The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
~Mark Nepo

It was time. In fact, it was past time. My piano was in desperate need of tuning and my beloved tuner is no longer with us so I had to find someone new. After a thorough internet search, I arranged for someone to come and restore the sound that lifts my spirits.

Of course, I had forgotten the sounds that have to happen before the beauty arrives in the touch of the keys. I sat in my kitchen as the tuner worked his magic in another room. The ping and plop of pitches echoed off the ceiling and into the room where I was trying to write. High pitches sounding like cats raking their nails across a chalkboard. Low pitches grating out like belches of middle school boys. Over and over again, until with some finesse, amazing patience and maybe a dose of magic, the pitch slides into the ‘just right’ place. For more than an hour I listened as the technician did his work. Work that astounded me at his ability to endure such scratching and belching until he landed in the home of tonal beauty. 

Captive at my kitchen table as I was, I began to think about how these last months and years have been a little like this tuning. Most of us have felt off, strident in sound, not knowing if we would ever be able to stay on pitch again. Some days we would find a word, an activity, a glimpse of something that would pull us up from the pits of disharmony. Other days, we were just strings plucked by an angry, inept hand. 

Sitting there, I was reminded of another experience of tuning I had a few years ago. I had anticipated walking the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and arrived expecting a quiet, calm and contemplative time. Stepping onto this stone path modeled after the labyrinth in Chartes Cathedral in France, I was only a few steps in when sounds like I had never heard before began. The huge, beautiful pipe organ was being tuned! If you have never heard an organ going through this adjustment, let me say that it is a primeval-like animal sound until it makes its way into its homeland. As I walked, I remembered reading that “Everything that happens to you on the labyrinth is metaphor.” And so, I continued to walk, surrounded by beauty, watching the unfolding path without being able to see exactly where it led, held in the sounds of tuning…blessed tuning. The experience allowed me to enter into a place of adjusting myself, of reflecting on the places that needed that very turn of an instrument that brought me back to myself. 

We are all still in the tuning stages of this pandemic. Each of us will find our way into a new harmony that has yet to be discovered. Tuning is not pretty. But it is necessary. So, let the patient hand of the tuner be gentle with us all. I trust, and I hope you do as well, that we will find our way eventually.