Stone Age Music

The next time someone asks me what I do or who I am, I’ll say, “Woman”. I suppose that will sound rather primitive. I decided this the last time I went to a doctor appointment and had to fill out a stack of new patient forms. For the first time ever, on the line where I was to list my occupation, I drew a simple question mark. It hit me. I don’t know who I am.

I’m a wife but I live alone most of the time as my husband lives and works across the continent. I’m a mom but my children would rather me mother them from a distance, or not at all at this time in their lives. I’m not enrolled in any educational institution so I can’t really call myself a student, not officially anyway. I’ve never had a career outside my home. Worker, mother, daughter, wife, sister, friend, church member, student. I am all those things. But I’m not, really. That is me in relation to someone or something else. So what am I? Who am I? Just me?

Then it came to me. Overriding and underpinning all those things is the one thing that never changes. I am a woman. Yes. That is an occupation that I can be absolutely sure of that is constant and unchanging. Beyond all my relational titles that define me, I am a woman who feels most myself when I am engaged in things artistic: transported by a piece of music or a sublime piece of writing (my own or someone else’s) or a transcendent work of art. This is when I really know who I am in my deepest, most primal core and how I am connected to all that matters in this sphere of our existence.

I recently came across a picture of a Stone Age flute carved from the bone of a griffon vulture. It was eight and half inches long, had 4 finger holes with the end carved in a V shape to fit the primitive musician’s mouth. It was estimated to be 35,000 years old and was found alongside a carving of a voluptuous female nude statuette dating from the same period.

I find it fascinating that some of the earliest evidences of humanity are primitive creative expressions of beauty in the forms of music and sculpture. This means that long before humans figured out how to grow their own food, music echoed off the walls of an Ice Age cave. The creative impulse is not only what makes us human, but it is what taps us into the divinity within us. Art is the most primitive expression of humanity.

So, it gratifies me, in a primal way, to know that my primordial ancestors also discovered who they were through artistic creation and found transcendence from this existence through music and art. That knowledge connects me to the human family throughout all ages of time. It connects me to myself at the most raw and elemental core, when all other cultural accoutrements are stripped away.

The next time I, Woman (not unlike the voluptuous carved beauty found in the cave), sit in a concert hall listening to the likes of Mozart or Mraz, the ethereal tones of an ancient flute echoing through the dark hollows of an Ice Age cave, warmed by firelight and human artistry, will not seem so far away.