In my experience, it isn’t possible to love unless we first have or make room to receive another person’s voice, personhood, or experience inside our own heart and soul. Music and all the arts teach us those receptive capacities in beautiful ways. When we stop and listen to the musical work, life or expression of another, sometimes wholly different from ourselves, we allow that difference to come inside and are made new by it. We cease being merely a user of music or a consumer of musical product. If I stop, look, enter into a painting, poem, dance, or a new kind of music that is created by someone else instead of only remaining inside my own experience, then the capacities to receive, hear, listen, love, cherish, forgive and to create are all interconnected. Each dimension aids and supports the other. Beautiful!

I recently had the opportunity to see an extraordinarily beautiful film about an extraordinarily difficult topic: war. The film showed people of radically different religious and political cultures at war with one another. Their story was set in a geography and way of life different from my own, and went back and forth between three languages! But the MUSIC of the soundtrack, which was performed with aching beauty, longing and artistry, was as powerful as the narrative the filmmaker portrayed. It was entirely possible for me to understand the message and get beyond my own language barrier if I remained present and open-hearted. Everything human-making was communicated through the power of exquisitely transmitted image and music. I needed only to be open to understand the depths of their love, fear, trouble, and glory. Here, communication wasn’t language dependent, but art dependent. I might never be able to fully learn the history of that particular complicated political and religious struggle, but the music of the soundtrack and simply glorious images transmitted unforgettable worlds and values.

As a harpist, singer, composer, and concert and recording artist, I have worked for more than three decades across several continents. I am also a clinician, working with the needs of the dying. One life happens on glamorous stages or in larger-than-life cathedrals, where you play for a few thousand people at a time. The other life is lived in hospital and hospice wards, working in a one-on- one situation, almost invisibly, but most definitely audibly. You are there for and with the dying individual. No curtain calls! Whether I am playing for one or for many, both provide an opportunity to serve urgently: people, others, beauty, music. But in order to serve, I need to become inwardly empty, inwardly quiet, fully capable of intimacy and beauty in order to hear and imagine something new inside my own soul. Only then am I am able to make what is new audible and external and give it away to another. This inner gesture, open and listening, is a two way street that shapes both artistry and spirituality. For me, both feed and bless each other when kept together.