Nigun
A nigun is wordless melody, a string of notes, that when put together can take us to different places and times, express pain and joy, and spirituality, have a kind of magic.
Every note looks at the note that came before and says “Thank you for being my teacher,” and to every note that comes after, “I give you permission to be even more beautiful than I am”
The magic and the power of nigun is not the notes, but the relationship of each note to the other. That is the essence of spirituality: to understand that none of us are a single note. Notes came before us and notes will continue long after we are gone. Each of us have our own note to play – it wouldn’t be the same without our note – but we are part of a larger whole. And when we consider what spirituality is all about, we tap into all that depth.
Music is not just about the notes. Claude deBussy notes: “music is the space between the notes.” For if there was no space and all the notes played at once, it would be chaos. If every note was held the same, there would be no resonance, no feeling – and the result would not be music but something more like a scale.
We too need the quiet and silence that goes between. We are so focused on hitting all the right notes – all the things we want to accomplish – we need time and space in b/t so our life is a song and not a scale.
It’s easy to feel like the space b/t the notes is dead time, a waste – but it’s not. There is no music without this space. – different amounts of space brings a new rhythm, and quiet allows us to feel the vibration and resonances of the notes we need to make our life a song.
