Dade County And The Arts - You Can’t Kill The Song

It is the stars and sun and earth and wind. It is all of us.

My book Night of Pan, first book of the Oracle of Delphi Trilogy, began its life on a windswept Irish shore as I sat with a blank page before me and wondered how one writes the first sentence of a novel. A red fox ambled past, slipping half-hidden through high grasses. Fat, black bumblebees stayed busy jolting from flower to flower… and I sat.

At last a buzzing fly, practically screaming as it tried to untangle itself from a spider web cast in the deep recess of the stone window, drew my attention.

While I watched fascinated and a little horrified, the spider crept up on the fly. Injected it with poison and wrapped the corpse in sticky strands of silk.

I’d been given the beginning of my book. I wrote about the spider and launched the story of a fifteen-year-old village girl in Ancient Greece who defied an arranged marriage, village authorities and even the gods to claim her destiny as Oracle of Delphi, to save the cradle of democracy from the largest invasion the ancient world had ever seen.

But as is so often the case in life, I had to set aside my writing. I taught piano to children, wrote poetry and played in an eclectic country band called The Prairie Dogs, whose claim to fame was being the only band to play Candlestick Park (the San Francisco baseball stadium at the time) between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

But that determined Oracle of Delphi never let me forget her. One day, while I sat in Brisbane, California with the few pages I’d written years earlier and wondered how in the world to pick up the thread of the story, a fly started buzzing in the corner of my window, trapped and tangled in a spider web.

“Alright, alright, you win!” I threw my hands in the air and laughed. The universe clearly wanted me to finish writing my book.

And why do I think flies and spiders were determined to give a message to me?

I want to share a secret with you. A secret understood by the ancient Greek song culture that survived for over two thousand years: You can’t kill the song of the universe that connects us—that power caught in the subtle resonance between musical notes and words, between the blind poet Homer and his audience, between you and a friend chatting in a grocery store line. That song is heart and yearning… it is everything. It will lead us to the stars. It will guide us to ourselves.

So, don’t text me or email me. Walk along a dark sand beach and listen to the sea. Let’s sing and dance together… and don’t ever let anyone kill your song.