I had the pleasure of doing bodywork with a musical conductor.
Slowly I became aware of all the sounds, the vibrations he works with! All the instruments of an orchestra…I don’t even know how many instruments that is.
Imagine being so free in your body that you are actually able to feel the subtle, and not so subtle vibrations of the sounds of so many instruments as they move in intricate weavings of melody, harmony, rhythm and volume through the instrument of your body.
And that is just the sounds of the instruments! There are people playing those instruments. People he knows to some degree, at least in relation to playing the piece of music currently filling the air, highlighting their strengths, supporting their weaknesses, coordinating the music on the page possibly written by someone long past, working to bring integrity between the passionately written notes on the page and the sound filling the hall.
Penetrating the world of the audience, sending vibrations of music through those bodies who listen not only with their ears, their entire bodies are responding to the sounds they are vibrating in.
The conductor, the musicians and the audience are already so many intricate vibrations…nerve impulses, blood flow, cranial rhythms, meridian pulsations, breathing, blood pressure shifts, muscular impulses. All of that now held in the presence of this intricate coordination as he conducts the symphony of sound, as he is the center point, and yet also the container for the sound that cannot be contained, that which just continues to move out further and further into the ethers. How far out from the walls of the hall do the vibrations move? Are they finished when we can no longer hear them?
And yet…
Here is this man, laying quietly for his massage, relaxing, letting go of the vibrations of hours of practice and performance, as the rhythms of his own body come back to the foreground. The beating of his heart, the in and out of his breath, all the nerve impulses that make breathing, and so much more, possible. Slowly, he comes back home to his own internal symphony of vibration.
I am in awe of this one who is so willing to be moved by the magnitude of sound he lives in, creates, supports and loves so much it cannot be contained.