We all know that music can be relaxing, uplifting, memory-stirring, and energizing. But music as a health tonic? Science now tells us much about the power of music to heal our bodies, lessen anxieties, and relieve stress. This last month I read about a new hospital recently built in Lafayette, Colorado, that has music designed into every part of the medical complex…from birdsongs or wind sounds when you leave the parking lot to soothing piano music in the reception area to an Irish harp piece in the emergency room. Every piece of music—and there are 9000 of them in all, so that you never hear the same piece during the day—has been specifically chosen for the part of the hospital where it is heard and for the time of day it is heard. This hospital is in the forefront of a revolution in health. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2004 released a report covering 600 studies that showed that design in hospitals—including sound and light—can have a dramatic effect on how fast and how well patients recover from illness.

I say that what is good for patients and visitors in hospitals is good for us at home…why not design our own environments with sounds that help relieve our anxieties or speed recovery from a cold? What about Mozart’s Violin Concertos when we feel blue? What about Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings if our blood pressure elevates? What about the CD “Mozart on the Go” when we want more pep and stimulation? This music can be adjuncts to the other things we do to take care of ourselves…and what a pleasurable antidote!

Mozart’s music, in particular, offers something for just about every ailment or need we might have, according to research. For anxiety, the recommendation is Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum.” For waiting time, Mozart’s String Quartets. For getting started in the morning, Mozart’s “Andante, Symphony #17.” Three Mozart CDs which we have had in our home for years and play over and over are Music for The Mozart Effect CDs: Vol. 1, Strengthen the Mind; Vol. 2, Heal the Body; Vol. 3, Unlock the Creative Spirit.

When I was writing Tough Transitions, my new book that will be out in June, I wondered why music seemed to be so helpful when we are going through hard times. Here is what I wrote in Tough Transitions:

How does music help? I’m sure we could read all sorts of sophisticated explanations, but I settle for something quite simple. This is something I learned from one of my early music teachers: that when you press down a key on the piano, you think you are hearing one note, but you are really hearing the key you have pressed plus all its overtones. These overtones—higher and higher sounds on the piano—that you hear at the same time you press the key down produce the note you hear just as all the colors in the spectrum produce the color white you are seeing when you look at a cloud. And what was so amazing that I remember it to this day was my teacher’s assertion that the overtones of a note in music are mathematical, that they occur in specific ratios, that they always occur in the same progression, and that they never change because they are a part of the physical universe. What the ancients called the music of the spheres is related to these set-in-nature harmonics.

So, in my amateur understanding of why I feel better after I listen to Barber’s Adagio for Strings is that I’ve heard order. I’ve heard the natural harmonics of notes and overtones. I’ve heard sound which conforms to a progression of ratios set in the universe. And somehow, in listening to this music, I am returned to balance, to internal order, to a sense of more harmony in my own life.

Music also helps me when I’m spent during times of tough transitions by taking me out of my verbal rational world into a creative, symbolic experience. Beethoven once said that music is the mediator between the life of the spirit and the life of the senses. So here I am trying to figure out how to get my aged parents to pick up meals at the community senior center, and I sit down to listen to Beethoven’s 9th. I am transported to another realm of experience. The music lifts my spirits. I am in this moment cavorting with my imagination, my intuition, my wordless self.

Then there’s the power of the emotion in songs I listen to when I’m disconcerted and trying to find solid earth to stand on. When Emmy Lou Harris sings, “I would walk…from Boulder to Birmingham…just to see your face,” and I’m grieving for a relationship that can be no more, there’s a correspondence, a fit. When I’m despairing over the challenges of a career change and listen to Elvis sing “I Believe,” I am quickened by hope; and when Barbra Streisand sings “We Are Standing on Holy Ground” I am touched by grace. I find a place for my emotions in these singers’ emotions. I experience recognition, relationship, and a deep sense of release.

National Geographic magazine recently wrote about a new documentary called “The Story of the Weeping Camel.” In this film nomadic Mongolians who have a camel that has rejected her newborn bring in a musician. This musician plays a song that brings tears to the mother camel’s eyes and results in her taking care of her new calf. One of the filmmakers says, “The nomads have ways of communicating with their animals by singing and playing instruments. Music can convey emotions and show affection, things an animal can sense.” Animals, human beings…we are all touched and changed by music. (From Tough Transitions: Navigating Your Way Through Difficult Times. You can preorder at Amazon.com now.)

So, on these early April days, may I suggest that we all brew a lovely cup of fragrant tea, sit, and listen to music that will uplift, heal, and invigorate us. Goodbye, winter. Hello, spring.

Love,

February 1 is the day St. Bridgid of Ireland is celebrated. This was one more phenomenal woman! Born in 451 or 452, she was a woman of great learning, artistic ability, and compassion. She founded the first convent in Ireland (which included both men and women.) She was designated a Bishop. She founded a school of art famous for its illuminated manuscripts and metalwork. She also founded a center of learning and spirituality famous all over Europe. She lived to be 71 years old, dying on February 1, which is now St. Bridgid’s feast day. In Ireland apple cake and apple dumplings are a favorite on this celebration day.

St. Bridgid of Ireland

We have dear friends in Derry, Northern Ireland, who continue the custom of the family sitting down on the night of January 31 and making a St. Bridgid cross out of straw. On the morning of February 1, the new St. Bridgid cross is put over the door in the kitchen (or over the front door) where it stays for the coming year until the next Feb. 1 when it is replaced with a new cross the family has made.

There are wonderful legends and folktales about Bridgid. My favorite is this:

Once on the way home she got caught in a rainstorm, getting soaked to the skin. Because of poor eyesight, when she took off her clothes in her room, she mistook a ray of light coming in the window for a clothes hook and hung all her wet clothes on a sunbeam where they stayed until they dried.

Such stories are, of course, fanciful…and at the same time they carry in them the seeds of respect and honor with which the real Bridgid was held by those around her. Evelyn Underhill has said that a saint is simply a human being whose soul has grown up to its full statue, by full and generous response to its environment which is God. A saint has achieved a deeper, bigger life…a more wonderful contact with the Mysteries of the University, a life of infinite possibility, the term of which a saint feels will never be reached.

	St. Bridgid’s Cross

All of us probably know one such saint. Someone who has a “deeper, bigger life…a more wonderful contact with the Mysteries…and a life of infinite possibility.” All of us can imagine ourselves growing little by little into being this kind of saint…someone who wants her soul to grow to its full stature.

So, in honor of all the saints we know (Think “When The Saints Go Marching In” played by a New Orleans jazz band–who would be in that march from your life and experience? Those are the kinds of saints we are talking about here!) and in honor of the the saint we’d like to be…our souls growing and our life full of infinite possibility…let’s celebrate all month long this amazing woman, Bridgid of Ireland!

You might even make an apple cake!

Love,

Apple Cake’s in Honor of St. Bridgid

In honor of St. Bridgid, who’s feast day traditionally involves apple cake, the e-mail newsletter asked for your apple cake recipes. And the recipes are coming in. Get the recipes and start baking!

This week I have been putting the finishing touches on my new book Tough Transitions that will be published in June 2005 by Warner Books in New York. Today I was writing about things I find myself doing that help me when I’m having a difficult time. I was focusing specifically on art. I talked about going to The Museum of Modern Art many years ago to see Monet’s water lily paintings in the early months of my being a widow. I’d sit on the bench for long periods of time in the room that held the water lily paintings. There was something about the serenity, the calm, the peace of the paintings that nourished me.

This is the cover of my new book to be published June 2005

Then I started talking about how I’ve found myself, during more recent tough transitions, gravitating to learning about color and going to exhibits where color is the topic of a particular show. Why? I don’t have a clue. I can only speculate–which I do in the section I wrote for the book this afternoon. I think I’ll share that section with you now. You can be my earliest readers—of a book that isn’t even a book yet!

Here is the section I wrote today about color helping me during difficult times:

From Tough Transitions, Section Entitled Responding:

Lately it’s been color that’s spoken to me most strongly as I moved through new transitions. I’ve gone to art exhibits based on color. Bought books about color. Sought out artists who build their creations around color. Whole new universes are opening to me that somehow and someway affect the way I think about my own transitions. Don’t ask me to explain this in some kind of one-to-one relationship, for I can’t. I just know that color and art are now nurturing subjects that I’m drawn to during times of upheaval and change.

Here is a left-hand page for the color salmon pink from the book called Colors

At the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston I bought a little book called Colors. The left-hand page will show you the color of, say, Parma Violet. The right-hand page will show you a painting “Evening in New York, 1890s,”by Childe Hassam in which Parma Violet is a predominant color. On another left-hand page you can see the color Green Blue and on the right Paul Signac’s “The Bonaventure Pine, 1893,” where the tree is that color. There’s cobalt blue and salmon pink and Sienna earth and carmine red and meadow green… each color showing up in a scene or a portrait an artist painted.

I’ve asked myself a dozen times why do I love this little book so? Why did I look at it almost every day when I was dealing recently with a really tough transition? I don’t know, except to say my eyes were always opened more, my mind stimulated, my imagination stirred when I put the book down. Perhaps the last page of the book gives a hint to why I find looking at and learning about color so satisfying when I’m in a difficult time. The author, Caroline Desnoettes, writes: Color, like painting, is a source of beauty and pleasure. By mixing the primary colors of yellow, red, and blue the painter obtains new, complementary ones—orange, violet, green. The painter organizes his [her] palette with cold colors—violet, blue, and green—and warm colors—yellow, orange, and red. Then he [she] adds white and black for light and shade. And so, the painter can make an infinite number of color combinations and give life to his [her] paintings as light reveals the color. Cold, warm, white, black… infinite number of combinations… give life… light… color: perhaps at some level I’m making an analogy to possibility in my own life. Who can say?

	Here is the right-hand page from the same book, showing the color, salmon pink, in a painting by Walter Ufer

I know I am so excited when I come across a line like this in another book called Color: A Natural History of the Palette. The first challenge in writing about colors is that they don’t really exist. Or rather they do exist, but only because our minds create them as an interpretation of vibrations that are happening around us. Yep, I say to myself, there’s something there for me to relate to my current life situation! I learn to understand color by having Victoria Finlay, the author, compare it to “a soprano singing a high C and shattering a wineglass, because she catches its natural vibration.” When light catches the natural vibrations of electrons, the expert tells us, it shoots them to another energy level where that portion of light is used up. What’s left is reflected out, and our brains read it as color.

Then there’s this:

	Here is a page from a calendar I have that features colors. All these colors make me happy.

The best way I’ve found of understanding this is to think not so much of Something “being” a color but of it “doing” a color. The atoms in a ripe Tomato are busy shivering—or dancing or singing; the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe—in such a way that when white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red—meaning paradoxically that the “red” tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red. A week before, those atoms would have been doing a slightly different dance—absorbing the red light and rejecting the rest, to give the appearance of a green tomato instead.

Ask me why this kind of information pulls at me when I’m in a tough transition, and I don’t have a clear answer. All I can tell you is that I’m enthralled by what I don’t know! By what I can’t see with my normal sight. I light up when I think of the turnips I have today in a dish on my counter top “doing” purple and white instead of “being” purple and white. Perhaps somehow this attention to color is enlarging my way of thinking about the world around me and making it less pat and solid and rigid. If the world’s full of vibrations that make music and create color, perhaps from the “vibrations” of my own life might make something interesting or something useful. If everything is always changing so that this week a berry on a bush is red when next week it will be black and ready for me to put in a cobbler…well, why do I try to hold on so tightly to the shape of my life as I have known it. But these suppositions are all in hindsight. Don’t believe for one minute that I think this way when I reach for a book or talk to an artist. I’m just doing what I’ve come to notice helps me when I’m in the kinds of Responding experiences we’ve talked about earlier.

I’d love to know how to respond to color. Why not send me an email from this website and let me know.

Have a wonderful September.