‘Saturn’: Song #5 from the Boundless soundtrack

Merry Christmas to all of you! I offer a meditation on the awe of our existence and an invitation to hear the bells. From BOUNDLESS, my newly published memoir.

Dec 25, 2024

My mother woke up Christmas morning and played “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” on her Steinway grand piano. Then she collapsed on the floor with an ischemic stroke.

That was the beginning of our goodbye. She would recover from that stroke—mainly because in all the years of playing piano, she had wired her brain with such strong neural networks that it was easy to rewire them. By spring, she was walking, speaking and —most importantly—playing piano again.

Long before I learned to read, my mother was the one who told me that “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” came from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She told me the poem came of his despair that there would be no peace on earth. The bells are ringing, he writes, “but does anyone hear them?”

That is how it always was, the connection between her music and my words. When I finished my novel, SEARCHING FOR PERSEPHONE, I held up the manuscript and said, “I wrote this…” and I pointed to her Steinway… “because you taught me that.”

She asked me to play for her. She said as she sank into her bed, “I’ll be here listening.” What she meant was: “I’ll always be here listening.” I heard that. I heard the bells.

In BOUNDLESS, the loss of my mother is one of the rapidly accumulating griefs as I enter the next one: emptying my nest. How had you ever let us go? I wanted to ask her, but she had already slipped away, leaving only her music and the sliver of her self in my heart that I still carry everywhere. I had only that to tell me the way I must go from here.

One relentless question fires BOUNDLESS, and it is this: What is a self, and can the essence of a soul live on in our consciousness? How do our lives touch each other? And what are we to do with that—the way our lives touch each other so? As I explored this question, I was most struck by the observation of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter that when his wife died, he felt “soul fragments” of her consciousness in him.

I contact her soul fragments whenever I play piano. My mother is in me and comes through me. She comes through to her grandchildren, two of which are my children. So it’s easy to believe what Hofstadter suggests.

This song, “Saturn,” by Sleeping At Last reminds me of my mother, who was always struck by the awe of our existence and modeled for us to live that way. “How rare and beautiful it is to even exist,” is the line by composer Ryan O’Neal in this song, spoken by someone who is gasping to catch her last breath, as my mother was in her last days with cancer.

On this beautiful Christmas Day, can you hear the bells? Has anyone you love ever taught you the courage of the stars, as O’Neal writes? Can you see how rare and beautiful it is that we even exist?

FROM ‘I HEARD THE BELLS ON CHRISTMAS DAY’
And the bells, they're ringing (peace on Earth)
Like a choir they're singing (peace on Earth)
And with our hearts, we'll hear them (peace on Earth)
Peace on Earth, good will to men

BOUNDLESS has a soundtrack!

In honor of the December 21, 2024, release date, I give you 12 days of songs that tell the story of Living Boundlessly.

Music runs all through the story because I passed on my great musical inheritance to the twins. (And probably the wordsmithing inheritance, too… Grace wrote a play in middle school, and Paul wrote a sci-fi novel in fifth grade.)

Boundless is available!

BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque

BARNES & NOBLE

AMAZON

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