December 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year? (Author: Jeffrey Davis)
Alright, this one almost broke my resolve to participate in Reverb10, I have to admit. When I first read this prompt on Saturday I thought “Really? These prompts are starting to sound like a condescending sunday-school teacher asking “Rain. Why did God flood the whole earth except for Noah and his family?” The prompt was not only too broad for me to be tempted but it also hinted at a certain level of empty kool-aid cup that I wasn’t sure I was thirsty for.
Saturday during the day I went to my alma mater’s college (American) football conference championship. I graduated from the University of Central Florida (UCF), which just made it into the BCS rankings for the first time ever. We’re also the second largest University in the United States with ~45,000 students in enrollment, so it’s kind of a big school. I went there for 8 years as I bounced among nearly every possible undergraduate course trying to find my direction and career. (Ultimately I gave up on finding a future and decided to take the shortest path out that resulted in a degree, wasting about two hundred additional credit hours in the process) Anyway, beyond all that tangent, I went with some of my closest college friends to watch our football team clench the conference title, which was great. It’s kind of like winning your league and getting invited to play at a special charity game because you’re a good team, if I had to compare it to any other sport. It was a fun thrill because I went to most games as a student but only a handful since.
Afterward we went and had (more) beer and food while we watched other teams play their games on TV, some of my friends went to those schools for their undergrad or graduate degrees.
When we were done watching football we wanted to keep enjoying what was a very pleasant day and sought out some live music. We went to Paddy Murphy’s Irish Pub in a highly developer-planned area of Orlando called Baldwin Park (previously a Naval training base, but was closed and sold off). They had a band called Seven Nations (audio) scheduled to play and when they finally took the stage I realized I had an answer to the prompt.
I always turn to music to promulgate a sense of “wonder” in my life. Music is a language that plays on our instincts and emotions, without a need for language or lyrics even. Music is present in every known human culture, from modern tribes to ancient ones, because we react to rhythms and sounds on a basic level. In our current times we’re able to carry all the music of the world in our pocket and hear it whenever we like, can you imagine being thrown back in time and having to wait for the social event of the year, a royal concert perhaps, to be the only music you hear? I think my example is a little extreme, I bet the boy in a nearby stable had a flute or something, but I’m just trying to say we’re very lucky.
I like music when I’m doing manual labor, I like music when I’m writing, I like music when I’m exercising, when I’m showering, and sometimes even when I’m trying to fall asleep. And the style and sounds in those situations are diverse, evoking such a range of emotion.
However, for the real sense of “Wonder”, nothing beats live music. Live music is controlled by the musician, their soul guides their practiced hands and mouths into producing a second voice and your only choice is to listen, rapt, to the message. It’s like a primal game to unravel a secret code or hidden cypher, to get the story the musician is trying to convey. Whether it’s a band of bagpipes, guitar, and violin, or a single woman and a microphone, there’s a spirit seeking kindreds willing to listen, and that creates a sense of Wonder in me every time.
Unfortunately, I tried to use Tumblr’s handy phone-in audio entry service, and it did connect, but it didn’t record the band playing, so my intention to at least augment this with a sample of Seven Nations’ music was unsuccessful, but I was surprised at the end of the day that I had not only my sense of Wonder for the evening, but that events had played out to remind me just how much I value it every day.
