inner, and that no treaty signed on paper can kill a zombie that the majority keep alive in their heads. Each individual must write their own song, so that the cry in the heart is proclaimed.

I’ll Take “Shut Up!” for a Million, Alex

Island Records was frightened of releasing something so politically charged, and according to the band’s former manager Allen Kovac, the label offered her a $1 million check to work on another track instead—and her answer was to rip up the check. “Dolores was a very small, fragile person, but very opinionated,” Kovac said—she felt called to write about what was happening in Ireland rather than stay safely in love songs.

A small, slight young woman in her early twenties, offered a fortune for her silence, and she ripped the check and kept her protest song. Remember our first week together, when we stood in the opera-house courtroom of Bohemian Rhapsody and met Galileo, patron of every soul condemned for seeing what is true and saying so? Here is the same figure in a different form—except that this time the tribunal came bearing a checkbook instead of a verdict, which is how the ruling elite more often come to us now.

Every one of us, at some point, is offered payment for our silence. It is rarely a million dollars. More often it is belonging, approval, comfort, the ease of not making a scene. The price of the prophetic voice has never changed: speak, and it will cost you; stay silent, and it will cost you more.

Zombie was released in September 1994 as the lead single from the album, No Need to Argue. That song feared by the label became the biggest hit the Cranberries would ever have—a lament for two children and an anger for an unhinged political ideology, sung in a voice trained in church, carried to number one around the globe. Sometimes the truth, spoken at full cost, is exactly what the world was starving for.

The Zombies We Carry

Let’s take a closer look at this song and how you can make application to your life. We will not only consider the context and impetus behind the song, but also the song itself, its sound, and its words.

As the song begins, there is the force behind the violence. It is the machinery of war—tanks and weaponry, arsenal upon arsenal turned upon the living. This has been going on for a long time—the same weary theme, grinding forward since 1916. This refers to the Easter Rising, an armed insurrection in Ireland that began on Easter Monday in April 1916, when rebels seized locations in Dublin to fight against British rule. Dolores laments that nearly 80 years later, Irish history was still trapped in a continuous cycle of nationalist conflict and bloodshed. Here, there is a calling out of what is, naming the injustice and inhumanity of it all.

Then there is a sadness, the acknowledgment that somewhere another head bows in grief as a child is taken, another mother breaking, her heart overtaken by sorrow. The raw admission is the stunned refrain of disbelief—surely this cannot be real; surely this is not who we are.

As sorrow is embraced, what emerges is rage. You see it in the words, and you hear it in the song’s sounds. As you listen to this song, you will notice the sound that is emitted. Each time I hear this song I am drawn into its mellifluous yet haunting overtures, even beyond the words, that portray that something is going on.

The Cranberries were known for shimmering, delicate music, and for this one song Dolores demanded distortion—guitars like collapsing stonework, with a heaviness the band never used before or after. The form matches the content: this is what it sounds like when a kind gentleness has reached its limit, and a ferocity is expressed. And through the wreckage moves that voice, providing something ancient from the bowels of human suffering, as if this is a deep burdensome angst that has been heard in many settings over the epochs, yet requires another telling.

And then there is the precise way in which Dolores imparted her voice. In Irish tradition there is the caoineadh—the ritual wailing of women over the dead, a sacred vocation of bellowing sorrow. Listen to what she does with her voice in this song—the swoops, the cries, the syllables that dissolve past words into pure screech—and you are hearing the wailing women of Ireland, reaching the world’s ears through a rock single. The song is formally a lament: a woman grieving over children, with the mother’s broken heart at the very center of its imagery.

Here again is the thread that has run through this whole series we are reflecting on—the Mother who receives the news of the death. In Bohemian Rhapsody the confession went to Mama, telling her he killed a man. In Zombie, it is the mother’s heart that is broken by violence. The collective feminine stands at the graveside of every war, forcefully wailing, refusing to be comforted, because there is no comfort, no solace, no bringing the children back.

Then take the central image into your own life, because that is where it belongs. What is the dead thing that still walks in you? What has been passed down, perhaps something you are unaware of, yet you feel it in your bones, or deep in your gut.

Every family has its zombies. The grievance between branches of a family tree whose original insult no one living can accurately recall—still walking, still dividing tables at holidays. The father’s rage that was really his father’s rage, which was really the famine, the war, the humiliation of a generation that never got to weep—handed down, undead, to the one who never chose it.

The silence in a family about the one who died, or the one who left, or the thing that happened—a silence that staggers through decades, feeding on the living. As it has been wisely said: pain that is not transformed is transmitted. That is the whole natural history of the zombie in a single sentence. Trauma that no one stops to grieve does not die; it walks. It crosses generations the way the song says the old theme has crossed them since 1916—in the head, in the nervous system, in the stories told and the stories forbidden—until somewhere down the line, someone finally turns to face it.

Facing the Treachery by Becoming Conscious

And this is where the song becomes a teaching for us, because facing it is precisely the work that is needed. We are aware of the wounds and complexes that live below awareness—and the fearful truth about a complex is that when it is unconscious, we do not have it; it has us. It fights, argues, rages, and withdraws through us while we believe we are simply being ourselves. We accept the complexes without asking often enough where they came from. The societal ethos of pathology lives not only outside in the ghosts of culture, but inside in each one of us, in the soul’s unconscious.

That is the zombie’s possession. And the only weapon that works on this kind of undead thing is not a gun and not a bomb, and the song is clear, this is what feeds it. The one thing the zombie cannot survive is conscious, grieving love. The zombie walks because the original pain was never fully felt, never properly howled over, never laid in the ground with honor. Yet once lovingly felt and sensed, the trauma is no longer transmitted, but transformed.

Honest and courageous lamenting is how the dead thing finally gets to rest. When we cry the wound out loud—in therapy, in prayer, in a walk in the woods, in a circle like ours, in a song torn from a twenty-two-year-old’s chest—we are not wallowing pitifully. We are conducting the real memorial that was skipped, the funeral without which nothing can rest.

Dolores understood the assignment of the weeping woman: someone must feel this all the way down, out loud, so that the zombie can stop walking. She did it for a nation. The question to be asked is whether we will do it for our own lineages—whether you and I are willing to be the one in the family line where the transmission stops, the one who turns to face the staggering thing and says: you have fed on us long enough; I will grieve you now, and then you will rest.

This reminds me of the Brothers Grimm tale of The Shroud. This story tells of a mother who is inconsolable in her grief because her cherished son has died. Her incessant tears prevent her dead son’s burial shirt from drying, as she soaks the garment with her bitter tears. In doing so she prevents his spirit from finding peace. The boy returns to his mother and begs her to stop crying because his shroud will not dry, because of all her tears, because he is unable to sleep where he is. Frightened, the mother stops weeping. The next night, the boy’s shroud dries and he can rest, allowing the mother to find quiet acceptance. From this story we learn that it is essential to feel the grief of what has come upon us, of what was lost, then we must rise up, walk, and let what is dead have its peace.

What Became of Dolores

I must finish Dolores’s story, and I will hold it kindly, as we held Syd Barrett’s, and Karac’s. Dolores carried heavy weights of her own. In her later years she spoke openly and courageously about her mental health struggles and about seasons of deep despair—the very kind of inner suffering our circle has learned to regard with reverence rather than stigma. She knew, from inside, what it is to have dead things walking around in one’s head. Perhaps that is part of why she could write this song; the ones who map the territory are usually the ones who are here to release us all from it.

On January 15, 2018, Dolores O’Riordan died suddenly in London—an accidental drowning. She was forty-six. And the timing of her passing carries a grace note that belongs in this series of synchronicities. She was scheduled to be in the studio the very next day, to sing Zombie once more—laying guest vocals for a cover of the song by the band Bad Wolves.

She left a voicemail the night before, excited, full of plans. When she passed, Bad Wolves released the cover in her honor and pledged the proceeds to her four children, eventually presenting her family with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sit with that loop for a moment: the song of a mother’s sorrow and rage over the ruthless killing of children became, after her death, provision for her own children. The howling she sang for other mothers’ sons returned, transformed, as bread for her daughters and sons. The field has an uncanny way of giving back.

And there is one more redemption to tell, maybe the most important one. Tim Parry’s father, Colin, did not let his son’s death feed the zombie. He and his wife became peace campaigners, and in Warrington they built a peace center bearing the names of Tim and Johnathan—a place devoted to reconciliation and to the victims of conflict.

After Dolores died, Colin Parry spoke movingly about how honored he was that his son’s story lived on in her song. And in 1998, four years after Zombie was released, the Good Friday Agreement brought the Troubles, in their long historical form, to an end. No one claims a rock song ended a war. But conflicts end when enough heads change, and the song told us that is where the war lives. Zombie was part of the great turning of hearts, a lament sung by millions of people at once—and still sung today. It is a caoineadh loud enough to awaken hearts, and to let the dead thing begin to be laid to rest.

Lament works, because it refuses to let injustice prevail and hearts to remain broken. That is the testimony of this song. Rachel’s weeping is not wasted; the text in Jeremiah, remember, does not end at the refusal of comfort—it goes on to promise that the children will return from the land of the adversary, that there is hope for the future. Embracing the sorrow, feeling the anger, determining the course of action, is how we get there.

And I will meet you there.

Our Thursday evening series, Songs That Hear Us, continues this week with Led Zeppelin’s Thank You.

The full contemplative reading is published here on Substack—A Crown of Light—and I encourage you to read it before we gather on Thursday, July 30. It carries a story from my own week: two Zeppelin songs arriving at the turning of a car key, a crown of light cast upon my office wall from the framed photograph of my son Ryan, and the timing of his high school class’s twenty-year reunion. It also carries the story behind the song itself—Robert Plant’s vow of enduring love, and how that vow was tested in his life beyond all imagining.

Below is our practice and the questions we will sit with together. Bring them with you on Thursday, in your heart or on paper.

For Contemplation

Before Thursday, listen to the song twice, as is our practice. The first time, listen for the story—a young man vowing a love stronger than the sun and the mountains, not yet knowing how sorely such vows are tested, or how truly they can hold.

The second time, listen as prayer, and stay with the long organ fade at the end; let your attention rest on the breath, and notice the moment you can no longer tell whether the sound has ended or has simply passed beyond you.

Then sit with these questions:

• To whom do you owe a thank you that has never been fully spoken—the living or the departed? Someone you are in relationship with, and someone you were formally associated with, perhaps deeply? What has kept the word unsaid, and what would it cost, and give, to say it now?

• Where is your grief in its ripening? Is it still in the wishing—wish you were here—or has some part of it begun, even faintly, to turn toward gratitude? Can you let both live in you without forcing either?

• If you share your life with someone, how have the great weights tested the field between you—and what has held you when neither of you could hold the other? Is there a thank you owed to the one who has endured beside you?

• Have you ever received what felt like a message—a song at the turning of a key, a light on a wall, a visitation of timing? Were you able to receive it without needing to prove it, letting the meaning be real in the only place meaning ever lives?

• What is the place or practice in your life that is aligned so that, on certain rare mornings or moments, the light comes all the way in? And are you present in the chamber when it does?

The Takeaway

Thank You was written by a young husband for his wife, the first words Robert Plant ever set down alone for his band—a vow that love would outlast the sun and the mountains, carried on an organ that fades like a hymn beyond the edge of hearing.

The vow was tested in his life beyond all imagining, and the marriage did not survive the testing; yet the song remains true, preserving the vow in its purest moment for all of us who draw on it still. Fifty-seven years later, ten seconds of it found a father in a parked car in New Mexico, in the week his son’s classmates gathered for their twenty-year reunion, two days before sunlight found a silver frame and crowned an office wall with a ring of light thrown from a photograph of a boy who loved this band because his father did.

Through the lens of this portal, Thank You stands as:

• A vow of love that loss or transition cannot dissolve—the sun may darken and the mountains fall, and the love stands

• A teaching that gratitude is the developed form of grief, the word love learns to say when longing has been carried long enough

• A witness that some vows do not survive their testing and some do—and that endurance is not achievement but grace, carried by the field between two people and by the daily return to thank you

• A reminder that the laws of light are among the instruments of Presence, and stopping to notice is a spiritual practice

• And a hymn that does not end but departs, fading below the threshold of hearing, where—I have come to trust—it is playing still

Ryan, you filled a CD with one song so the thing you loved would never stop coming. I understand that now better than ever. The music you loved keeps arriving—at the turning of a key, in the last ten seconds, in a crown of light on the wall—wave after wave, an unbroken circle of the thing I love. You did not send me an elegy, because nothing between us has ended.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

And I will meet you there.

Meditation and Study Group

The Coherence Circle, our meditation and study group, meets every Thursday at 5:30pm MST at the Unitarian Church in the Meditation Room.

You may also join us on Zoom via this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5054120010?pwd=aWoPgmIYXkOMdpPHKvASKlE6BapNAD.1

All are welcome—no musical knowledge is needed, only a willingness to listen with the heart.

The Books: When the Field Remembers & The Field Between

Both books remain available: When the Field Remembers: Understanding the Inner Structures That Shape Your Life, now on Kindle, Apple Books, and other online sources, and its companion, The Field Between: Understanding the Hidden Structures That Shape a Committed Relationship. If you would like a copy of either or both in digital e-book format, message or email me. In place of payment, I ask that you make a donation of any amount to the Uganda Fund for Ryan Foundation.

Uganda Construction Project

The building in Tororo continues to rise—a future home for women and children rescued from the streets and from human trafficking—and the home in Mbiko is near completion, with women already accepted into the program. My friend Martin, who leads both projects, still needs 15 sheets of iron to complete the roof, about $336 in US funds. If you are able to help, you may donate directly here:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/6q8z2j-uganda-fund

Every contribution goes directly to this work, and I am grateful for the generosity this community continues to show.

With gratitude, and see you Thursday,

Tom

A Contemplative Reading of Led Zeppelin’s song— Thank You

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.

— attributed to Meister Eckhart

One of the duties of a parent is not only to pass down genetics, but also customs and traditions. I have loved Led Zeppelin since I was in high school, and I found it essential to expose my sons to this legendary rock band. Andrew and Daniel learned to love this group, yet it was Ryan who played their songs on his acoustic guitar in our living room. Ryan once burned a CD with the song Ramble On recorded on every single track, so he could listen to it over and over without ever pressing replay.

On Wednesday of this week, I got into my car and turned the key. Led Zeppelin’s song Thank You was playing on the radio—the last ten seconds or so, in its closing moments, as though I had been let into the very end of a conversation. On Friday morning it happened again: I started the car and another Zeppelin song, Black Dog, was just finishing, and again I caught only the final seconds. Why only the end?

Two songs, two ignitions, two endings. The first song is about deep gratitude for enduring love. The second song features a black dog, that has nothing to do with the song, only that a black Labrador kept wandering in and out of the studio while the band recorded. In folklore across many cultures, the black dog is a threshold creature—a guardian of crossroads, a companion at the boundary between worlds.

I then drove to work and walked into my office. I turned to my right, because something was glowing on the wall. A great luminous ring—a rippling, radiant diamond of light, like a crown or a mandala or an open doorway—was shining on the wall beneath the windows, with a soft rectangle of light floating at its center. I had never seen it before in all the years I have worked in that room. I walked around the office trying to find its source, and when I stood in front of my bookshelf, the formation vanished.

I turned around. The light was falling on the framed photograph of Ryan.

Sunlight had found its way through the window to the silver frame that holds his picture, and the frame was catching that light and casting it forward across the room—the polished border of the frame flinging the ring, and the glass over his photograph projecting the glowing square at its heart. The picture of my son was wearing the sun, and throwing a crown of light upon the wall. (see images below)

And this was Friday, the opening day of Ryan’s high school class of 2006 twenty-year reunion. Perhaps he knew his friends were near, but he also wanted me to know he was near.

The Song: A Vow Set to Music

Thank You appears on Led Zeppelin II, released in 1969. Prior to this Jimmy Page had written most of the songs, but here, Robert Plant began writing more lytics. And this is the song Plant wrote it for his wife, Maureen.

The song promises, in essence, that this love would remain even if the sun refused to shine, even if the mountains wore away and crumbled into the sea, there will still be you and me. Love is pledged, even when the cold drops of rain whisper of the pain, the weeping of the loss of love in days gone by, I’ll still be loving you. His love is strong and his world smiles, because she is the only one.

And then, for nearly a minute at the end, John Paul Jones’s organ hovers, almost hauntingly, beyond everything else. Robert’s iconic voice stops, the guitar of Page and the drums of John Bonham fall away, and the organ continues alone. It fades slowly, deliberately, into silence, like a hymn dissolving into the air of an emptying sanctuary, like a prayer that does not so much finish as pass beyond perceiving. You can hear the organ become softer as it evaporates into silence. The song does not stop. It departs.

This song, as a vow of love stronger than the sun and the mountains, ends in an anthem that outlasts all other sound. You can see why, of all the Zeppelin songs, this is the one that reads most naturally as a love that death cannot dissolve, because nothing can diminish the potent force of love. Love is more powerful than anything else, and it always endures.

A song sung by a husband to a wife and then heard by a father in a parked car almost sixty years later, being carried through time as if time does not exist. There is a grief, a longing, a deep happiness, and the recognition of pain, expanding long enough by the infinite emanations of love, leaning into the song’s refrain and name… Thank you!

The Light on the Wall

The light on the wall, I just had to know how that happened, so I pondered and searched and spoke to others. The frame that holds Ryan’s photograph is polished silver, with a curved border, and glass over the picture. The shiny surface in direct sunlight acts as a mirror, and curved mirrors do not reflect light as a plain patch. They gather it and extend it outward in bright ribbon-like lines that opticians call caustics, like the dancing ropes of light on the bottom of a swimming pool.

The luminous diamond on my office wall is a caustic portrait of the frame itself: the rippling ring is sunlight concentrated by the frame’s curved silver border, and the soft rectangle at the center is the reflection off the glass over Ryan’s face. If you look closely, you can even see the faint banding of the window blinds the sunlight passed through on its way in.

And why that day, when it had never happened before? Because the sun’s path across the sky shifts every single day of the year, and for that projection to form, everything had to align at once. It was the sun’s exact height and bearing, the angle of the blinds, a clear sky, the precise position and tilt of the frame on the shelf, and me, present in the room, during the few minutes the alignment held. Such an alignment may occur on only a handful of mornings in a year, and it happened for me on one precise day.

Gratitude: the Ripened Form of Love

Last week, with Wish You Were Here, there was longing as love reached across absence, something I referred to as the presence of absence. This is the hope for presence even in the realization that something is missing. This week’s song underscores the ubiquitous and unceasing nature of a love that is always known in the heart. And all that is left as a response is gratitude, and you can hear it as it drips from Robert’s words in this song of thanksgiving.

This is why I have come to believe that gratitude is the seasoned and developed form of love. Early love desires; wounded love aches; but love that has passed through the fire of loss and kept walking eventually arrives at thanksgiving. This is not because the loss stopped hurting, but because the heart finally grows large enough to hold the gift and the grief with equal awareness.

You know this love, you really do. There have been moments of its recognition. For some odd reason it is felt strongest at the beginning of relationships, like Robert’s vow of love to Maureen. You may have known this too, yet why does it wane? If relationships end, does love also cease to exist? If someone passes from body, where does your love for them go?

I have said that grief is love with nowhere to go, and now I am offering that gratitude through the years can reveal a version of love that matures into a quiet serenity that settles any heart. This love is what transcends all human experience, the tragic and the sublime, because it is all there is. And with this love, all I can say, is thank you.

When I caught those last ten seconds of the song in the car, I did not hear a rock band finishing a track. I heard the end of a message, as if the whole song had been playing for me before I arrived, the way the love of those who have crossed over continues whether or not we are tuned in—and every so often we turn the key at the right moment and catch the closing bars.

Love is always present, it never diminishes, even if someone leaves us in body, even if a relationship ends, the organ is still playing. On Friday, for a few minutes, in a ring of light on my office wall, I began to enter in. I was reminded, in that moment, that I am loved… I am love… and love is all there is.

Love’s Many and Varied Seasons

I must tell you the rest of the story behind this song, Thank You, because it carries a sorrow of its own, and because it opens a question I have pondered for years.

Robert Plant could not have known, writing this vow at twenty-one in the beginning joyous moments of his marriage, how it would be tested. In July of 1977, while the band was on tour in America, Robert and Maureen’s son Karac died suddenly at the age of five, from a severe infection that took him within a day. Plant flew home shattered, withdrew from music for a long season, and nearly left the band altogether.

The song that carries that grief is All My Love, from 1979—his elegy for his boy, one of the tenderest things Led Zeppelin ever recorded, a father still singing from the depths of his grief-soaked heart. And then, in 1983, several years after Karac’s passing, Robert and Maureen’s marriage came to its end. The love that was to outlast the sun and the mountains did not, in its married form, outlast the sorrows and absence that came.

I’m not sure why Maureen and Robert’s marriage ended, but the loss of a child does put an incredible strain on a marriage. Two people are asked to survive the same catastrophe while grieving on different clocks, in different languages—one needing to speak when the other needs silence, one reaching for closeness when the other can barely breathe—and each becomes, for the other, a living mirror of the very loss they are trying to survive. That so many marriages bend or break under this weight is not a failure of love. It is a measure of a burdened heart, heavy with sorrow, that is stricken by grief’s onslaught.

And here is what I have pondered for years, long before this week: how many of the greatest love songs ever written—the ones that capture young love in its first radiance, reminding us of the beauty of love itself—were written for loves that lost their flame.

The vows were real when they were sung. The songs remain true even when the stories behind them changed. Perhaps that is part of what these songs are for: they preserve the vow in its purest moment, the way amber preserves the light of a vanished afternoon, so that the rest of us can keep drawing on a promise even it slipped away from its makers.

And some marriages do last. It is a mystery to me why this happens. The longer marriages may not be any stronger or healthier, they simply continue. Sometimes there is a strength that arises from the ashes of severely tested life, and love is allowed to continue.

And, oddly enough, my wife were married in 1983, the year the marriage of Maureen and Robert ended. They ended. We began. They lost a son. We lost a son. How do you endure that? I don’t really know. Some do. Some don’t.

All of life is a mystery and we don’t have any guarantees that a sacred pledge for enduring love will last a human lifetime, yet true love, is eternal, no matter what happens in any human relationship. Love in its many forms lasts forever, even in the multifaceted emanations of life and living.

The Song Not Sent

When I learned the fuller story—that Plant had written an elegy for his own son—I naturally wondered why that was not the song that found me this week. If ever a song were fitted to a bereaved father remembering his son, surely it is All My Love: one grieving father’s song reaching another.

And yet it was not sent. The songs that came at the turning of the key were Thank You and Black Dog. The song Ryan loved enough to burn onto every track was Ramble On—a song of a soul journeying joyfully onward. Not the elegy, but why not?

Ryan did not send the elegy because he is not gone. He sent Thank You to acknowledge the awareness of the enduring nature of eternal love. He sent Black Dog as an accounting of something that enters and exits the room and is the threshold between dimensions. No elegy, no absence, only presence, and I am grateful.

Ryan did not send me a song of mourning, because mourning is not what is happening between us. What is happening between us, is gratitude—flowing, as the song says, like inspiration between two souls.

Perhaps one week, when the circle is ready, we will sit with All My Love and let Robert Plant’s elegy have its own evening—it deserves one, and so does Karac.

On July 26, 1977, Karac, the son Mauren and Robert, passed from this world. Today is the 49^th anniversary of the end of his earthly life. I honor this soul, as I honor all souls. Those with a body, and those without a body.

All live on on, as love does, because love is eternal, and it is the greatest power.

Thank you!

Our new Thursday evening series, Songs That Hear Us, continues this week with one of the most tender and haunting songs in all of rock’n roll: Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here.

Last week we began the series with Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, listening contemplatively to the six-movement passage of a soul—confession, trial, defiance, and release. This week we turn from the courtroom to the threshold, from judgment to longing.

I have published the companion reading here on Substack: The Presence of Absence: A Contemplative Reading of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. This one is close to my heart. It tells the tender and tragic story of Syd Barrett, the founder of Pink Floyd, whose mental illness exiled him from his own band and his own brilliance—including the almost unbearable day in 1975 when he wandered unrecognized into the studio while his old bandmates were recording their elegy for him. This month marks twenty years since Syd’s passing, which makes our timing feel less like coincidence and more like invitation.

The article also carries some of my own family’s story with this song—the thresholds where it has been played in our lives—and a word of honest hope about mental illness, including my son Andrew’s remarkable recovery, which some of you know and which you can hear him tell in his own words in his TED Talk (linked in the article).

Before Thursday, I invite you to listen to the song twice, as is our practice: once for the story, holding Syd and anyone of your own who has been here-and-not-here; and once as prayer, with your attention resting on the breath, letting the opening radio passage be your call to stillness. The contemplation questions await you at the end of the article, and we will sit with them together.

Meditation and Study Group

The Coherence Circle, our meditation and study group, meets every Thursday at 5:30pm MST at the Unitarian Church in the Meditation Room.

You may also join us on Zoom via this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5054120010?pwd=aWoPgmIYXkOMdpPHKvASKlE6BapNAD.1

All are welcome—no musical knowledge is needed, only a willingness to listen with the heart.

The Books: When the Field Remembers & The Field Between

A reminder that both books are available: When the Field Remembers: Understanding the Inner Structures That Shape Your Life—the polished, published version of the book our group studied together, now on Kindle, Apple Books, and other online sources—and its companion, The Field Between: Understanding the Hidden Structures That Shape a Committed Relationship, which extends the Soul-Field Vectors into the key relationships of your life.

If you would like a copy of either or both in digital e-book format, message or email me and I will send it to you. In place of payment, I ask that you make a donation of any amount to the Uganda Fund for Ryan Foundation, described below.

Uganda Construction Project

The building in Tororo, near the Kenyan border, continues to rise—a future home for women and children rescued from the streets and from human trafficking. The home in Mbiko is near completion, and women have already been accepted into the program. My good friend Martin, who leads both projects, has purchased the bricks, wood, and 100 sheets of iron for the roof; 15 more sheets are needed to complete it—about $336 in US funds.

If you are able to help, you may donate directly here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/6q8z2j-uganda-fund

Every contribution, of any size, goes directly to this work, and I am grateful beyond words for the generosity this community has already shown.

With gratitude, and see you Thursday,

Tom

505-412-0010

tomstewardpa@gmail.com

Songs That Hear Us

The presence that pervades the universe

Is imperishable, unchanging,

Beyond both is and is not:

How could it ever vanish?

Bhagavad Gita

In the town where I live, Los Alamos, there seem to be a lot of deaths of children. Sometimes they are high school students, or younger, and at times young adults in their twenties or so. There may not be any more losses of children here than in any other community—it just seems like a lot, because this is a relatively small town of 18,000.

I worked at the high school from 1996 to 2001, and every one of those years we had at least one death of a student. I coordinated and spoke at more memorial services for students than I ever knew I would. Since then, there have been too many students at the high school, and young adults, who passed away at an age younger than their families and friends wanted.

In 2008, one young man, Brent, passed away suddenly by drowning in the Puget Sound. A year later, in 2009, his brother, Russell, passed away from an accidental fall. These young men were friends of my sons, Andrew and Ryan. At Russell’s memorial service at Hummingbird Music Camp, Ryan used Russell’s guitar to play an instrumental version of Stairway to Heaven while Andrew accompanied him on his flute. It was very beautiful. Ryan also played Wish You Were Here on Russell’s guitar. That was a kind tribute to Russell’s parents who were warmed that their son’s guitar came alive during this gathering.

Then my son Ryan left us in 2012. Three of his friends—Caleb, Willie, and Ryan—who were grieving his departure, played Wish You Were Here on their guitars. It was a beautiful rendition of this meaningful and haunting song.

So you will understand that when I bring this song to our circle, I do not bring it as a text to be studied from a safe distance. I bring it as a song that has been played at the thresholds of my own life—a song that has heard me, and heard my family, in the very hours when other words failed. And like all songs that hear us, it carries a history of its own: one of the most tender and tragic stories in all of rock’n roll.

The Crazy Diamond: The Story of Syd Barrett

Pink Floyd did not begin as the band the world came to know. It began as Syd Barrett’s band. Syd was the founder, the namer, the songwriter, the singer, the painter, the beautiful one—a luminous, playful, wildly original young man from Cambridge who assembled the group in the mid-1960s and gave it its name.

He wrote their first hit singles and nearly all of their first album. Those who knew him in those years describe someone lit from within: charismatic, funny, overflowing with whimsy and invention. He was, by most accounts, the most naturally gifted of them all.

And then, over the course of little more than a year, he came apart.

Heavy use of LSD is usually named as the trigger, and it surely played its part, but those closest to him came to understand that something deeper was breaking open—a psychological unraveling that the drugs accelerated but did not fully explain. Through 1967 and into 1968, Syd became increasingly unreachable. He would stand on stage and not play, strumming one chord for an entire show, or detuning his guitar mid-song, staring into the distance. He missed performances. He wrote songs the band could not follow. The light that had drawn everyone to him was flickering behind a wall no one could get through.

The band brought in his old Cambridge friend David Gilmour to cover the guitar parts, intending to keep Syd as a songwriter the way the Beach Boys had kept Brian Wilson. It did not work. One day in early 1968, driving to a show, someone asked whether they should pick Syd up. They decided not to. That was the end. The founder of Pink Floyd was simply, quietly, left behind.

The guilt of that moment never left them. Roger Waters and David Gilmour would spend much of the rest of their careers writing about it—about madness, absence, and the friend they could not save. The Dark Side of the Moon circles the theme of a mind slipping its moorings. And in 1975, they made an entire album about him.

The Visit: June 5, 1975

Here the story turns from tragic to almost unbearably poignant.

In the summer of 1975, Pink Floyd was at Abbey Road Studios recording the album Wish You Were Here—an album built around a long suite called Shine On You Crazy Diamond, their open-hearted elegy for Syd. On June 5, while they were working on that very song, a stranger wandered into the studio.

He was a heavyset man with a shaved head and shaved eyebrows, holding a plastic bag, behaving oddly—standing about, at one point brushing his teeth. The band members glanced at him and carried on. No one knew who he was.

It was Syd.

When the recognition finally came, it undid them. Roger Waters was reportedly in tears. The golden boy of seven years earlier was unrecognizable—so changed in presentation that his own bandmates, his oldest friends, had looked directly at him and seen a stranger. At one point he reportedly asked when he was to add his guitar part. Then, at some point amid the day’s events—which coincided with a gathering for David Gilmour’s wedding—he slipped away. Most of them never saw him again.

Sit with the synchronicity of this for a moment, because it is the kind of thing that cannot be planned: while the band was singing to an absent friend, wishing he were here, he walked into the room—and his absence was so profound that even his presence could not overcome it.

He was here, and he was not here. That is the deepest wound of serious mental illness, and the band had it enacted before their eyes in the very hour they were setting it to music. Art created during rupture acts as a portal, and on that June day the portal opened both ways.

What Became of Syd

Syd had tried, after leaving the band, to continue making music. With help from Gilmour and Waters, he recorded two fragile, haunting solo albums released in 1970—records that flicker between brilliance and disintegration, sometimes within a single verse. In 1972 he briefly formed a band in Cambridge, but the venture collapsed within weeks. A final attempt at recording in 1974 produced almost nothing. The gift had gone somewhere he could no longer reach.

And then he did something that, in its own way, took a kind of courage: he stopped. He left London, eventually making his way back to Cambridge—by one account walking much of the distance—and returned to his mother’s home. He set aside the name Syd and became Roger Barrett again; the name his family had given him.

For the next quarter century, he lived quietly: painting, gardening, riding his bicycle to the shops, doing crossword puzzles. The band saw to it that his royalties reached him, so he lived without want. Fans and journalists who tracked him down were met with polite bewilderment; he did not wish to speak of the past, and by many accounts he remembered parts of it only dimly.

He struggled with diabetes in his later years, and on July 7, 2006, Roger Keith Barrett died of pancreatic cancer at the age of sixty, in the town where he was born. That is twenty years ago this month.

When word reached his old bandmates, the tributes were tender. And when Waters and Gilmour—long estranged from one another—had shared a stage one final time at Live 8 the year before Syd’s death, Wish You Were Here was among the songs they chose. Some absences shape everything that comes after them.

The Song as Mirror: A Contemplative Reading

Now listen to the song itself through the mirror, the way we have learned to listen in our circle, to other songs and other writings.

It begins with a radio. The opening guitar comes to us thin and distant, as though transmitted from far away, drifting through static—and then a second guitar enters, warm and near, full-bodied, playing along with the broadcast. Before a single word is sung, the song has already given us its whole teaching in sound: one voice far away, one voice close at hand, reaching toward each other across a distance. This is Syd and the band. This is every one of us and someone we have lost. This is the soul and its Source, calling across the veil of static and bewilderment. The distant signal and the present player—wishing each other here.

Then come the questions, and they are questions worthy of any wisdom text. The singer asks, in essence: can you tell what is real from what is illusion? Heaven from hell? A green field from a cold rail of steel? A genuine smile from the concealment of a veil?

These are the questions we asked of Bohemian Rhapsody’s opening—the questions of maya, of the cave, of the dream—but here they are asked with a particular ache, because they are addressed to someone whose ability to tell the difference has been taken from him. And, if we are honest, they are addressed to us. Do we know the difference? Or have we, as the song goes on to suggest, made the quiet trades that constitute a modern life—heroes exchanged for ghosts, living trees for hot ashes, the fire of the spirit for the cool comfort of the breeze, a walk-on part in a real war for a starring role behind bars of our own choosing?

That is the song’s hidden severity, wrapped in its gentleness: it is not only a lament for Syd. It is a question posed to everyone still standing. He lost his presence through no fault of his own. What is our excuse? Where have we absented ourselves from our own lives—through distraction, numbing, performance, busyness, the endless elsewhere of our screens and our anxieties? Are we really here?

It’s as if our entire lives are poised between presence and absence, whether we can show up and arrive, or whether we will vacate, be absent from all that life is truly about. This includes being present to yourself, your relationships, your experiences, and even your own heart. Will you be here, now, or will you be somewhere far away?

And what is it that is distant, absent from you, that you long to bring near? What are you missing, that leaves an ache in your heart, and have you grieved it?

The tragedy of mental illness is that it exiles a person from the shared world against their will. The quiet tragedy of ordinary life is that we banish ourselves from it voluntarily, a little each day.

And then the image at the center of the song: two souls, lost and swimming, circling the same small bowl of water, year after year, covering the same old ground—together, and yet somehow never arriving at one another. Is there any truer picture of human longing? We swim beside the people we love most, close enough to touch, and still we ache with the distance.

The song does not resolve this ache. It simply names it, in the four words of its title, which are at once the most ordinary postcard sentiment in the English language and one of the deepest prayers a human being can utter: wish you were here.

Here is what I have come to believe about those four words. They are the sound of love refusing to let absence have the last word. Grief, as I have written before, is love with nowhere to go—and this song gives it somewhere to go. When Ryan played it on Russell’s guitar, love had somewhere to go. When Caleb, Willie, and Ryan played it after my own Ryan’s departure, love had somewhere to go. Every time this song is played at a memorial, around a campfire, in a bedroom with the door closed, someone’s love is finding its way across the water of the fishbowl, across the static of the radio, across the veil itself.

And notice—this is the song’s final grace—that the title is addressed to a you. The song never lets the absent one become an it, a case, a diagnosis, or even a memory with a recurring loop always returning to the pain. Whoever has been lost remains, forever, someone we can access and speak to.

In the grammar of the heart, the departed are always second person. That is not denial. That is the deepest theology I know: the conviction, held by every contemplative tradition, that the field between souls is not severed by absence—that presence, real Presence, is not bounded by the body. The song wishes; the wish is itself a thread; and the thread holds.

The Shadow We Must Name: Mental Illness

I cannot bring this song to you without speaking plainly about the shadow that runs beneath it, because it runs beneath more families in this town—and every town—than we ever dare say out loud.

Serious mental illness derails lives. It takes brilliant, luminous, beloved people—people like Syd Barrett, people like the young ones we have lost, people sitting in our own living rooms—and it walls them away from the shared world, sometimes slowly, sometimes with terrifying speed. It steals futures. It exhausts families. It hides behind stigma and silence, so that those who suffer often suffer alone, and those who love them often grieve a person who is still alive—the strange, unnamed grief of watching someone be here and not here at once, just as the members of Pink Floyd experienced in that studio in 1975. If you have lived this, you know it is one of the heaviest burdens a family can carry.

I know these people, who have a mentally ill child, or family member, or you may have been diagnosed yourself. It often seems so hopeless and despairing, alone and untethered, with much absence, and little presence.

And yet I must also tell you what I know from the inside: the story is not always tragic. My son Andrew was, in the language of the literature, a rare case. After seven years of suffering, he overcame his mental illness. Seven years—a definitive span of time, a full season of the soul—and then a return that just as unexpected and abrupt as the onset. (You may watch his Ted Talk at

I do not offer this to minimize anyone’s ongoing struggle, or to suggest that will or love alone can accomplish what illness resists. I offer it because hope, too, deserves a voice in this conversation, and because I have watched with my own eyes as someone came back across the water. Not everyone does. It seems that hardly any do.

Syd did not, in the way the world wanted—though perhaps his quiet years of painting and gardening in Cambridge were their own kind of peace, a life reassembled on smaller, gentler terms, and who are we to say the Presence was not with him there. But some do come back. And every one of them needed people who kept wishing them here—who kept playing the song, keeping the thread, refusing to let the absence become final before its time.

So let this be said to our coherence circle or any gathering: if someone in your life has gone behind the wall—of illness, of addiction, of depression, of any exile of the mind, of abandoned relationships—do not stop transmitting. Your signal may sound, to them, like that thin guitar drifting through the static: far away, barely audible. Send it anyway. You do not know what is being received.

We usually send out fear to the one we worry about, to the one who is struggling, to the one who is ill, to the one who is not living well, to the one who is absent in some way, but we can just as easily send out love. The love that is within our power to broadcast can bring them home, and can usher in the presence that is always there.

And if you are the one behind the wall, hear this: the second guitar is playing. Someone is answering your broadcast, even now. You are wished here. You are wanted here.

For Contemplation

Before Thursday, I invite you to listen to the song twice, as is our practice. The first time, listen for the story—hold Syd in your heart, and anyone of your own who has been here-and-not-here. The second time, listen as prayer, with your attention on the breath, and let the opening radio passage be your call to stillness. Then sit with these questions:

• Who is your “you”? When the title of this song sounds in your chest, whose face arises—the departed, the estranged, the ill, the far away? What would it mean to send them your signal this week, in whatever form remains possible: a thought, a letter, a prayer, a song, a visit, a candle?

• Where have you absented yourself from your own life? What have you traded—which heroes for which ghosts, which fire for which comfort? What would it take to walk back onto the field of your one real life?

• Have you known the grief of someone who was here and not here at once? Were you ever able to grieve it, given that the world offers no funeral for that kind of loss?

• Can you sense the pulse that the wishing itself creates—the possibility that love spoken across absence is not futile, but is itself a form of presence, a fish finding its way through the water of the field between us?

The Takeaway

Wish You Were Here was written for one man—a crazy diamond who burned too brightly and was lost behind the wall of his own mind, and who wandered into the studio, unrecognized, on the very day his friends were singing him their farewell.

But like all songs that hear us, it long ago outgrew its occasion. It has become the song humanity reaches for at the threshold—the song of every fishbowl, every static-filled radio, every soul swimming beside another soul and aching across the little distance.

Through the lens of this threshold, Wish You Were Here stands as:

• a lament for all who are here and not here—the ill, the lost, the absent, the departed

• an examination of conscience for the rest of us, asking what we have traded and where we have gone absent from our own lives

• a teaching on grief as love with somewhere to go

• and a quiet declaration of faith that the field between souls holds—that the wish is a thread, and the thread does not break

My son Ryan played this song for a friend who had crossed over. His friends played it for him when he crossed. One day, in some way, someone will play it for each of us. Until then, we play it for one another—two lost souls, swimming in the same bowl of light, closer than we know, held in a Presence that has never once, in all of this, been absent.

Wish you were here. And you are. And I will meet you there.

Thank you, Ryan, for helping me write this, and being present with me, always.