Yes — again and again and again.
The last time I posted, I was on my way to France to join my choir on a short tour and 9-day choral festival. Tour now over, I am back in Nice to decompress and get ready for the rest of my summer spent with friends in Europe.
My choir is a community of talented, smart, caring women. The singing together—some of the most gorgeous repertoire, in some of the most beautiful spaces—brought us closer. And I am missing them right now.
The tour was well beyond my hopes and expectations. In Nice, audience members told us that we moved them, made them feel, gave them a reason to smile again after the recent tragedies that have devastated the city and the country. There were few dry eyes in the house, onstage or in the seats. With each following concert, folks came up to us wanting to thank us personally. After one of our last performances, in a small village square, we were served a huge open-air dinner as the sun set, and our hosts feted us with folk songs. They touched us just as much as we touched them.
The choral festival offered performances by world class choirs, and from what we heard on the streets, ours was one of the most popular! But I am not meaning to boast. I was honoured to know we were a crowd-pleaser. My own favourite choir was Slovenian, and from their first notes, their music raised goosebumps on my arm, and caused tears to flow. They were, in that brief hour, the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. It was an auditory orgasm as I kept feeling myself lifted to greater and greater heights of aural ecstasy. I left the concert venue utterly speechless. To try and describe the profound experience in words seemed to take something from it.
Traveling itself can do this for us, in providing novel opportunities for sensory pleasure and deep meaning. As we go along, gasping at the sea and mountain views, the galleries, the cathedrals, and revelling in the new tastes and smells, we transcend the ordinary. The drive to capture these things and events is so strong, so seductive. But the camera and notebook take us a step away from our own experience. Knowing this, sometimes I just leave my tools in the bag. I close my eyes, and let myself soak it in.
Then, the performance is over, the echo faded, the sun set, the meal finished, the lover left behind. Then what? We must move on. A saying comes to mind: “If you love something, set it free. If it come back, it’s yours; if it doesn’t, it never was.”
I am not sure I totally agree with this statement. The first part, yes. I know that I continually need to let go of things and ideas and experiences and people, no matter how much I love them, so I can live in the present and remain open to the flow of life. We must not set ourselves up for disappointment and stagnancy by clinging, or by defining ourselves or anyone or anything else too rigidly. This is not easy.
But if we let go of a lover, and they return to us, they are not “ours”. And if we let go of experiences, like the sublime concerts I have been a part of, they will not come back. Moments like that are temporal and ephemeral, and we can never relive them. Being an artist, I will always want to interpret and share what I feel and what I witness. But we can never really recreate or fully capture these events. The thing is to live them fully in the moment. However, the part of ourselves that comes alive—with the music, with the intimacy of a kiss, with all your attention focussed on the sunset or any beauty-filled moment—can come alive again, at a different time, in a different way. But it takes letting go. Forever and always letting go.
The whole bus ride back to Nice after the choral festival, I was in tears. I did not want to leave the music and my friends and the breathtaking landscape. But it was over, and my choice was clear: let go. And now, here I am, enjoying what the day has offered me.
If you love something let it go. And then—there is MORE.
SEE with a WHY 