So much of life we all pass by
With heedless ear and careless eye.
Bent with our cares, we plod along,
Blind to the beauty, deaf to the song.
But moments there are when we pause to rest
And turn our eyes from the goal's far crest.
We become aware of the wayside flowers,
And sense God's hand in this world of ours.
The sun flecks gold through the sheltering trees,
And we shoulder our burdens with twice the ease.
Peace and contentment and a world that sings
The moment of true awareness brings.
In a sense great music exists for the sake of its pauses; for instance, the pauses that occur in the middle of a Beethoven symphony. These pauses are of course quite unlike bits of ordinary silence, because the whole symphony has led up to them — they are held and defined, and the music goes on the other side of them. Such pauses are silence charged with meaning. Music transcends music by producing charged silence.
