“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” 

– Kahlil Gibran

Last night our band played a benefit concert at the Schorn Barn in Kingston. It’s a magical venue courtesy of Lynn and Mark Schorn. There were about 85 people with $1,720 raised for Partners in Health, a social justice organization driven by the uncompromising belief that everyone, especially those most in need, deserves the right to health care. Last year alone, they conducted 1.6 million outpatient visits globally!

It really struck me as I gazed out at the audience what an important role music plays in our society. I believe that without arts and humanities there is no hope for the future. Several people commented that with the constant stream of negative news, they needed to be somewhere that transcended individual differences. I felt the same way. And it’s why I’m so glad to support Arts & Humanities Bainbridge.

I am reminded of a time when our therapist, back in 1997, encouraged my wife Trude to take watercolor classes as a way to help her deal with her sudden paralysis and MS diagnosis. Her instructor was a flamboyant master artist from Venezuela. For several years, her instructor helped a group of women create really beautiful visual art.

For someone whose mother told her “you’re not my artistic daughter,” it was a real expansion of Trude’s life. I look at those early paintings framed on our bedroom walls (see photo) with real admiration for both her courage and the power of art to help us transcend our smaller selves. It was one of the factors that helped us turn what could have been a devastating experience into fuel for making constructive changes in our lives.

To quote Daisaku Ikeda,

The emotion generated by a work of art, be it poetry, painting, or music, may be that tangible, unquestionable feeling of a broadening of the self. It is a feeling of fullness, borne from a mysterious rhythm, a kind of flight toward the infinite, lived as a sharing, an exchange, whose source is our interior world.

When Trude and I were first together in 1969, I played piano in a soul group in East LA. I eventually set aside music to put bread on the table. When I retired from my consulting business, I rediscovered my passion for music by singing and playing harmonica in Good Karma Blues. Music has given me another way to get in touch with my inner self – that part of me that values human connection and wants to believe there is always hope.

After all, as Nietzsche wrote, “Without music, life would be a mistake.”

ABOUT MIKE LISAGOR – Mike Lisagor plays harmonica and sings in Good Karma Blues. He has written hundreds of magazine articles and blogs on a variety of business and Buddhist related topics. He is the author of “Romancing the Buddha,” which he adapted into a successful one-man show that he performed at Bainbridge Performing Arts and in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. His nature photographs have appeared in the Boston Globe, Bainbridge Island Magazine, Living Buddhism as well as in several local galleries. His latest graphic art project, “Reimagined Nature”, is in the lobby of New Motion Physical Therapy.