This song came through Guan, a Chinese woman in a class I taught called “Spontaneous Musiking: A Pathway for Inner Discovery.”
Musiking is the way my teacher Kaija first guided me into songwriting, singing, and playing piano and ukulele when I was forty-one. It is a practice of listening for the music that is already moving through the body, the relational field, and the living world, allowing it to take form through deep listening, improvisation, and relationship.
Over time, I began sharing this practice with others, inviting them to “allow” a song to come through. One of my greatest joys is witnessing the awe on people’s faces, especially those who have never thought of themselves as musical, when they discover that a song can live inside them too.
When this song came through Guan, our whole class—gathered on Zoom—was moved to tears. We felt something together: hearts trembling, as if a soft and beautiful cosmic presence had descended and made itself known to us through a digital space stretching across the Pacific Ocean.
Since then, I have arranged the song for piano and returned to it many times. Each time, it brings me back to that same feeling of touching something vast and infinite—a presence that seems to hold humanity with compassion, tenderness, and a deep yearning.
That experience also gave rise to the poem that follows.
Lyrics
Setting sun, morning stars,
between Earth and Sky.
Myriad beings,
borne upon an undying current—
Measureless, boundless,
all-pervading, ever-unfolding.
One Shore of Belonging
Sometimes
the mist rising from the river
on an early summer morning,
a fallen leaf painted
crisp green, persimmon orange, and sunset red,
or a great horned owl
gliding silently above me
opens a doorway
into a vastness
inside my body—
a hidden sky,
a quiet universe
folded within creases of awareness
revealing itself through a crack in time
And for a moment
I remember
that this life,
this body,
this name
may be only one shore
of an ancient river of belonging,
flowing towards
the ocean blue
and an undying love.
Then the mist,
the leaf,
the owl
become messengers—
a love note
from the unseen,
a smiling nod
from another Self,
another song of life
sounding in a different octave
yet humming
in soft echo and a deep indigo tint
with this life on Earth
They remind me to follow
the slender tendril of a thread
weaving through joy and grief,
through the dark mouth of death
and the blazing threshold of birth,
through everything
we are asked to love
simply by being alive.
This time,
the messenger
came as a song.
This song.