Jazz & Cosmic Threads

I’ve been rewatching the Ken Burns jazz documentary. It’s hands-down one of the best things I’ve ever watched. Not in form per se, but in subject. While it’s about jazz on the surface, it’s really a showcase of the capacity of soul and the presence of higher places.

Often humanity, with its double edged sword of language, can catch and order and encapsulate that which needs to be said, and spread. Often this tool does just the trick, and eloquently so. Hello Einstein. But there are regularly times where messages, frequencies, pleas, et. al, cannot be done justice by words, no matter how flowery or mathematical. No matter how people try to birth them and mold them.

These are “eras,” no matter how big or small, that are eras of the heart. Eras of the high. Eras that transcend the borders we so often draw for ourselves, or for others.

The rise of the Blues was just such a time.  No amount of words or money or status or peer reviewed papers could have “said” what needed to be said during this time and by that group of people. Well…maybe. Maybe with enough craft and combination of people, a powerful string of words could have formed “on paper” that said every gorgeous and gut-wrenching thing that needed to be said. But not near enough people would have listened, could have listened. For it was not our brains that needed to learn, nor could they have learned in the right way.

I look back at this time and see a cosmic thread of truth that was speaking its language through us. Expressing itself in cosmic ways. I suppose this thread is always hanging there if we so choose to seek it, but there are times when we lack enough seekers. Back then those who were grounded, who did not receive gifts from their fellow man, were the needles through which the thread flowed.

The music sought those who did not seek. It educated the parts of us that cannot read. It broke down walls that would still be standing if language stood as our main mode of communication.

The music is proof if there ever was, that letting raw truth and love flow is far, far more enduring than hate. In fact, I’m not sure anything else fully works when it comes to matters of the heart.

The harder you try to box people in, the thicker the thread becomes. The more cosmic their message will play.