Everybody wants to laugh,
Ah, but nobody wants to cry.
I say everybody wants to laugh,
But nobody wants to cry.
Everybody wants to go to heaven,
But nobody wants to die.
King reminded me why I love the blues: the blues knows that life is music with an ever-changing rhythm and you have to sing, sing and even dance, the downs along with the ups. The world’s mystics agree. Give thanks for the evil as well as the good, the Hasids and other mystics say. In The Call of the Dervish, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan says:
The dervish sees this happening in the lives of people—how at some times so much grace is given to them, and at others it is taken away. The person himself is perplexed and wonders why sometimes the sun shines upon him while at other times he seems to be the object of God’s wrath or curse: the dervish sees this as the breath of God, inhaling and exhaling. If people would let themselves be drawn into the solitude of the divine unity when God draws them out of their unfoldment in the manifest, they would realize it as a higher initiation instead of regretting it and considering it to be an injustice of destiny. That is why the dervish accepts every gain as a gift of God and also every loss as a gift of God, like al-Hallaj, who said, “Even when I am deserted by you this isolation is a companion for me. Does not God try those whom God loves?
So the mystic in the world, the dervish, dances in ecstasy, whether because abandoned by the One or drawn close by the One, all in love. “If I can’t dance, what am I?” asks the dervish, according to Pir Vilayat.
This wisdom of the unity and beauty of life is what the blues knows and gives to all who have ears to hear. I once heard in a documentary on gospel music—Say Amen, Somebody, I think it was—that the blues and gospel music came up at the same time and that deep down they carry the same message. They do.
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