Woven Image

Sunday was a family day. I had lunch with my dad before heading out to a benefit concert my cousins were putting on at a church (in Leisure World! If you know where that is) with their band, Woven Image. Many years ago, my amazing cousins started a non-profit organization, The Woven Image Sewing Institute in Hyderabad, India, to provide Untouchable women with sewing skills they could use to make a living. You can read about the institute here.  This organization is funded largely (entirely?) with donations collected at Woven Image benefit concerts. They play a variety of song types, all with a spiritual, community, or social justice theme. I had been to one of their concerts before and knew what they were about, so I pretty much approached the concert as if it was something I was simply going to sit through before we all went to dinner together.

As I listened to the words of the songs, I began to hear myself in them. I identified with the writers’ desperation of feeling pulled/propelled toward something, but not knowing what.  Of feeling that it’s right, but fearing that is not.  And of other people just not getting it, which only increases the fear and loneliness (or shame and guilt, if your intimates are into that kind of thing). I know what it’s like to feel the pain of stagnation and the desire to break free. That’s my life right now. Hearing my own story – and not just my story, but the same story I keep hearing from different authors over and over the more I read – in another’s song gave me an overwhelming sense of connectedness and oneness.  A new, compelling potential path came into my awareness.

This whole experience – the reading and the songs, expecting nothing and getting infinity instead – literally moved me to tears.  My eyes well up now even thinking about how touching and moving it was. I’d considered not even going to the concert, since I’d been to one before and I had so much else I could be doing in prep for my fast-approaching move, and here I was crying about it.  It was an overwhelmingly joyful experience.

TL:DR; Got more than I bargained for at a benefit concert held at a church in a retirement complex.