The Alphabet Playlist

When I'm driving along, I put my playlist on Alphabetical by Title.  It makes for an interesting juxtaposition of spoken words and music.  I have songs I didn't even know I had, probably imported from someone else's CDs.  And songs, like the poetic ones of Leonard Cohen, in which I hear something new each time I listen.

On one stretch of road, I heard Ram Dass (Jewish/Buddhist) fold so naturally into John O'Donahue's (Christian, Mystic) that they could have been at the same table conversing, agreeing with each other.  The higher spiritual leaders are on the ladder, the more they sound like each other, and the further they move from rigid pronouncements. These two teachers throw open windows and let in fresh air-- instead of posting signs over the doors, like US and THEM, BAD and GOOD.

In yesterday's road class, John O'Donahue and Ram Dass both spoke from the tip-top of the ladder, I thought. Thanks to the magic of digital preservation of voices,  John O'Donahue's living voice survives his own physical death of several years ago.  Ram Dass, now 84, has suffered a stroke since he gave the talks I'm listening to--on aging and death.

We should not fear death, O'Donahue says; rather, we should "build a little raft of words to help the dying person reach the other shore."

Both consider being present with a dying person as a privilege--and both tell stories about the final hours of transformation that often happen when a person is "leaving his or her body."  In the Buddhist tradition, they call it "dropping the body."

In my scattered life at home, I rarely take the time to listen to these voices.  On the road, music and talks I've saved take me to higher, more vivid overlooks, just as the landscapes outside my car window change as the light and weather changes.

Years ago, I bought a set of CDs by O'Donahue: Beauty.  When I listen to them now, I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard certain lines--at the gym, in Alabama on a previous road trip, driving along Big Sur.

"Beauty awakens us to the life we have been given--and tries to coax us into a new way of being in the world...." he says in his beautiful Irish accent. "Beauty always wants to break the present cage of confinement."

He quotes four sentences by the poet William Stafford, in Crossing Unmarked Snow:

The things you do not have to say make you rich.

Saying the things you do not have to say weakens your talk.

Hearing the things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.

And the things you know before you hear them, these are you and these are the reasons you are in the world.

He talks about the mediocrity and dullness of most talk that fills the airwaves--the heated fear-based raging  of certain political voices, the cliches of advertising, the noise of strident opinions.  If those are the only "channels" we listen to (to borrow an excellent analogy from Ram Dass), we can start thinking they are the only ones we have.

From the well of all journeys come music and insight that inspire--as well as, unfortunately,  wall-building opinions that evoke fear. Road trips are times to take a break from the latter and tune in to clearer, kinder channels.