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2/?

When I finally brought Pelor (yes, like the D&D sun deity) home, I was thrilled to find it played like the recorders I grew up with in elementary school music classes. Learning songs was fun, and I spent most of my remaining time in the bardic grade mastering classics like House of the Rising Sun and Dust in the Wind.

Then, on the HSF website, I found the scales. It was like giving a desert-stranded man water, and I devoured everything I could find; Lydian, Aeolian, Byzantine.

3/?

I'm moving through the ovate grade now, and the music continues to be important in that practice: as often as I can remember to, I play to greet the Sun in the morning and the Moon at night. I play on walks through the forest. I play when I'm happy. I play when I'm sad. I let the music move me.

That's been the biggest upshot, more than my attempts to create a flute Ogham or finding some way to adapt it into a spiritual healing practice: the magic of surrendering to a melody.

4/?

The other thing is that I find myself listening much more than I used to. Not just to other humans, although we can discuss the virtues of that separately, but to the trees. To the waters. To the stones and the wind and the endless parade of insects I usher back out my front door.

I firmly believe there's no holier calling than storyteller. But to tell a story, you have to have heard it first. And to really tell it properly, you have to have LISTENED, which is not the same thing.

5/5

The long and short of all this is that the craft of playing and writing music taught me to listen to myself. Learning to listen to myself made it easier to listen to the people and spirits that surround me. And when you really listen, it becomes impossible not to care.