The Music Medicine Cabinet
Weekly Summer Camp News Bulletin #2
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Over a week ago, before all the protests broke out in the U.S., Brad had a dream:
In the dream I felt an unusually sharp pain in the left side of my abdomen. I went to a medicine cabinet that mysteriously had been installed in our home. Inside it were unusual medicine bottles with song titles as their pharmaceutical labels. Looking into the cabinet I faced many kinds of songs, including every tune that has ever come down our visionary pipeline. I selected two songs: “Happy Together” and “St. Louis Blues.” When I opened those musical medicine bottles, I started to sing the songs inside myself, one after the other. Instantly, my pain went away. I continued to sing to assure that the therapeutic effect was long lasting.
Feeling uplifted by the dream’s musical treatment, which evolved into pleasantly experiencing more complex harmonies and melodic embellishments, I was struck by how “mood” or emotion is such a strong and perhaps primary determinant of health and well being. More than a change of attitude, perception, cognition, or physical condition, a change of emotion can be transformative even when the body is out of sorts.
I more clearly recognized how the popular assumption that a super-concentrated positive thought, outlook, or intention is the best path to health or happiness is a monstrously naïve notion. Nothing feels more incongruent, emotionally off, and potentially iatrogenic than eradicating the particular variations and vagaries of any unique situation through the gloss of a one-size-fits-all, never-changing generalization.
Vicious thought cycles spin out of control because they lack a good soundtrack. When music is brought in to accompany all changing moods, we’re free to be critical, skeptical, oppositional, sweet-and-sour, complexly bitter, multi-ambiguous, or absolutely nonsensical without throwing our whole being out of whack.
In a flash, I realized how tone and rhythm better convey healing truth than intervention by mindful words or physical deeds. Musical ingredients readily penetrate and alter the emotional climate of every existential room. When any mood is blended with the vibrations of rhythm and tone it unexplainably feels healing, even when you’ve got the blues, funks, suffering woes, or painful jabs. Match the emotional climate with a sympathetic song and allow the interaction of their co-vibration to set you free from inherently limited insight – even the kind that’s right.
The next morning, we pondered the many kinds of medicine found in the musical pharmacopeia and became excited to advise everyone to install a new medicine cabinet in their home. There are musical vitamins, musical immune boosters, musical performance enhancers, and a musical treatment for every kind of condition whether named or unnamed. Keep a song in your heart and in your other organs as well. What’s your belly song? Your hip joint tune? How about a melody for your pair of knees and a tune for when you are spiritually out of tune?
Resist the temptation to restrict yourself to music that is only a superficial feel-good tonic that leaves you with a syrupy, sticky gloss that hides underlying and overlying complexities. This deejay error inevitably leads back to the fixated positive thinking whose stinking addiction to magical causality is equally shared by such seeming opposites as Donald Trump and Marianne Williamson.[1] Nothing is more ecologically dangerous than maximizing any singular personal preference, even when your chosen majority think it’s right. It’s as critically important today as it was in the 60s to respectfully allow criticism of anyone critical of the critical and to question those who are negative about anyone not being more positive.
With a vaster range of mood variation, allow thinking to surpass its limits and celebrate not knowing what to think or say. Better to rap an irrational rhyme than commit another crime of using positivity like a weapon to annihilate whatever presumed negative force stands in your way. It’s healthier to be a jaded blues singer than a simplistic pop sugar slinger. Allow your full range of complex natural flavors, climates, and expressions to come through, bringing more garden variety to your orchard of life.
Be for the whole ecology—the big room of life. The new summer of love requires songs of every kind of mood, especially those that host the oscillating tension between positive and negative, exemplified by the medicinal musical cooking wisdom of Beethoven, the stinging, singing bee-in-the-oven.
The former summer of love in 1967 came after many years of Civil Rights struggle and biting criticism of the establishment. Though its initial participants sought to create a better world, it all petered out when getting high became more important than social change. Later, many hippies became yuppies. Oprah-like, mild positive thinking replaced wild protest, wedding the capitalist entrepreneur with the new age spiritual seeker. Let us go back to re-own what is right about focusing on what is wrong. We invite you to face the self-centered, delusional madness of the world, and that includes how we all participate in it.
Confronting this same kind of overwhelming experience preceded the sacred ecstatic explosion of C. M. C. and Brad’s mystical awakening at age 19. Without the protest that leads to feeling overcome and defeated by the impossibility of all the negativity and the insanity of all the positivity, there can be no empty vessel able to feel the need for a n/om feed. Notice the painful jab in your gut as a signal that something isn’t right in the world. Then reach for a medicinal song that provides a link to higher creation transformation power. In the contrarian juxtaposition of a critically piercing stab and a musically penetrating joy, the sacred vibration comes through to realign your relations within and with all.
Feel free to “Accentuate the Positive” at the campfire singalong as long as there is equal room for “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and “Inner City Blues.” “Somewhere” there’s a place for us “Over the Rainbow,” whether it’s “On a Clear Day” or we have to say “Here’s that Rainy Day.” To get cooked in the fire you need to “Stay on the Battlefield” while still remembering “You Must Believe in Spring.”
As you broaden the scope of your musical ecology, do the same with your thinking and emoting. Reset your relationship to the changing moods so the reflecting moons of Jupiter and Mars will rock the “Age of Aquarius” to protest again as it sings and feels joy whenever any needed criticism is allowed to deliver its sting. This truly is “A Time for Love” and “We’ve Only Just Begun.”
-The Keeneys, June 7, 2020
[1] See Tara Isabella Burton, “The Self-Centered Religion Shared by Marianne Williamson and Donald Trump,” in The Washington Post, August 1, 2019.
Photo by Matt Briney on Unsplash