In Search of...a healing spirit

So it's Sunday and I'm sitting in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania with my friends, Anthony and Renato, sipping coffee, looking at baby deer a few feet away, and watching This Week with George Stephanopoulos - not exactly a bad way to start the day.

I'm trying to pay attention to what George's guests have to say today, but the mountain air makes me feel something I seldom do - blissfully calm and serene, and besides I have the distinct feeling that they're saying nothing anyway, at least nothing I haven't already heard many times before. So I pretend to pay attention to David Axelrod and Senator Charles Grassley while really just studying their faces, which I notice are completely devoid of joy let alone humor, and I think that's a shame. And though the crises of the day seem insurmountable, I am sure they can't be solved by joyless people...which got me thinking about the spirit with which we approach our lives.

Then This Week moved on to the roundtable, which I paid little more attention to than I did the earlier body of the show...until they got to the celebrity passings of the week. Something about the incongruity of listening to people like Peggy Noonan talk about Michael Jackson with such reverence and nostalgia made me laugh, but it also reminded me that not only is music still the great unifier, but the healing nature and universality of it, as well as the spirit of those who create it, continue to move the mountains of our cynicism, intolerance, and inaction, because in truth "we are the world," and "there is a choice we're making," to save our own lives, and music remains the one acceptable place to have big dreams and broad visions for humanity, and to bring people together in reality, not just in theory.

So maybe it would be a good thing for Congress to take out their Bic lighters and sing a rousing chorus of We Are the World before deciding on healthcare or any other big issues. Maybe the spirit with which we approach things big and small determines the outcome as much as anything else does.

And so today, as I am caught up in revisiting the music of my generation, I am taking a deep breath and choosing to be a voice for healing, love, compassion, and peace. I hope you will do the same.


Thanks for stopping by.