The Healing Power of M: Moving Out of a Spiritual Winter Into Spring
Monica King
March 12, 2006
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! When you read that or HUMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, what does it make you do automatically? For most of us, it makes us Smmmmile! I rest my case. There you have it, the healing power of M. The M vibration sets the creative in Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmotion. And off we go....
My parents had the good sense & grace to raise us kids in an environment enriched with music. Either one will tell you it was/is music I love to immerse myself in whenever I am able to.
Not only my parents, but my grandparents as well. In particular, my grandmother Gigi in Washington, D.C. Gig, in tandem with my grandmother from Sweden, Lins, were, as I have written of before, quinessential matriarchs. Both ambassadors of good will, peace, grace, conflict resolution, the groaning board, parties, intergenerationals fests that carefully laid down for us, the blessed grandchildren, marvelous memories of magnificence involving music & musicals in particular.
While both women have practically been deified in my reminiscences here in the Chronicle, I am sure they harbored some of their own prejudices just as the menfolk did in my family of origin, the one that contributed to my jean pool, both literally & figuratively. (Pun again purely intended!)
Yet they had a way of softening these prejudices by blowing them away effortlessly with a funny counter joke or remark that put the culture bashing to rest...at least in the moments when we sensitive kids could feel adult tensions rising in a room or gathering.
I do not, by virtue of my order in our family tree of course, have recollection of my grandmother Gigi as a mother, only as a great, meaning awesome to me anyhow, grandmother. Gig was the best.. or at least stood shoulder to shoulder with my grandmother Lins, whom we stoically were taught with all the strictness & reverence due to family traditions from the old world always called Farmor. We Scandinavian/Germanian types LOVE precision & order & exactness about certain things, & where we came from in our personal family tree was extremely important in forming our clan or cultural identities. Farmor in Swedish literally translates to "father's mother".
Since we are so precise about such matters, this inevitably led us into many an argument growing up with our single cousin Lins, my grandmother's name-sake who sprang from my paternal aunt Wenche.
Lins called this same beloved Lins the elder; Mormor, meaning, accurately enough, mother's mother. Which led predictably in our preteen & younger years to some mighty shouting matches over who was REALLY correct! She's FARmor, no MORmor, no FARmor, on & on we would argue until some concerned elder relative would attempt to bring the noisy din down with logic again.
Of course it led to the golden mean of Swedish neutrality: we eventually got it through our thick blockhead skulls, (Swedes like to poke fun at themselves as much as any other race): the famous Viking compromise. She's BOTH! We had to bow to the reality that was seeping in to our stubborn brains; she is BOTH our father's mother & our aunt's mother too. Ah! the light dawned. And in reward for this fine educational achievement we were taught more Scandinavian aphorisms designed to keep our healthy senses of self worth & esteem right up there with our cultural norm:
Two of the ego-feeding slogans included: "whose better than us?" And my favorite, the Viking compromise: when you can not decide between two wonderful things to eat, or drink or see or buy, take them BOTH. That is the Viking compromise!
The world is simply FILLED with wonderful things, places, people, environments, past-times, games, parties etc. GO FOR IT kids! This was the consistent message our wandering explorer-lusting blood relatives encouraged in us. Which may well be why we love to visit & travel so much. To borrow from another sage traveler, Mark Twain, it turns out that indeed, travel is fatal to every form of racism & bigotry that can surface in a belief-limiting life.
Gigi on the other hand, while adventuresome too (how many grandmothers do you know who arrange for going on African Safaris, bringing back huge coffee table-sized picture books to tantalize your imagination?) was still less , shall we say, imperious about her persona. Lins was definitely a force of nature. No doubt about it. At sixty-five she was wielding a crow bar in our back yard, moving boulders & rocks to create terraced gardens to gaze out at from the kitchen window, as if they were mere puffballs. She could move gracefully from a pair of muddied up jeans into a steamy, nearly over-the-top hot bath & transform herself into the reigning matriarch in any social gathering within a matter of hours. A cake walk for Lins.
No, Gigi was easily tickled pink by "the darnedest things kids could say", most particularly, her own beloved grandchildren, & later great grandchildren. Is it any wonder I could not wait to be a grandmother myself with these two pillars of matriarchy as exemplars?
Gigi or Giggles as I would call her, would dissolve into fits of laughter over & over again over silly things. If anything got too serious she could move like mercury a mood from somber to funny simply by her spontaneous joi de vivre. Gigi's world view was "life is a banquet". And so it was, all around her.
One of the recurring silly things I remember clearly is my sweet little sister Jen climbing into Gigi's lap when she was maybe 4 or 5 or so, looking up at Gigi with her huge blue eyes & saying, "Gigi, your hair looks like a mushroom!" It just cracked her up! She would just laugh & laugh, her laughter so infectious that none of us could help but join in, laughing so hard tears rolled down our faces. Laughter can have that effect. So it was, one of those family sayings that got trotted out whenever needed... someone got a little grumpy or nasty tempered, & someone would say, but Gigi, your hair looks like a mushroom! And it was all over. Case closed.
And so it is.
Contemplate the healing power of M
Music
Movement
Mediation
Meditation
Massage
Making
Encompassed in music is both silence & sound. We would not hear the harmmmmmmmmmm ony without the empty space needed to set each note like a jewel in the overall composition of a piece of music or a song.
Positive and Negative Poles
Everything begins with a circle of motion. Without positive and negative poles, there would be no movement, no creation. Without the dark side, your beauty would not exist. Don't be afraid to look at both sides. You need them both. You must honor all existence as part of the Great Spirit.
Butterfly Woman, Jaguar Woman, Lynn Andrews, writer
Movement; music leads instantly to movement; we can not help ourselves. It is spontaneous, stupid laws not withstanding this universal law & force of nature. Did you know that in the Granite State of New Hampshire we still have some crazy laws on the books? Like;
You may not tap your feet, nod your head, or in any way keep time to the music in a tavern, restaurant, or cafe.
But not to be outdone, in Vermont, in my very own beloved new adopted city/home I am now technically an outlaw because I failed to, on Saturday night; conform to this law:
All residents shall bathe every Saturday night.
A hardened criminal I am obviously, because I have knowingly & willfully done some of these other things that are outlawed in my beloved Twin States:
Women must obtain written permission from their husbands to wear false teeth.
Whistling underwater is illegal.
At one time it was illegal to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole.
(These are Vermont laws...not really have I broken these YET, I do not have room for a giraffe where I live at present, nor do I own any false teeth, but I will cop to not bathing last Saturday night. Couldn't be bothered.)
As for whistling underwater, well I have never honestly tried, but this exercise too it would seem, fly in the face of natural law!
But in New Hampshire, now, I have broken all kinds of laws here!
It is illegal to pick seaweed up off of the beach.
It is considered an offense to check into a hotel under an assumed name.
Looking for more dumb laws? Check out DumbLaws.com!
Any cattle that crosses state roads must be fitted with a device to gather its feces.
You cannot sell the clothes you are wearing to pay off a gambling debt.
You may not run machinery on Sundays.
You may not tap your feet, nod your head, or in any way keep time to the music in a tavern, restaurant, or cafe.
On Sundays citizens may not relieve themselves while looking up.
White Mountain Nat. Forest
If a person is caught raking the beaches, picking up litter, hauling away trash, building a bench for the park, or many other kind of things without a permit, he/she may be fined $150 for ''maintaining the national forest without a permit''.
I will leave it to your imagination, intuition & discernment to figure which 6 out of 8 of these I have knowingly & flagrantly violated. O.K. one hint, I HAVE picked up seaweed off of the beach! You take it from there...
There is a definite order & sequence in the Universe. In general, we crawl before we walk. We eat before we defecate. Get my drift?
Can I eat for you? Only if you are a baby in the making of my womb. That is the ONLY thing I can do once you decide to incarnate through the gateway of my particular womb. Ditto every other mother under the sun. Any argument there? I can not eliminate waste for you. You take it from there.... connect the dots!
However, even while drifting in the relative bliss of a perfectly controlled, warm, watery environment, where, as above so below, the infant in the making is being formed by the cocreative process of passion, coupling & gestating, LOVE in motion as it were & is, in this prebirth stage of development the nearly newborn enjoys warm watery darkness, sightlessness, or a prebirth blindness, & the energetics of SOUND, & the natural rocking motion of a very mobile mother. Universal natural & supernatural LAWS. The sequence found contained in Genesis. First silence, then sound, then light, & on into material manifestation as we each burst through the maternal gateway into incarnated human life.
In a winter season, many mammals hole up in a cave, but let us take Stephen Colbert's favorite Fear Factor; the Bear as our example. To see how we are more alike as mammals of the earth creature tree than not. Bears hibernate & gestate in winter. Yet with the new energy of spring, they will emerge from those caves with little bears in tow.
Emerging from both a spiritual & physical winter into the new energies of greater light, beckoning from the long sleep. And perhaps the chirping of returning migratory birds on the wing, the smell of warmed earth, the scent of the earliest of spring flowers, the buzz of the bees setting about to create the bear's favorite food, honey.
To be blessed by the Mmmmmmmmmmmmmaternal voice or key signature in all of Earth living repeat these words in a circle like a mantra, "whenever you feel afraid" as Anna sang to the King of Siam in a favorite Rogers & Hammerstein musical, the King & I.....
Music, movement, meditation, mediation, massage...
and when conflict, ugly entrenched conflict rears its ugly head in your own family, clan, village, city or nations, consider taking the embittered war of words into a different medium... suggest to the adversaries involved that the Rules of Engagement for "dueling it out" is that each party engaged in the conflict must SING their disagreements out loud to each other, & then see how long the iron grip of serious warfare holds its sway!
Seriously, try it, you'll like it!
And once the tension is broken, try MOVING into MAKING something; how about making sweet, sweet love? One of the most creative acts on the planet. Or a loaf of bread? A painting, a picture, a musical composition. Noteworthy here are the inventors of nuclear bombs who later, in horror at the miscreations they had unleashed upon the earth, transformed that cocreative ability into a love of building Church organs, magnificent instruments of sound & harmony.
Join the choir! Sing, I say, sing away the tensions, frustrations, disappointments that have made you sad, angry, anxious or depressed.
Take the lead from the littlest Who in Whoville. (Dr. Seuss)
Lead the choir, when all seems lost, stolen or destroyed. And sing. Then you too, will know & exercise the incredible healing power of M.
AND reap the reward & natural Gift of the Spirit, MIRTH.
My parents had the good sense & grace to raise us kids in an environment enriched with music. Either one will tell you it was/is music I love to immerse myself in whenever I am able to.
Not only my parents, but my grandparents as well. In particular, my grandmother Gigi in Washington, D.C. Gig, in tandem with my grandmother from Sweden, Lins, were, as I have written of before, quinessential matriarchs. Both ambassadors of good will, peace, grace, conflict resolution, the groaning board, parties, intergenerationals fests that carefully laid down for us, the blessed grandchildren, marvelous memories of magnificence involving music & musicals in particular.
While both women have practically been deified in my reminiscences here in the Chronicle, I am sure they harbored some of their own prejudices just as the menfolk did in my family of origin, the one that contributed to my jean pool, both literally & figuratively. (Pun again purely intended!)
Yet they had a way of softening these prejudices by blowing them away effortlessly with a funny counter joke or remark that put the culture bashing to rest...at least in the moments when we sensitive kids could feel adult tensions rising in a room or gathering.
I do not, by virtue of my order in our family tree of course, have recollection of my grandmother Gigi as a mother, only as a great, meaning awesome to me anyhow, grandmother. Gig was the best.. or at least stood shoulder to shoulder with my grandmother Lins, whom we stoically were taught with all the strictness & reverence due to family traditions from the old world always called Farmor. We Scandinavian/Germanian types LOVE precision & order & exactness about certain things, & where we came from in our personal family tree was extremely important in forming our clan or cultural identities. Farmor in Swedish literally translates to "father's mother".
Since we are so precise about such matters, this inevitably led us into many an argument growing up with our single cousin Lins, my grandmother's name-sake who sprang from my paternal aunt Wenche.
Lins called this same beloved Lins the elder; Mormor, meaning, accurately enough, mother's mother. Which led predictably in our preteen & younger years to some mighty shouting matches over who was REALLY correct! She's FARmor, no MORmor, no FARmor, on & on we would argue until some concerned elder relative would attempt to bring the noisy din down with logic again.
Of course it led to the golden mean of Swedish neutrality: we eventually got it through our thick blockhead skulls, (Swedes like to poke fun at themselves as much as any other race): the famous Viking compromise. She's BOTH! We had to bow to the reality that was seeping in to our stubborn brains; she is BOTH our father's mother & our aunt's mother too. Ah! the light dawned. And in reward for this fine educational achievement we were taught more Scandinavian aphorisms designed to keep our healthy senses of self worth & esteem right up there with our cultural norm:
Two of the ego-feeding slogans included: "whose better than us?" And my favorite, the Viking compromise: when you can not decide between two wonderful things to eat, or drink or see or buy, take them BOTH. That is the Viking compromise!
The world is simply FILLED with wonderful things, places, people, environments, past-times, games, parties etc. GO FOR IT kids! This was the consistent message our wandering explorer-lusting blood relatives encouraged in us. Which may well be why we love to visit & travel so much. To borrow from another sage traveler, Mark Twain, it turns out that indeed, travel is fatal to every form of racism & bigotry that can surface in a belief-limiting life.
Gigi on the other hand, while adventuresome too (how many grandmothers do you know who arrange for going on African Safaris, bringing back huge coffee table-sized picture books to tantalize your imagination?) was still less , shall we say, imperious about her persona. Lins was definitely a force of nature. No doubt about it. At sixty-five she was wielding a crow bar in our back yard, moving boulders & rocks to create terraced gardens to gaze out at from the kitchen window, as if they were mere puffballs. She could move gracefully from a pair of muddied up jeans into a steamy, nearly over-the-top hot bath & transform herself into the reigning matriarch in any social gathering within a matter of hours. A cake walk for Lins.
No, Gigi was easily tickled pink by "the darnedest things kids could say", most particularly, her own beloved grandchildren, & later great grandchildren. Is it any wonder I could not wait to be a grandmother myself with these two pillars of matriarchy as exemplars?
Gigi or Giggles as I would call her, would dissolve into fits of laughter over & over again over silly things. If anything got too serious she could move like mercury a mood from somber to funny simply by her spontaneous joi de vivre. Gigi's world view was "life is a banquet". And so it was, all around her.
One of the recurring silly things I remember clearly is my sweet little sister Jen climbing into Gigi's lap when she was maybe 4 or 5 or so, looking up at Gigi with her huge blue eyes & saying, "Gigi, your hair looks like a mushroom!" It just cracked her up! She would just laugh & laugh, her laughter so infectious that none of us could help but join in, laughing so hard tears rolled down our faces. Laughter can have that effect. So it was, one of those family sayings that got trotted out whenever needed... someone got a little grumpy or nasty tempered, & someone would say, but Gigi, your hair looks like a mushroom! And it was all over. Case closed.
And so it is.
Contemplate the healing power of M
Music
Movement
Mediation
Meditation
Massage
Making
Encompassed in music is both silence & sound. We would not hear the harmmmmmmmmmm ony without the empty space needed to set each note like a jewel in the overall composition of a piece of music or a song.
Positive and Negative Poles
Everything begins with a circle of motion. Without positive and negative poles, there would be no movement, no creation. Without the dark side, your beauty would not exist. Don't be afraid to look at both sides. You need them both. You must honor all existence as part of the Great Spirit.
Butterfly Woman, Jaguar Woman, Lynn Andrews, writer
Movement; music leads instantly to movement; we can not help ourselves. It is spontaneous, stupid laws not withstanding this universal law & force of nature. Did you know that in the Granite State of New Hampshire we still have some crazy laws on the books? Like;
You may not tap your feet, nod your head, or in any way keep time to the music in a tavern, restaurant, or cafe.
But not to be outdone, in Vermont, in my very own beloved new adopted city/home I am now technically an outlaw because I failed to, on Saturday night; conform to this law:
All residents shall bathe every Saturday night.
A hardened criminal I am obviously, because I have knowingly & willfully done some of these other things that are outlawed in my beloved Twin States:
Women must obtain written permission from their husbands to wear false teeth.
Whistling underwater is illegal.
At one time it was illegal to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole.
(These are Vermont laws...not really have I broken these YET, I do not have room for a giraffe where I live at present, nor do I own any false teeth, but I will cop to not bathing last Saturday night. Couldn't be bothered.)
As for whistling underwater, well I have never honestly tried, but this exercise too it would seem, fly in the face of natural law!
But in New Hampshire, now, I have broken all kinds of laws here!
It is illegal to pick seaweed up off of the beach.
It is considered an offense to check into a hotel under an assumed name.
Looking for more dumb laws? Check out DumbLaws.com!
Any cattle that crosses state roads must be fitted with a device to gather its feces.
You cannot sell the clothes you are wearing to pay off a gambling debt.
You may not run machinery on Sundays.
You may not tap your feet, nod your head, or in any way keep time to the music in a tavern, restaurant, or cafe.
On Sundays citizens may not relieve themselves while looking up.
White Mountain Nat. Forest
If a person is caught raking the beaches, picking up litter, hauling away trash, building a bench for the park, or many other kind of things without a permit, he/she may be fined $150 for ''maintaining the national forest without a permit''.
I will leave it to your imagination, intuition & discernment to figure which 6 out of 8 of these I have knowingly & flagrantly violated. O.K. one hint, I HAVE picked up seaweed off of the beach! You take it from there...
There is a definite order & sequence in the Universe. In general, we crawl before we walk. We eat before we defecate. Get my drift?
Can I eat for you? Only if you are a baby in the making of my womb. That is the ONLY thing I can do once you decide to incarnate through the gateway of my particular womb. Ditto every other mother under the sun. Any argument there? I can not eliminate waste for you. You take it from there.... connect the dots!
However, even while drifting in the relative bliss of a perfectly controlled, warm, watery environment, where, as above so below, the infant in the making is being formed by the cocreative process of passion, coupling & gestating, LOVE in motion as it were & is, in this prebirth stage of development the nearly newborn enjoys warm watery darkness, sightlessness, or a prebirth blindness, & the energetics of SOUND, & the natural rocking motion of a very mobile mother. Universal natural & supernatural LAWS. The sequence found contained in Genesis. First silence, then sound, then light, & on into material manifestation as we each burst through the maternal gateway into incarnated human life.
In a winter season, many mammals hole up in a cave, but let us take Stephen Colbert's favorite Fear Factor; the Bear as our example. To see how we are more alike as mammals of the earth creature tree than not. Bears hibernate & gestate in winter. Yet with the new energy of spring, they will emerge from those caves with little bears in tow.
Emerging from both a spiritual & physical winter into the new energies of greater light, beckoning from the long sleep. And perhaps the chirping of returning migratory birds on the wing, the smell of warmed earth, the scent of the earliest of spring flowers, the buzz of the bees setting about to create the bear's favorite food, honey.
To be blessed by the Mmmmmmmmmmmmmaternal voice or key signature in all of Earth living repeat these words in a circle like a mantra, "whenever you feel afraid" as Anna sang to the King of Siam in a favorite Rogers & Hammerstein musical, the King & I.....
Music, movement, meditation, mediation, massage...
and when conflict, ugly entrenched conflict rears its ugly head in your own family, clan, village, city or nations, consider taking the embittered war of words into a different medium... suggest to the adversaries involved that the Rules of Engagement for "dueling it out" is that each party engaged in the conflict must SING their disagreements out loud to each other, & then see how long the iron grip of serious warfare holds its sway!
Seriously, try it, you'll like it!
And once the tension is broken, try MOVING into MAKING something; how about making sweet, sweet love? One of the most creative acts on the planet. Or a loaf of bread? A painting, a picture, a musical composition. Noteworthy here are the inventors of nuclear bombs who later, in horror at the miscreations they had unleashed upon the earth, transformed that cocreative ability into a love of building Church organs, magnificent instruments of sound & harmony.
Join the choir! Sing, I say, sing away the tensions, frustrations, disappointments that have made you sad, angry, anxious or depressed.
Take the lead from the littlest Who in Whoville. (Dr. Seuss)
Lead the choir, when all seems lost, stolen or destroyed. And sing. Then you too, will know & exercise the incredible healing power of M.
AND reap the reward & natural Gift of the Spirit, MIRTH.
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