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I bet music, movement and dance were an essential  human experience from nearly the time of our earliest beginnings.  It’s power to heal humans is probably as powerful as our experience with music is ancient!

And speaking of the passage of time, I finally today photographed this picture my son, who is now 26, created when he was 6 weeks away from his 6th birthday.  I kept an art portfolio of every piece of art my son did until he left home at 18 — but this piece NEVER left my side!

He doesn’t remember this, of course, but I wrote a note on the back of it that lets me remember!  He and I had gone to the high school to listen to my daughter’s concert (she played sax).  The instant my son returned home he ran to the table in the house with the art supplies on it, grabbed this stiff cardboard 11″ x 14″ black background and went to work quickly and passionately expressing his emotions from the music he had just heard.

The music MOVED him.  That he at his young age specifically gifted this work of art, his creation, to his Mom with love — and did not destroy the art piece because it took him all those attempts to get his message to me the way he wanted it — well over the passage of time in this case the music AND the visual art work give me JOY (as has my son FOREVER!)

I am doing a great job of learning to read the music for this song, to PLAY it – and most importantly to HEAR it in my BODY as it comes through my body into existence in the immediate space and TIME of my life:  STARLIGHT WALTZ by C.S. Brainerd (orchestra listen here – piano solo listen here – but I’m not this good yet)!  I am ALMOST crossing the threshold of enjoying the process.

Crossing the threshold to the experience of total JOY is not an easy task for severe child abuse survivors!  No, of course being joy-full is NOT supposed to be a TASK at all!  Therein lies the clue!  Early abuse, especially relationship trauma during the first year and through the second year of life CHANGE the development of the JOY pathways in the developing body and in the brain.

A long, broad and very solidly entrenched highway of fear and sorrow carves itself into the body-brain of an abused infant INSTEAD of all the OTHER expressions of life in the world that a safe, secure and loved infant will build into theirs – INCLUDING the experience of true joy.

Joy, I believe, is an experience that does not ever exist when trauma is present.  Because early abuse implants the experience of trauma into a little one’s growing body-brain, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to get that trauma out again.  (Yup, like an impossible laundry stain!)

Therefore, we severe early abuse survivors will find ourselves celebrating ANY MOMENT we experience true joy – or at least what we imagine true joy to feel like.  I don’t think we will EVER take joy for granted the way ‘ordinary’ people can – and are SUPPOSED TO!  Being joy-full is, after all, what human evolution has designed us to experience in the best of all possible worlds – the aim and goal of our healthiest desires.

Part of what fascinates me about learning to read music and to play it is that time takes on a very real and tangibly-intangible meaning through this experience.  I suppose when we read words and write words in the literate literary fashion we are able to experience a relative of what I am talking about here.

I ENJOY reading and have from the time I was very young (reading classics by age 9, having Borderline mother accusing me of ‘pretending to read them’ to ‘show off’ – had she asked me a gosh darn thing about the story I could have told her – but that was the twisted nature of my Borderline Mother’s mental world!)

But I’m not sure reading written words has given me the kind of JOY that music has.

Before now there have been many times I have listened to music that has turned-my-crank and found itself in the middle of my DNA in the middle of the molecules in the middle of my cells – etc! – and FORCED me to MOVE and FORCED me to forgo rational thought!

But now learning to read and to PLAY the music – well, there are all those little notes on the paper, each with its own tiny piece of multitasking purpose!  Pitch!  Got it.  Tone?  Got it.  And TIMING?  GOT IT!

Put them all together, along with all those other little markings all over the pages that I don’t yet know the meaning of, and there is MUSIC which is tracking history in the passage of TIME.

Like the written word, music on paper tracks the inner experience of the person who did the writing.  But there is something SPECIAL to me about music BECAUSE the writer of music is specifically and exactly writing about the passage of time because without doing so – well, there is no music!

Of course any accomplishment in being able to read and actually PLAY the music allows for a totally different translation (within reasonable parameters) by the present-time musician over what the original musician meant to communicate.  That’s pretty marvelous, too!

At my age, I will NEVER take reading and playing music for granted any more than I take joy for granted.  Playing music, even when I get to playing my own inspirations, is a miracle of accomplishment to me.  Healing the musical channels in my badly infant-abused musical-sound brain and in those connections throughout my body is miraculous, also!

And because I believe so much of what lies within the PTSD experience is related to alterations in the passage of time – along with accompanying dissociation – my having discovered an activity that can so directly access, address and begin to physiologically HEAL some of these difficulties is – well – just another miracle in the passage of time!!

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