Usually, "a contemplative moment" on this blog has selections and poems from folks I am reading, but this time I am posting a version of a piece I am learning and imagining playing with a friend, maybe even someday soon. A few years ago, I broke my left wrist and have not really been able to play violin since them. Over the years as the ligaments and soft tissue healed (the bones were not a problem), I have practiced, sometimes seriously, and sometimes not at all -- because the pain in my wrist and the pain of the loss of facility to simply create music were both very difficult for me. But this piece is an excellent duet version of Pachelbel's canon in D (it needs some tweaking for violin) and may be within my physical limitations. My pianist friend is leaving the area in a few weeks and the ability to play this with him before then is simply something I would love to do.
In any case, the piece sings to me of friendship and the deep bonds that are the heart of such relationships. It says through music the things I rarely have words for but could always explore and express on violin. The piece is joyful with notes of sadness and a kind of plaintiveness appropriate to loss even as the music intertwines and mutually supports the individual voices in a unity which surprises with its strength and fruitfulness. This last week, because of my time at New Camaldoli and my own work in spiritual direction, I am more freshly aware of the "bonds of being" (PRH terminology) which enliven me and make me whole. These bonds are integral to the abundant life Jesus calls us each to.
So often people write me about becoming a hermit because they seek to "flee the world" or have few (or no) real friendships. But eremitical life depends on deep bonds, bonds of being which fly in the face of the superficial notions of friendship so common today. The silence of solitude is not about being alone in the absence of sound. It is about being alone with God and others to whom one is bound by bonds of genuine love, a love that resonates with the Love-in-Act who summons us and the entire cosmos into greater and greater expressions of fullness and a perfection which is always relational. In this conception of the silence of solitude, noise has to do with superficiality and hunger; it is about the anguish of brokenness, incompleteness, and yearning. But bonds of being sustain and nourish, bring courage and peace; they allow us to live from the depths of our truest selves and they still our souls. Sometimes we don't know how real these bonds are until we go away for a time or anticipate another's leaving. Learning to live into these bonds as well as from them, even in times of separation and distance, implies a commitment to the solitude of wholeness and the silence or stillness (the hesychia) of belonging.
Whether there is opportunity to play this version of Pachelbel's Canon in D with my friend or not, in my prayer I have imagined doing so, and in imagining that, I was put in touch with those deep bonds of being that exist and will continue to exist between myself and him. It is an illustration of the way I understand the silence of solitude and what eremitical life makes possible and depends upon if it is to be lived well. I am grateful to God to have come to know this dimension of this reality.
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