Too Deeply Blessed to be Stressed and Not Rest (with My Local Birdsong, Löwe, and Schubert)

All photos taken June 10-17, 2024, by the author, Deeann D. Mathews

I noticed something about myself, standing by the Jubilee Celebration roses in San Francisco's glorious Rose Garden, and noted it that it bore further examination ... I don't do celebration like other people do, and the thought came back to me again as I received some information that heralded another great milestone in the progress of my book.

Folks speak of cracking champagne, going out to celebrate with food and festivities, getting together with friends and letting everybody know and basking in the glory ... but me? I want this!

... and it dawned on me after reconsidering that long walk through the redwood hollow to the Rose Garden: it's about energy usage. I climb my local hills, and it is just as it is on real mountains. People imagine -- and even indulge -- in big celebrations at the top, but if you know you know. As Ed Viesturs, one of the world's greatest mountain climbers, has said it: "Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory." Most people are injured or die on the way down because they have neither saved enough energy or planned their way down as well ... and even in my local hills, I have to keep this in mind. If what you do is climb, you don't waste your energy, and that rolls over into the rest of your life.

But also, when we speak of "mountaintop experiences" ... I think of "milestones" on a continuing climb, not some accomplishment that will finally prove to someone else that I ... whatever. Spotlights mean little to me save for their usage, and bragging rights mean nothing. My choice of reward for my labors, and my solace for the struggles and failures along the way, is the same. Why it should be so was not completely clear to me at the time of my considerations, but that it is so was clear to me.

But of course, I do notice that I am advancing in the world ... it has come to a point that the gap between how I operate and how my culture expects me to operate is kind of a yawning chasm, and the sound of the wind whipping through it is a bit ... disturbing ... but then again, I know where to go to not be disturbed by the wind ... so, out upon my walk I went and came to one of my favorite places to sit ...

... and listened to the symphony of the dawn of summer ... I wondered if Beethoven had heard some of the same birds in a Viennese summer, because many of them were singing variations of this back and forth to each other ...

... but then blended the longer lines at the end... now I wondered if the authors of the Mexican folk tune "La Cucaracha" had heard the same birds I heard in California, earlier in their journeys migrating northward in the spring...

Some hummingbirds showed up ... their Bs really had more of the sharp crack of the clarinet at that height, but I am going to play it all out for flute, so we'll keep it here ...

... and around that time the birds I had heard before modulated down to B flat and developed a new, long theme ...

... while the wind sang overhead through the higher trees, sounding like distant ocean waves, for the strength of the wind could not reach the birds nor me in that secluded high seat in the hollow of the Fuchsia Dell.

So there we all sat, all this happening in that hour around me ...

Yet somewhat distantly through the portal of imagination ... well, already through the portal and walking up from the other end of the fuchsia dell, was a song in deeper in tone than the wind in the tops of the trees, though as sweet as the birds -- a voice singing the story of a German who knew the song of every bird, and one day, in doing faithfully what he did best regarding the birds, was approached by those who knew his skill, consistency, and faithfulness, and was made emperor. That sounds like a fairy tale, but something like that apparently did happen to Henry the Birder, or, "Heinrich der Vogler," as presented by Carl Löwe!

To think -- yet again -- that my favorite basso profundo had refused the best-known bass roles in Wagner in order to sing such simple and yet beautiful songs so rich with meaning ... for of course, without him even needing to explain it, I knew that half the lesson for me that day, verging upon new milestones, was 'He -- or she -- who is faithful over a few things shall be made ruler over many' ... but to think that he had passed over such acclaim to leave such a legacy ...

"Well, Frau Mathews, there are advantages to remaining a humble little bass, and one of them is that humble little contraltos might just listen to you and let you sing your humble little songs on Hive, a place where people who could be on Web 2 instead choose the humbler path of community on Web 3 ... and, that's my kind of audience, too, for you know I enjoyed my small community singing gatherings too!"

The Ghost of Musical Greatness Past at last made it up the little hill in a hiking suit of hunter green with sky blue hiking poles, blending quite well ainto the blue and green of the day until the sun caught his white hair and gently tanned face ... and I smiled, because ...

"How are things up at home this week, Herr Altesrouge?"

"Old Blush," the nickname he had gotten from the roses in San Francisco's Rose Garden, befit him well at that moment, for he colored up like a gorgeous rosebud as he laughed.

"About as well as you expect, Frau Blumenkind!" he said, likewise picking up his new nickname for me as the German for flower child. "In choir rehearsal I was no sooner back that Jerome Hines stopped me and said, 'We didn't know Beethoven's Scherzo from his Seventh Symphony was such an operatic treat, Kurt!'"

"I don't think even Beethoven knew that," I said with a chuckle.

"Because Jerome is 21 years my elder, I simply said that it had been an honor to discover such a thing, an honor to be noticed by him discovering it, and that I was sure his time of similar discovery would be granted to him soon! Whereupon he answered, 'Now see here, you pert youngster --.' but he was overtaken with laughter just as much as everyone else, for he is a good sport, always! It has been a good time, overall, I must say ... and it allows me to appreciate the quieter music here all the more."

He sat down by me on the log, and closed his eyes in great pleasure as the birds sang over us and the wind rustled far above. We settled into his viewpoint on time ... there was plenty of it in both summer and eternity ... and so it was a long time before he spoke again.

"I was reminded of 'Heinrich der Vogler' as you sat here because of your noting the songs of the different birds around you ... and as you sit here, having determined that whatever change in your fame and fortune that begins after tomorrow ... or not ... you shall be who you are."

"I have," I said. "In reality, everyone does remain who they are."

"Indeed," he said. "Therefore, Frau Mathews, the answer to a rather complex question about why you are here not doing what others might do in your place is partially manifest. You were called and set on your path young, and you are forever arriving where you are going!

"Now I have observed, as you have, that people often seem to change when fame and fortune at last come. But we often do not know who people truly are until they have the resources to live out their actual desires. Neither do we always know who people truly are until we have resources, while they still do not, that will allow them to live out their actual desires."

For a moment, a look of deep concern came across his face, followed by intense concentration ... a hard point had to be made in the lesson now, but he wrapped that point in all his wisdom and his gentlest, double-deep tones measured at a careful pace ...

"This is why, Frau Mathews, you are so deeply blessed in that you separated from your old circle while they still considered you on the rise but not there yet, not yet with the fame and fortune and leaving with it, and why you are so deeply blessed that you yielded to the reality that there is no bridge, and can be none, for your protection."

My intellect had time to measure out that indeed, all delay of me achieving my potential in fame and fortune until I accepted the permanency of such separations was indeed a great blessing. My memory was still quick enough to have my whole life for a decade flash before my eyes in light of how much worse that would have been had I been trying to leave all kinds of situations while taking fame and fortune with me -- there were enough dead institutions and bodies in that decade so there had been absolutely no need for anyone to add mine to the number.
But as for the pain from the past, and of that realization in the present -- though that point had gone to the depth of my heart, what pain?

Then I remembered the difference between those who use sharp pointed things: the surgeon does so to aid in healing, knowing that the pain and trauma response alone of deep cuts -- the shock alone -- can kill. So, though he or she cuts as deep as any murderer, he or she does so with strength and skill and strategy for good, after the application of sufficient anesthesia to spare the patient deadly levels of pain, and before the prescription of appropriate medication to keep that pain at bay so the patient can heal.

"I am actually not the surgeon, Frau Mathews, although, to follow your analogy, a patient may or may not know everyone in the operating room unless told. So I tell you plainly: the Great Physician handles all such matters regarding you. The surgical removal of you from a decade of unsuitable companions -- or, in His own terms, the pruning of all connections unsuitable to you for bearing the fruit He intends for you -- is His work. It has merely been my honor to have been appointed as a pain management specialist."

Anesthesia before, appropriate treatment after ... he was still at that same pace and that gentleness of depth as he further corrected and explained ... so the birds sang, and the wind made a shimmering sound in the height of the trees like cymbals of sweetly-tuned brass caressed by brushes in a master hand ... and my heart seemed to be wrapped in velvet ... I had been given rest from all that had hurt me, and there was nothing left but this great truth to acknowledge, with deep gratitude: "Indeed in all things that have been given, and also taken away, I have indeed been deeply blessed."

The length of a summer day and eternity are not quite the same ... when the shade at last overtook us in that high seat in the Fuchsia Dell, we then walked onto the next portion of the lesson, for along the way this place to rest caught our attention in a sunny meadow ...

"I know you love a stand of redwoods, Frau Mathews ... ."

This was another place of important memory, one that made everything else I had been doing in the park possible.

Here, cars flowed around us from where the easternmost portion of the park met Stanyan Street ...

... but from this distance the sound of their passing was like the wind in the trees far above, while my view was this ...

... and I found myself in the same happiness there as I had back in the Fuchsia Dell... it took so little ... nothing but time gloriously spent on days when I felt like walking the loop, $2.50 when I chose to spare my healing foot a little from a full two miles of walking ... not for three years had I a vacation nor had I felt in need when such moments were so near to me.

"But that is not so little, Frau Mathews," my companion said. "It is little in the eyes of a world so greedy, so loud, so calloused that it knows nothing that your soul knows ... of meeting the limits of ecstasy from nothing more than a sunny day or in a passage of music, or both ... of the truth that a broken heart, alone, can kill ... of the connection between gratitude and new strength ... of being alone in the eyes of the world and yet knowing every space is full because the One Who has called you was there when you arrived ... not even to speak of what you have created from what your soul has been called to know and abide in. You think that little? Not for $2.50 or $250 trillion -- they are in essence the same number -- could the immensity of what you have be purchased.

"You know this, Frau Mathews, instinctively, for you have not taken a new permanent walking partner in four years. Can anyone love the striving and the greed and the petty competitions of the world, and have them be the conversation of the hour, but also walk with you?"

"No," I said. "You are right. $2.50 and $250 trillion are exactly the same number in that respect -- not for all the money in the world."

"We surface this matter today that you may have it in conscious wisdom, Frau Mathews, for as I have said, you are deeply blessed to have these things before your elevation in the eyes of the world, and I am called to nothing but to further that depth of blessing and your understanding of it. As such, Frau Mathews, though it be a summer day, for three minutes I must return us to a winter's journey ... for in the tenth song of Winterreise, the character actually does come to a safe place to rest."

"I take it you would not recommend him as a walking partner, still," I said.

"Frau Mathews, a good portion of the point of my existence, in history and extended in Q-Inspired, is to make sure you and anyone who pays attention to either one of us never does take such a partner, for any journey whatsoever. I share with you now the tenth reason in a set of twenty-four."

"Rast" caught me by surprise, coming as it does right after "Irrlicht," in which the character has wandered in and out of a deep river valley into which a will-o'-the-wisp had led him ... after the audacity of saying "I'm used to going astray,' and after escaping through a dry river valley -- quite a rough path, that song 9 -- the character in song 10 finds himself cozy in a tiny cottage, in a warm and safe place to rest ... and starts complaining ... he did not know he was tired until he found rest ... he was more cheerful on the road against the storm and obstacles, and the storm helped to blow him along ... now at rest, the bruises from all that climbing out of that river valley are paining him, and in the stillness, a serpent is stinging his heart ... .

To have been brought to rest ... but to not be fitted for it ... to be in a place of safety ... but long for the situations that hurt you because that pain distracts you from the deeper pain you cannot or will not find a way to grieve and release ... "Rast" as song 10 answers "Der Wegweiser" as song 20 in advance ... you will never give up the toxicity you believe you need, even if it is deadly ... the same man who in a place of rest longs for the storm later finds that even when he at last longs for rest, he cannot make himself go to any place of safety. Even a graveyard will not vouchsafe him a peaceful rest in song 21. That which he had and could not appreciate in song 10 will never be his again.

But now, the particular details of this particular interpretation ... that immense black velvet voice, so big and yet so close ... in that tiny cabin ... but surely as it is in 'In Dem Kirchhofe' on another stormy day, surely there is someone there in that cabin, a humble host for whom the singer has put on his "inside voice" ... at first ... as if that host had inquired if his guest were comfortable ... and heard this answer ... from calm to suddenly shouting, and back to calm, and back again -- those high Fs in a basso profundo voice!

Now, by contrast I did check the recording of Martti Talvela, my great Finnish favorite who uses his gloriously cavernous voice to make one hear that space as empty ... like he is singing out of a tomb where he has been buried alive in his own discontent, his shouts heard by no one ...

That is a horror worthy of the writing of Edgar Allen Poe ... perhaps of "The Raven," in which the character is brought to a state of maddening terror between a stormy night and his inability to move through and beyond his grief of his lost Leonore. That is high praise from me for Martti Talvela, as always ... he, being my first beloved among European basso profundos, calmly retains a tie for first place whenever I return to his singing.

Yet if you have ever read Ambrose Bierce's collection of horror stories aptly named In the Midst of Life ... if you know the ins and outs of what makes for serial killers who are effective in gaining the trust of their victims ... then you would know what Kurt Möll chose to do ... to convey a horror that somehow already has gotten too close for comfort ... for if all one has is a tiny cottage for safety against the winter's fury, and one has brought in one who prefers that fury to rest, one has essentially, in an act of well-meaning kindness, brought in the destroyer of one's own sanctuary.

To follow a much older fable when it comes to serpents in winter: in Aesop, a man once rescued a frozen snake and put him in his pocket, only to die when the snake bit him even though that meant that the snake would eventually freeze and die as well. Martti Talvela reveals the nature of the snake, unchanged by better circumstance. Kurt Möll lets you know what happens when you, well-meaning and unaware, take that snake with all his venomous nature into your life.

"For, Frau Mathews, long have you read ... from Genesis 3, when Eve, unaware and well-meaning, was deceived, down through Poe, and Bierce, and Conan Doyle, and Frau Christie ... across to Jules Verne and his endlessly fascinating and deadly Captain Nemo ... and to Melville and his equally fascinating and deadly Captain Ahab ... and in history and news have you read of how it occurs that men and nations are subtly overtaken. So, you were well prepared, Frau Mathews, now to know what you know."

I shivered, and then wept, wept for the tragedy of being brought to rest while being unfit for it, and then wept in gratitude and joy for the grace shown me, in every way that I had been fitted, separated from those unsuitable, brought, and taught how I was to safely abide in the rest I had been brought to ... indeed, I had been deeply blessed.

My companion sat down by me and held me through that great release of emotion, and then made a set of gentle observations.

"You are not unlike Ambrose Bierce, Frau Mathews, in that you are aware of the height and depth of matters in the midst of everyday life, and you add with that a mind such that you see all events and people flowing from eternity past through all known recorded history and the present into eternity future, all in a great arc of redemption offered, accepted, or rejected. That is a way of viewing life that is so intense that transient things like pomp, circumstance, fame, fortune, and champagne might not be deep enough to move you, though they move those heedless to the deeper realities of which you are keenly aware.

"Within that, Frau Mathews, already you are accustomed to walking and resting in the kinds of joys that go with your perspective of life. In the decade that I sang Haydn's Creation, you as a little girl first read Genesis 1 and 2 and were taken out into your beautiful state and shown the things ... you were given picture books and magazines that showed you all that has been made, and you were taught that the One Who did all that loved YOU, and was willing to make you a redeemed daughter in His family ... and you believed it, at that tender age. So you already knew, in those tender years, that Haydn was singing to you of your things to enjoy, for all eternity. You also had with you the deepest treasures of music given you by your own African American heritage, telling you exactly the same things.

"So, now, as you intently choose your own things, and you abide in them, know that your permission to do so has already been granted you from eternity past, and flows through the present into eternity future. When people struggle to understand that, refer them to the One Who called you, and granted the permission ... or at least, remind yourself, and do what you young people say to do relative to all things not worth considering: give it a rest. Or, as we have both learned from Strauss: nur ruhe, Frau Mathews, nur ruhe.' "

"Or, from idiomatic German, 'Lass mich in die Ruh,' from me to the world," I said. "Leave me at rest ... or in Mahler, not caring when 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.'"

He considered this for a moment, and then shook his head with a smile.

"Frau Mathews, I do not think that last part will actually occur for you. Yet it is one thing to make one's place in the world by competing and conquering and making chattel of others, and another thing to have it given to you because you are a faithful steward of your life, a beacon of that great light and joy in which and for which you are called. You are on the path to the latter. The only way to avoid that is not possible for you; your heart is not hard enough such that you can overlook personally blessing this one here and that one there, and these over here, and those over there. All those people are in the world, too, and they have influence. That number is adding up, Frau Mathews, and eventually -- well, remember Heinrich, and how his career as a bird-herder ended?"

My companion sang "Heinrich der Vogler" again, gently emphasizing the last verse in which the choice of all the German people as emperor looks up and reverently thanks God for the catch of the day ... for both the birds of the past and the throne of the present are the same ... gifts to a man beloved, with acknowledgement and gratitude thus properly returned ... the work of course would be different, but both were gifts ... and then I understood where the advancement to come fit in, for it had been decreed from eternity past: "You have been faithful over a few things ... I will make you ruler over many."

"I have said to you recently that you understand the side of loving deeply, Frau Mathews, but you have yet to fully understand the side of being deeply loved. Know for certain that as you attend faithfully to what you do thoroughly understand, you are permitted and shall be fitted to understand, thoroughly, what is not yet clear to you. Love will overtake you, and may well carry you to heights even in this world that you cannot conceive of yet. Be faithful in those things given to you, and you will learn in good time as you go!"