Photo by Nancy Wait; Park Slope, June 2014

There’s a melody in everything.
And once you find the melody,
then you connect immediately with the heart.
Because sometimes English or Spanish,
Swahili or any language gets in the way.
But nothing penetrates the heart faster than the melody.
Carlos Santana

I was thrilled to come across this quote in my facebook stream this morning. It’s exactly what I’ve been going on about lately!

What you see in the photo above is typical in my neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. These lovely wrought iron railings with flora and fauna poking through the bars. It was back in 2007 that I began hearing a song, hearing a duet in the vision, and then painting a series of little watercolors I called The Song of the Iron Railings and Flowers. I posted them a few weeks ago here. I tried writing about them back in ’07, and showed them around a few places, but found no interest in them. I knew what I was seeing and feeling, but maybe I hadn’t the ability to express it. Maybe it wasn’t the right time.

Photo by Nancy Wait, June ’14 Park Slope

Here’s another shot taken on my walk home recently. I wasn’t looking for anything, but once I came upon it I had to capture it — this example of living poetry. This beautiful melody between the fence and the flowers. The fence has its own rhythm. It sings its own song all year long. But the flowers have only sprung with the spring. See how they jump for joy behind the railing? And the pointed tops of the railing — don’t they look like mouths open in song? Or perhaps single petals, carved in iron.  They are the chorus, while the circles all in a row below and between them, thrum a beat. The circles are kept in line by the bars, which hum their own rhythm, keeping the beat, in line and in time.

But before I heard the music I saw the rhythm. Here, in this watercolor from 1994, a few

watercolor by Nancy Wait (1994)

years after I moved to Park Slope. I saw the swirling lines of Nature reflected in the stone carvings. I saw an iron circle like a porthole. And through the round window like a magnifying glass, I saw the delicate bare branches of a bush, reaching up to the willowy lines of stone. And I thought to myself, where on earth have I landed, that there could be such harmony and poetry — and beauty! on view — for any passerby to notice.

Form follows thought, and thought is consciousness. Every form expresses a consciousness. If we could look at everything (including one another) as an expression of consciousness (at any given moment) — while removing any and all judgments — what we would see is energy. It might be positive, it might be negative, but the energy will always be in movement whether we see it or not. And it will have a harmonic, whether we hear it or not.

I realize I haven’t mentioned that most important quality in Santana’s quote at the beginning of this blog:

…once you find the melody,
then you connect immediately with the heart.

Connecting with the heart. Well, first there is connecting to the melody. Next comes the heart, a topic I am working on for July 14th, when I will be a guest on the Healing Fountain. More on that to follow!

And last but not least, from today through July 10th, the Kindle version (also available on the free app) of my memoir, The Nancy Who Drew: The Memoir That Solved A Mystery, is only $1.99. Get it HERE. (Soon I hope to publish Vol. 2 of the memoir.)