Language of the Soul

Since May, I have had the pleasure of being in a book club with some of the most encouraging ladies I've ever known.  We meet every two weeks to talk about classical literature but I leave every time encouraged as a believer, as a mother, and just as a person in general.  Right now we are right smack dab in the middle of John Milton's Paradise Lost.  It's Milton's fleshed out version of the fall of Satan and subsequent fall of man written in epic poem version.  And it's gorgeous.  We spent some time tonight talking about how sometimes poetry can say things in such ways as to make them make more sense than prose.

The same is true for all of the arts, I think.  Whether a painting, a poem, a song, or other art form, I believe that they reach different parts of us than mere words.  They speak a language of their own and differently to each one of us.  They are the languages of the soul.  It was actually happy coincidence that we talked a bit of this tonight because I was thinking about it in regard to music last night.  B and I watched the movie, "The Soloist", and it was incredible.  It is the true story of a LA Times reporter who befriends a homeless man who is a musical prodigy.  There is this one beautiful scene in the movie where Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the homeless musician, is presented by the reporter with a cello for the first time in many years.  Mr. Ayers sits down on a makeshift stool on the side of the road and begins to play.  And the look on his face as his bow glides across the strings!  He's hearing the language of his soul for the first time in years.  And I knew that look because I know that language too.  I was almost in tears.  Jamie Foxx should have won an Oscar for that scene alone.  

Maybe everyone's like this and I just don't know it, but songs speak to me in ways that nothing else can.  Music makes me feel alive.  What an incredible gift!

What makes you feel alive?