Richard Rohr says:  "Soul is the blueprint inside everything that tells it what it is. Now in many ways we human beings haven't found our own blueprint.  That's why we are largely conformists. We do what everyone tells us is the appropriate thing to do because we haven't really discovered our own deepest ultimate meaning, our deepest destiny, our purpose, that which makes anything itself, authentic, true.  We might call it our uniqueness, our fate, our destiny.  We religious people keep talking about saving souls for the next world.  But I'm afraid that we are so disconnected from the natural world, that there is not much soul to save.  Both John Duns Scotis and Thomas Aquinas taught that 'grace builds on nature.'  It's nature, the givens of life, what is, that heals us, that reconnects us.  But we can spend our whole lives rattling around inside of thoughts, ideas and words and never really touch upon the givens, what is."

"When I can let my roots, and tendrils reconnect me with nature, with the givens of life, not the ideas of life, but the givens, of life, I find that there is the most extraordinary grounding, healing and even revelation."

(Initially this meditation makes me think about when I confront some situation in which I am experiencing some nervousness or conflict and I remember my mothers words to "just be yourself."  It's an innate knowing that acting out of the soul, the inner self, is always truthful, healing and reconnecting.)  And then I think this thought:

As this truth of nature speaks to my heart, so too does the truth that music also grounds, heals and is revelatory for me. I believe music is the language of the angels, from classical orchestrations to the tenor sax, I sense the interplay of a true and deep conversation back and forth, a ministering of the angels to my very soul (and I remember how the Gospel of John records that in His Agony in the garden, Jesus was ministered too by the angels).  It is this kind of ministering that has saved me during times in my life when I'm too depressed to open my soul to nature, or when nature is unavailable to me.  I am not the maker of the music--it is not my gift--but in my listening to it, in the presence of it, through it, when I allow my "roots and tendrils to reconnect me" in the music, I am grounded and healed as I deeply experience the truth of my soul founded on the Creator God's love for me.  "Grace builds on nature"---hmmm, perhaps as we experience the natural world with our senses of sight, smell, taste and touch, music is the instrumentation of nature itself--playing softly as the wings of the sparrow or the budding of a new leaf, or sometimes deafening as in the crashing of the waves of the oceans; and it is in our hearing of the music that opens our soul to the fullness of nature's grace--a building onto, if you will,--of the very soul of the natural world.

peace,