Synesthesia
Do you experience the melding of the senses? It is considered an anomaly by science but revered by indigenous people. It is a spirit and an embodied interbeing connection.
One time, driving to a ceremony, I told my indigenous teacher, “If I lay in the meadow on a sunny day and watch a Hawk above me flying in the sky, I feel and hear the movement of her flight in my body as if I am flying.” I feel the up-and-down movement in my muscles, I feel the buoyancy of air, and accompany all this movement is music.”
Watching the waves on the lake near my home, I feel the syncopated rhythm in my body, and my heart beat with the water. At the ocean, I feel and hear the rocking of waves. When we look at sheet music, we see this undulating procession of musical notes. For me, when I am at peace, when I have opened the spirit the spirit of the earth, the great mystery aligned with my soul, and my personal ego is set aside, then I hear and feel the rhythms and music of the world.
And I must confess the synesthesia comes and goes. Doubt silences the music for me. It occurs primarily when I am at ease when my thoughts are still, and I am in harmony with my environment and in nature. That is when the music and motion commence.
When I shared this experience with him, he had tears in his eyes. He said what I described was a natural gift of native people, and merging with the hawk was used as navigation in canoe journeys. That insight would never have occurred to me.
People on psychotropic drugs often experience this melding of the senses. But there are other portals to such enlivening experiences, such as dance, meditation, dreams, and deep emersion in nature. Synesthesia experiences have burgeoned as my faith in a mystical eternal,
and yet embodied world. It is an inter-being phenomenon.
