This post is inspired by a reflection on me life’s journey as it is and something that occurred to me whilst listening to a piece of music.
It was around October 1979 when Stevie Wonder released Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants a soundtrack album to a film exploring, get this, the secret life of … plants! I didn’t watch the film until a friend sent a video of it to me which I subsequently lost and then discovered it again only for it to be destroyed among with other valuable personal items in an incident that I don’t wish to happen to my best enemy. (Remember, your worst enemy is your best friend – think about it!)
In any (brief)case Wonder’s album was the first album release since his epic much vaunted Songs in the Key of Life and the listening public were waiting for another smash hit. What they got was something more akin to a damp squib as the album itself wasn’t too pop savvy with the exception of one or two tracks. Other than that it was what it said it would be – a soundtrack. Pundits and experts all tutted and wondered if the streak was over for the man who won Grammy albums with the regularity of a regular thing on a regular day displaying remarkable regularity in all its beauty.
Thankfully, pundits, critics and experts have their say and then in the course of time mugs like me good self come across it. What’s more, with no reference to the movie of which it is mean to be a soundtrack, I can listen to it and appreciate it for the experiment that it is and the different themes within it were we to but look.
This is not a review of the album but the track that inspired this post is from that album, names the track known as The First Garden. The idea of the album to a large degree is that it is to be enjoyed as a flowing narrative of an album more or less with linking episodes and distinct chapter changes. So the track before this is called Earth’s Creation and sure enough as you listen to it you can get the feel of what it’s meant to represent – the clash, the flash, the bang, the methodical emergence of something out of seemingly nothing, growing, mounting, etc. So by the time you get to the end of that track and come across The First Garden from the grand panorama of all of creation this is far more intimate and gentle. You feel as if you’re in that First Garden as it experiences the first moments of life in its freshness, purity and glory.
So as I listened to that and considered where I am at present in a lot of issues this question occurred to me: what if everything I believed to be true turned out to be wrong? What if the underpinning foundations of what constitutes Christopher Dryden in substance was faulty at best and catastrophically fatal at worse? What if the things I used to rely on as unmoving were as transient as time itself? What if the people I felt I could depend on turned their back on me and left me all alone? What happened if the mega-structure that had taken so long to build crumbled and fell like the Tower of Babel? Almost like a mental meltdown.
Tell you something – that is what I would call the Big Bang. From nothing something happens. From the swirl of chaos and disorder that would come about would need to emerge structure and new order. From the mess would need to emerge some sort of new way of engaging with this new thing. Old perspectives would not be of any use in this new era. Previously held convictions would all have to be swept away and if they returned would definitely be refreshed if not revised.
What a different person there would be who came through that. He would look the same and to those in that past he would be able to connect with their perception of his former self, but it wouldn’t be the same. They would be talking to someone who no longer existed. They would be engaging with the past that had been shattered and blown into smithereens. (Ages since I used that word!)
That different person would approach life much like the new creation approached life all that time ago. It’s bewildering. It’s new. How do we go about living this kind of life?
I don’t subscribe to the big evolution story or to the Big Bang theory as anything other than that – a theory and a story – not much else. Claims to truth and fact are always going to be highly contestable to me because of their reliance on things beyond human comprehension. Have we really sussed out the physics and everything? How would we ever know? Why should I take it on board as truth?
In as much as I don’t believe it, I do take on the concept of Big Bang on the smaller scale – like the personal scale. Although it’s not always as graphic and traumatic as the questions I asked can assume, I know people who have experiences not too far from that from all manner of triggers – hurt, rejection, revelation and realisation and so on and so forth. It’s a strange place to be when everything’s up for grabs, but it is no less a place of peace and child-like wonder to consider it and take tentative steps to embracing and engaging with this new creation.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
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Life With CD 