In classical music, two main modes define the scale of a work : major or minor. The first one generally invites to joyful and luminous harmonies. The second one is often more dramatic or sad.
Paradoxically - and this is the mark of geniuses - there comes a moment when we no longer know if we should smile at a certain color or cry about it. Suddenly, a major mode transfigures us so deeply that we feel like we're wavering, whereas its previous passage, made of minor and dark chords, didn't shake us so much.
I see two kinds of tears : those that make us feel separated and those that make us feel connected. Each of these can be powerful, like a reminder. Like the Himalayas within us.
Isn't this the essence of our movement, throughout our lives, coming home or going away, embracing the other or forgetting ourselves ? Yet it is only ever about ourselves, transported here or there...
JUNE
Here is the period of full moons, solstices and eclipses, the one that tells us that everything is possible ! The dark can intrude into the day and the day, like a big round moon, illuminate our nights. The eclipse tells us that nothing goes away completely but that nothing is frozen either. Like masks, like veils, a joy can slip over a melancholy and a sigh can topple the glory. In the end, the night can never make the light disappear. At most, it can only interfere, dress or adorn it.
The finest spark can reflected itself in the darkness of a cave. But the greatest darkness has no effect inside a flame.
Yet this time period shakes up for some of us. Going from major to minor mode in a second, sometimes happy or angry, full of hope or on the contrary desperate... Here we are alive !
THE MISTS OF TIME
Science reveals that what we take for night is not totally black ! Since the Big Bang, a fossil radiation has never ceased to be, very intensely for the first four hundred thousand years, then in a frequency that has become too slow to be visible by our unaccustomed eyes. However the light always remains, even in our nights !
These eclipses of the sky are also sometimes those of our spirit. Never gone, it amuses itself to veil itself, to dress itself, to make us turn the head... until we realize that it is only a question of what we decide to see or to create at each moment of our own universe.
MODULATION
The famous tennis champion, Novak Djokovic, confessed it recently during the famous final of Roland Garros where, after losing two sets to zero, he asked the umpire to go back to his cloakroom for a few moments. This practitioner of mental preparation decides then to listen to the two voices that are playing in him : the minor one, which screams that he is worthless and that he is going to lose ; and the major one, which whispers that there is still a chance. While he decides to give more tone to the second one to, little by little, reduce the first one, he changes his clothes. He was wearing a red shirt and white shorts, but now he's back on the court with a white shirt and red shorts. From his first ball, everything has "switched" as said in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He leads and goes to the end of the match, winning. If one wanted to describe a hypnosis or coaching session, there couldn't be a better picture than this one !
Learning to know oneself means realizing we are the author of the major or minor modes, getting amused with it and even taking the risk, sometimes, like a sailboat, of bending to the extreme, to verify that in the end, no one else but oneself can have the helm. Only you are the master on board.
By storms or in bright sunshine, each of us has known, at least once in our lives, that moment of solitude in the middle of a party or, on the contrary, that of rainy afternoons, celebrating life as never before...
EMBRACING OUR PARADOXES
The mystery is this : discovering that what we took for opposites, for struggles, were in reality two lovers necessary for each other, two paradoxes made to embrace. Our fear highlights our courage, our doubts accompany our faith.
What a strange idea to want to "manage" our emotions instead of learning to direct our thoughts ! It would be like asking a wild animal to sit well at the table instead of letting it live in its natural space and choose where you want to walk. It would be like an archer trying to avoid his target !
In this period announcing the end of time, in the literal sense of the term, we are allowed to realize there is something in us that lasts forever. A new scale for a new masterwork...
By crossing our worlds, we find what was never lost and we learn to really handle our art, our spirit, our vibration. In a word : our music !
These may seem like small, insignificant gestures. Sometimes it may even seem like we are going backwards, not evolving, fumbling. But like a music score, the melody returns each time a little different, more itself and opens to new harmonies...
I wonder what will be, for you, the one of this summer solstice.
Wishing you a wonderful month of light and shadow in the service of your music,
Hélène Tysman
photo ©lou Sarda