Nox Amicus

Now that I’ve got most of my faculties back, I feel like I can finally write this month’s New Moon post. The moon was new at 10:32am this past Sunday morning – while I was enjoying a brunch cocktail with a friend and former work colleague who was visiting from Denver. It was good to see him, and a good reminder that there are professional relationships that transcend the profession. Souls meet, they react, then they sustain or they fade. I’m grateful for all the souls who touch mine – regardless of whether they linger for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.

The focus last month was on Curation, and in the post I justified my concept of Curation by saying that “there are times when we welcome the energies that resonate with our own, but there are also times when we need to let energies wane that no longer have a place.” I think I’d done well in the last cycle of creating the appropriate distance from elements that are not healthy for me. There is still work to be done – and I need to be cautious not to make the firewall too strong – but I think we are finally on the other side of self-sacrifice for someone else’s good. That doesn’t mean abandoning responsibilities or being selfish – but it does mean weighing the merits of participation and determining if they warrant the personal cost.

When looking for “how” to do that I went back to my very justification for Curation and found my focus for this month. Resonance. For these purposes, I’ll take a definition from Wikipedia, which reads, “In physics, resonance describes the phenomena of amplification that occurs when the frequency of a periodically applied force is in harmonic proportion to a natural frequency of the system on which it acts.”

There are moments in our lives of which we are certain. The frequency of those moments act in harmonic proportion with the natural frequency of our intent and reverberate in our souls. The same can be said for the souls that we meet. We connect with someone and feel an instant kinship. We must be aware of course that just because “we” feel that, doesn’t mean they do. Just because their “periodically applied force” on us causes reverberation does not mean that the inverse is also true. But when we get what I’ll call reciprocal resonance – factors of both create self-sustaining harmonies, then that’s something to hold on to.

To me, this is like singing with the band. I used to just sing and hold on for dear life to my part. But lately, when I sing and another voice is in harmony with mine, I find myself floating and adapting to their nuance, and feeling them do the same – and we create a thing that is independent from each of us – but that we each become part of.

So this month I will look for where there is deep resonance in my life, and try to find ways to better appreciate and cultivate it. I will also look for places where I may have been too eager to declare resonance and continue to curate those.

It took some time to settle on a song this month – but this version of “Monday, Monday” by The Mamas & The Papas fits well. It’s a live version from 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival, so it’s not studio-perfect. You can hear them working to find what resonates – they know it’s there, but sometimes it takes a little finesse to find just the right blend – but once the frequencies are in place, they weave and adapt with harmonic gentleness and compassion. Something I want to continue to try to do.