Flibbertyjibbet

Yes, it is the season for "The Sound of Music." Sister and I set up a laptop at her house with some speakers (another no tv home) and balanced it on an ottoman while we sat on the floor, Ella betwixt us, and munched Kettle Korn (who invented that and how can it still be legal?) by a crackling fire. Cheery, isn't it? Does anyone else have such fond memories of that movie as I do? I guess it became a Christmassy association because of the whole These Are a Few of My Favorite Things thing, what with "brown paper packages tied up in string" and all that. Ali, remember the Derek Trucks concert at the MACC when he played that song for what, 20 minutes? Anyway, I just love the story but it wasn't until this most recent viewing (and it had been many years since I had seen it in its entirety) that I really heard the lyrics to the songs. Yes, I had been listening to them since I was a wee tot, but I had not truly heard them until this last viewing. How about THIS:

The hills are alive with the sound of music

With songs they have sung for a thousand years.

The hills fill my heart with the sound of music

My heart wants to sing every song it hears.

My heart wants to beat like the wings

Of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees,

My heart wants to sigh like a chime that flies from a church on a breeze,

To laugh like a brook when it trips and falls

Over stones on its way

To sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray.

I go to the hills when my heart is lonely,

I know I will hear what I've heard before.

My heart will be blessed with the sound of music

And I'll sing once more.

Check out that line: [My heart wants] to sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray.
I know it. Crazy stuff for a little 'ole errant nun-wannabe to be emoting as she flounces about through the Alps, right? And then remember when the head honcho nun tells the blushing Maria to go back to the handsome Captain and get him to break off his engagement with that chain-smoking, vodka-guzzling svelte and wealthy Baroness?

Climb every mountain

Search high and low

Follow every by-way

Every path you know

Climb every mountain

Ford every stream

Follow every rainbow

'Till you find your dream

A dream that will need

All the love you can give

Everyday of your life

For as long as you live

Climb every mountain

Ford every stream

Follow every rainbow

'Till you find your dream

If you are able to suspend the music from the words and read it not as a showtune but as a poem, it really hits home. For me at least. Which brings me to my point...almost.

Most of you know that Ella attends a Waldorf School here in Chapel Hill, the Emerson Waldorf. One of the hallmarks of this school is celebrating soul-nourishing seasonal festivals that serve to enhance the spirit of community, establish a sense of rhythm to the school year and ultimately connect the students, teachers and families to the natural cycles of nature. The most recent tradition that I was able to attend is called the Spiral of Light with Ella's kindergarten class, last Saturday evening. We enter a dark room with other families, minus the kids, and sit on benches that are arranged to face one half of the room. Behind us in the corner a woman plays a harp. What we are facing is an arrangement of evergreen boughs interspersed with shiny magnolia branches that forms a giant spiral on the floor. Every 4 or 5 feet along the boughs are 2-foot tall tree stumps with cut out gold stars lying flat on their surfaces. The spiral forms a walking path that leads to a larger, center stump with a single tall white pillar, lit and glowing enough to illuminate the route to the center. Then the children are brought in and they sit, silently, on the front bench row. Their teacher then takes each child, one by one, hands them an apple with a candle in the top, and escorts them around the spiral to the center, where they light their own candle from the lit pillar, then sets it on one of the smaller stumps as they slowly exit back to their place on the bench. When all the children have finished, every stump now holds a burning candle in an apple atop shiny gold stars, and the spiral of light is complete. She then tells a tale full of archetypal imagery for all of us to enjoy. And then we leave and each kid gets given one of the apples to eat on the way home. The purpose of this ceremony is to mirror the yearning for light that we all feel at this time of year when days contract and nights expand.

My dad (who did not attend) wondered if any of the kids "got it". Which is a valid question. Did I "get it" when I watched Maria singing her heart out in an alpine meadow, long before I really heard what she was saying? Did I "get it" when the nun told her go forth and don't stop at anything until you have fulfilled your most expansive dreams? Yes and no. Had you asked me at the time what she was singing about, the brain part of me would have said, the mountains. The nun? Rainbows, maybe. But what I really absorbed, as each child did in the soft flickering light of that harp-filled classroom, was the imprint of the experience, almost like a residue that resonated in a much deeper place than in our little analyzing, calculating, categorizing brains. It touches our souls and the action of that, in itself, holds value, for that is what nourishes and sustains our spirit. And I think that is what life is all about--strengthening spirit.

And there I am,watching the Sound of Music and feeling like I know these lyrics, these are about me. My love of the mountains, my desire to live life utterly full of experiences... But I guess that's why it was so hugely successful. It turns out a gajillion other people feel the same way. And once again a bumper sticker seems to sum it up best: You are a unique individual...just like everyone else.