Footbridge to Paradise

 

                        All things go too fast, swiftly pass the years

                        Only love it is, that with us stays, abides with us. 

                        To be selfless we must trust. 

                                                            – Avon Gillespie

 

This little canon written by my teacher was running through my mind as I crossed the footbridge to Paradise for the last time this summer. That little wooden bridge marks the transition from the hotel to Hidden Valley Music Seminars, where some 100 people gathered each morning for breakfast. Walking into that room with the buzz of conversation and the lilt of laughter was my daily return to my particular paradise in this Orff training. 

 

A life that began 52 years ago at Antioch College when I took my first Orff Course with Avon Gillespie. After meeting each Saturday for six hours, the poem above was the closing song Avon had us sing. I was 21 years old, he was 34 and what did either of us now about how swiftly the years indeed to pass? He couldn’t have known that he would only have 17 more of them on this planet and I could only hope that I would have 52 more and hopefully, more years to come. 

 

But both of us intuited the truth that Love was the redeeming angel, the eternal presence in our fleeting temporal existence. And that’s why we both understood that the music education we cared about was very little about reading quarter and eighth notes and playing the piece perfectly correctly and wholly about awakening Love in all its many faces— love for music, love for playing and singing and dancing with others that led to love for those others, love for everything that is beautiful and real and life-affirming in this world. 

That’s the sub-text to the buzz of the breakfast gathering and the tangible presence in last night’s sharing, where each Level present outward to the others what they had created inwardly amongst themselves. 

 

The calendar month has turned to August, this morning we will have our always-stirring and sob-inducing closing singing a later canon Avon used to close his courses. The world—our families, our homes, our jobs—await our return and hopefully, with astonishment at the colorful butterflies we have become gracing the year to come with new-found confidence, understanding, skills and awakened hearts and minds. 

 

Hopefully this old caterpillar has also sprouted some new wings. Looking forward to the family vacation that awaits me and more teaching in China. But first I have to pack!