Birds sang, when God made the world

When God made the world, birds sang.  This is a secret which the morning song of the bird teaches me each dawn, every morning light is song, song is light,  When the dawn comes, the bird begins to sing, and song is bought into the world.  When the bird begins to sing, dawn comes and light is brought into the world.  Song and light are one and the same.

But to be able to hear this great secret of creations – that light sing the world into being and song lightens the world – requires a radical shift in our ways of understanding the world and living in it.  For me, this shift was the earthquake of the soul which happened with the death of my wife.  I lost touch with anything that was meaningful or useful.   What did it matter to me now that I had a house, that I paid bills on time, that I was a good citizen who had lived by the rules and obeyed the law?  I cared nothing for any of that, and in this condition I was being made ready for a change.

The change came when, sometime in the beginning of the third year after my wife’s death, mourning yielded to melancholy, when small shoots of green joy began to puncture the dead and barren landscape of my winter soul.  In the sweet happiness of melancholy, in that gentle state of feeling newly born, I discovered a kind of presence which precedes meaning and makes all of our meaning making possible.  The dawn song of the bird, a most useless thing, evoked a presence which understands that, when the dawn comes and the bird sings, the song is a celebration of the light.  That is all! The early morning light is the song of the bird, and the bird’s early song is the light of creation.  A beautiful kinship renewed each morning, a continual reminder of the love between morning light and the song of the bird, a love song.  All of this is really nothing, nothing at all.  But all of it is really everything.

Roman Romanyshyn  :  The Soul in Grief