The Sound That Calls Us Home

“There is something in every man that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in himself.”— Howard Thurman

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”— Simone Weil

“Be still, and know that I am God.”— Psalm 46:10

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Several people sent me links about Dolly Parton this week. They knew I would be impacted by the news of her death, and they were right. Dolly has been part of the soundtrack of my life for as long as I can remember, although that soundtrack was never made up of only one kind of music.

My grandfather’s house was filled with symphonies and opera, Andrés Segovia, and music I absorbed before I was old enough to understand how deeply it would shape me. I trained as an opera singer from childhood into my teens, singing in choruses and chamber choirs, but my musical life never stayed inside the classical world. I sang in bands and earned the role of Adelaide through open auditions for a Washington, D.C., high school production of Guys and Dolls. Rock and roll was always there, and country entered through the people I loved: my stepfather, who played it while I rode beside him in his truck, and one of my best girlfriends, whose parents owned a well-loved country-and-western bar. Music can still bring an earlier version of my life back in an instant.

I think outer music was preparing me to understand something about the Holy Sound long before I had words for it. Radha Soami teachings eventually gave me those words. Shabd is the current of love and consciousness flowing from God, through creation, and back to its Source. It does not begin when somebody picks up an instrument, and it does not end when a song is over. The music I had loved all my life could reach the soul. This was the Sound that could carry the soul home.

Dolly was always a role model to me. I loved her voice and the songs, of course, along with the hair, the clothes, and her sense of humor. Mostly, though, I loved that she was exactly who she said she was. She never pretended the glitter was accidental, and she did not confuse humility with making herself smaller for other people’s comfort. She created Dolly deliberately, laughed about it, and never apologized for being fully herself. At the same time, she gave so much away: money, books, time, and whatever help she could offer, and often did it without fanfare. Her Imagination Library alone has put hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children. I have always loved that combination in her. She could be covered in rhinestones, command the room, and still understand that the room was not always about her.

We sometimes imagine that a spiritual life should make us quieter, more restrained, or less distinct. I don't believe that. I think the work is to become more honest about who we are while becoming less preoccupied with ourselves. Dolly was gloriously visible, yet her visibility made other people feel included. That is probably why people on opposite sides of almost every fence claimed her as their own.

One day after Dolly passed, Tim Curry died. I had barely taken in the loss of Dolly when another part of my musical history disappeared. For a brief period of my life, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a ritual for me and my friends. We dressed up, shouted at the screen, threw rice and toast, and danced the Time Warp. It was ridiculous and joyful and completely outside ordinary life. Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter did not ask anybody’s permission to enter the room as himself. He arrived in heels and pearls, in absolute possession of the moment.

Dolly Parton and Tim Curry were not people I would have thought to place together but losing them so close together made me consider why both mattered to me. Dolly lived her larger-than-life persona in public. Tim Curry was far more private, but in Frank-N-Furter he created a character who gave generations of people permission to imagine themselves beyond the usual boundaries. Dolly expressed that freedom through the way she lived; Tim gave it form in a role he was brave enough to inhabit.

What impacted me in both was the refusal to be made smaller by other people’s expectations. I recognized it in Dolly herself and in what Tim Curry brought to Frank-N-Furter. One was a life being lived and the other was a performance, but both opened space for other people to feel less confined.

That kind of freedom affects me because it points toward something deeper. Each of us expresses life through a personality, with all its color and particularity, while Radha Soami teachings invite us to discover who we are within it all. We are soul. The roles we inhabit can bring courage and joy to other people, as Dolly and Tim Curry’s work did for so many. Beneath every note we play in the world, the Holy Sound continues calling us toward who we have always been.

This week was challenging for reasons that had nothing to do with public losses. Grief has a way of finding whatever is already tender, and there was plenty to find. I made repeated trips to Philadelphia while a family member underwent surgery. There was the hospital, the uncertainty, the work I was missing, and the constant effort of holding myself and everything around me together. By the end of the week, I was exhausted and could feel myself pulling inward.

Luckily, I was not carrying all of this alone. During those two hospital days, several close friends from the Path reached out personally. Their messages mattered more than they probably knew. One of my brothers drove us to and from Philadelphia both days and sat with me through the surgery. While we waited, we took a long walk and explored some of the city’s history. For a little while we were two friends walking through Philadelphia instead of two people waiting for something intense to be over.

Two other friends stayed with my pups. After already caring for them for two days, one drove all the way back to Philadelphia to take the same family member to a follow-up appointment. She knew how worried I was about missing more work. A friend who is also my coworker introduced me to a former client who had moved into a new position in my territory. On another week, I might have thought of it as an ordinary work connection. This week, I felt the support behind it, and it meant a lot.

Inside, I know with certainty that I never walk alone. This week reminded me that I am not walking through the outer parts of this life alone either. My friends paid attention and stepped in where they could. Their care took different practical forms, but I could feel the same love moving through all of them.

Meditation is usually where I go when the world gets too loud, but for two days I could not complete my full practice. That may sound minor. It did not feel minor. When meditation is the ground beneath your life, missing it can feel as though the ground itself has shifted.

In the language of the Path, my surat, or attention, had scattered outward into hospital rooms, highways, responsibilities, and the relentless activity of my own mind. I kept running my mantra through my thoughts, but the noise was accumulating in my body. I could feel myself moving farther away from the still place I knew was there.

When I become that overwhelmed, I sometimes close myself in a bathroom for a few minutes and shut my eyes. Other times I have to wait until I am finally home. Almost immediately, I can hear Kathy whispering, “Shh.” I can feel her finger moving gently upward over my third eye. I remember the coolness of her hand and her scent, something like flowers and ocean air.

In the early days after I met her, Kathy did this when I was stressed or upset. Sometimes she recognized that I was overwhelmed before I did. My thoughts would come faster and faster until the whole process locked up. I could not have explained that to her then. I did not need to. With one touch, she drew my scattered attention toward the third eye, the place the teachings identify as the seat of the soul and the doorway within.

Energy poured through me like rainwater. My body calmed, and my mind finally stopped racing. It felt almost like anesthesia, or like a mother quietly crooning to a baby. I know there was a response in my nervous system, but that explanation only goes so far. Through Kathy came the presence of Shabd, or God. Some part of me recognized it before my mind had any idea what was happening. Nothing outside me had changed, yet I had been gathered back into the right place.

Her physical presence is no longer here for that moment to return. But the body remembers tenderness, and the soul remembers the current through which it came. The outer Master turns us toward the Master within. I close my eyes, hear that soft “shh,” and stop trying to contain the whole world at once.

In Radha Soami practice, we withdraw scattered attention from its constant movement through the senses and bring it toward the eye center through repetition of the Holy Names, contemplation of the Master’s form, and listening for the inner Sound. We do it imperfectly. We wander off and return, again and again. As attention begins to collect, the soul can hear the Shabd that was sounding the entire time. I am not trying to escape my life when I turn inward this way. A wave draws back and returns to shore. The breath empties and fills again. I withdraw so I can come back from somewhere deeper than my outer self.

The point of spiritual practice cannot be to remain untouched by hospitals or grief or death. I thought about that while watching a message from Sadhguru after the catastrophic flooding near the Nepal-Tibet border. A group returning from a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash had been inside an immigration building when the flood swept through the town. Approximately eighty people remained unaccounted for. Sadhguru struggled to speak through his tears. In front of him, people were wailing.

It was painful to watch. There was no polished lesson and no attempt at spiritual composure. He was standing inside the helplessness of not knowing what had happened to people entrusted to his care. He asked the authorities to allow him into the devastated area with a small group of volunteers so they could help search, whatever the risk. His spiritual life had not made him impervious to grief, nor do I believe that genuine spirituality should. What I saw was a man willing to let suffering break his heart and still move toward it.

We can misunderstand detachment as distance, but spiritual depth should make us more responsive to another person’s pain rather than less. We become quiet so we can hear what is actually present, and what we hear will not always be peaceful. Sometimes it is music or the Holy Sound within. Sometimes it is the strain beneath a friend’s words. That day it was the sound of people crying for those who might never come home from a sacred pilgrimage.

The Holy Sound does not make us deaf to the cries of the world. It makes us more able to hear them. If the current drawing me inward does not change the way I meet another person’s suffering, then I have missed something important. This week I felt that current in the attention my friends gave me. I saw it in Sadhguru’s willingness to move toward people who needed help, even when he was grieving too.

Karma still unfolds, bodies tire, and people we love leave while the mind continues trying to control what it cannot. In Kathy’s book, The Living Master, Maharaj Charan Singh says, “Love is something in which there is that complete surrender, that merging of our will, our love, into Him - just losing ourselves in Him. We then find that we don’t exist anymore. We find only that the Lord exists, the Lord is acting, the Lord is speaking, the Lord is doing. We merge ourself in that Ocean, we are lost in that Ocean of Love.”

Meditation does not erase a difficult week. It loosens my grip on it. Somewhere below the overtaxed mind and the exhausted body, I remember I am more than the role I am playing. My own suffering does not have to seal me off from everyone else’s. If I let it, it can help me recognize what another person is carrying.

Tonight, I will hear my dear sister sing at a retreat center created by another member of our spiritual family. She sings songs of longing for the Master, who was also my Teacher. Hearing her brings me back to Kathy’s room, where I watched Kathy sway to the music and mouth the words along with her. After this week, it seems right to end up there among people I love and let music lift my attention again.

I am grateful for all the ways love reached me this week, some visible to millions and others so quiet that only a few people knew they were happening. One of the quietest came through Kathy: “Shh.” It was never an instruction to stop making noise. It was an invitation to become quiet enough to hear the Sound that has never stopped calling me home. From there, if I am really listening, I can hear the world calling for love.