Harmonic Frustration

In one blog I follow, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer posts a poem of hers, every day. A recent post refers to the song of a river; and what keeps it from falling into the clogged waters of cliché is Trommer’s telling us this riversong is due to the river being frustrated in its course, being impeded by changes and obstacles in its path.

Here’s the poem I’m referring to:

Tanka

The river song

fills the evening—an homage

not to flow

but to what

stands in its way.

Like most folks, I don’t like being frustrated. This poem, though, has me thinking. Just maybe there is something substantial to the cliché regarding the silver linings of dark clouds, or of the lotus flower blooming in a pile of yak flop. It also got me remembering that sounds, and especially musical ones, don’t happen without vibrations; and vibrations can’t occur unless there’s a disturbance to an object’s stasis, its sense of stillness and poise. Until, say a guitar string, is strung in taut tension and then plucked, there is no note, no music.

And I’m not all that comfortable with how this applies to life—to my life, especially. It makes me squirm, seeing that it’s only by being stretched and struck, or by being thwarted, that allows music to be manifested. But it does offer another meaning to the notion that we’re to be instruments of God’s will.