A broken tulip

Thoughts come along at the oddest times. Sometimes they are silly. Sometimes they are lovely. Sometimes they are a cross-breed of silly and lovely… sively?

This Fall’s silly-lovely comes from daily drives to the farm where I work. I drive with one elbow permanently out the window and the other hand negotiating the stick shift. My windows are always cranked down in my A/C-less car and music pours out.

What if you could see music? Can you imagine one car dripping long, droopy sound waves elegantly over the landscape, while out of another came short, staccato flowers, dropped like stepping stones across a stream? Maybe rap looks like hastily scrawled, raspy lines and maybe choral music jumps out the window like majestic redwoods.

What if the flowers and trees we pass by see and love the music drifting out our windows; what if they wait for the “regular” cars that daily pass? What if what flowed out of our windows was not only music but peace, laughter, sorrow?

What happens when you pull up alongside another car and your musics meet? One music slips out the window just cracked open, while another music tumbles out of the cranked down window. In the open air the two create an unlikely dance pair: hip hop with waltz, salsa with highland dance. What fun!

Oh yes, and those cars that are sealed off yet cough little reverb clouds as they drive. Have you noticed those?

Maybe, just maybe, our daily lives produce a beautiful, chaotic cacophony of sound and sight that we are blind to. Maybe it takes all of us wacky individuals to weave this beautiful tapestry seen nowhere else on earth.