I received an email this morning with a thought provoking story. It ties in with some threads I have been considering recently. Here is the story (thanks to Georgios Perros for forwarding it to me) and then the threads.
Violinist in the Metro
A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousand of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.
Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.
A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.
A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.
The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother however was in a hurry and, though the child stopped to look at the violinist, the mother pushed hard and the child had to walk on though he continued to look back. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.
In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.
No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.
Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theatre in Boston and the seats average $100.
Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of an social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?
And now for my threads …
I have just completed using Equilibrium B80. It is the first bottle I have really worked through for some time and it has been a very good experience. The main theme it has triggered for me has been that of conception – the subject of spirit being born into the material world. Indeed the intention that led to my choosing this bottle was to address my own coming into this world. The colours may be seen to represent spirit – the of love, delicacy and sensitivity underneath the red of matter. In fact, I am beginning to see pink not just as a spiritual quality but actually as the energy of spiritual being-ness itself.
The 8 of the 80 echoes this theme in so far as 8 is the figure of two circles meeting. The worlds of spirit and matter. Spirit enters the world with conception and departs with physical death. The pink enters the red, travels the red experience of living an earthly life, and then, with death, returns to its spiritual home. The 0 initiates and energises this contact at the midpoint of the 8 – the place of meeting between these two worlds.
The emailed story is about beauty appearing unappreciated in a busy world. The theme of Red /Pink with its refined energy of love underneath the coarser energy of red may be seen as equivalent. It is interesting to consider that the colour reversal of this bottle is B84 Pink/Red. This bottle is named Candle in the Wind and is associated with Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. They represent the opposite situation, they were not beauty unappreciated, they were symbols – icons even – of beauty that were held up before the whole world.
Red/Pink, resonating with the beauty we each have within, a beauty that is so easy to overlook, to ignore, or dismiss. Yet the pink is our essence. The email story is about missing the beauty in the world around us. My message from using the B80 is about honouring the beauty, the preciousness within our self.
This awareness goes towards a healing for what has been the hardest part of my life: to welcome conception, to understand that the soul coming to earth is purely and simply adding love to life.
