This I Believe, I Believe

Today marks the end of a series on NPR called, “I Believe”. I only heard it for the first time maybe two years ago, and I must confess, every time they announced a new segment I half expected to hear a bar or two of a song that was popular when I was a little girl, “I Believe”. They probably thought of it and decided against it as being too schmaltzy. Wise.

I really loved this series. It is fascinating to hear people from all walks of life and in all sorts of circumstances make a public statement about their most privately held and most central core belief. Most of the time I would listen and think to myself, “Gee! That’s a good one! I believe that, too!”. But I had never consciously thought about most of these ideas. They just informed my life, always working at a subliminal level, the mirapoix that flavors the soup, but whose taste nobody can identify.

Then, inevitably, I would say to myself, “Gee, I really ought to write a “This I Believe” essay and send it in. Then I would think: “Who knows? They might choose mine to put on the air”. (Notice the immediate departure from ‘Art for Art’s Sake’?).

So I have to ask myself the musical question: Do I really believe in what I say I believe in, or do I believe others would validate me if I said I believed in it? How do you really get deep beneath the bubbling surface of the potato leek soup of your mind to the most basic of its elements? And how do you know when you’ve gotten there?

This is an especially thorny issue for a songwriter. I write songs all the time that set out to express some aspect of what it is I truly believe. Some of the songs do this overtly in a kind of spiritual testimony. Some of them do it obliquely in a kind of story tradition that is so prevalent in country songs. (Some songs I write for pure fun, so they don’t count here). I have one song that states that I, like Norman Rockwell, try to describe the world as the best of all possible worlds, not because it really is that way, but because that is the world I would like it to be. The hope is that, “we get the life we make”. This is a corollary of the affirmation theory; the belief that you can change your life by changing your perceptions. As much as anything I have ever believed in, I believe in this.

Or do I?

I never have sent in my own essay for the show. Every time I came up with a hypothetical title, I questioned it. The questioning would inevitably plant just enough doubt in my mind to make me think, “Who am I to make this statement? What proof do I have? Is it truly an original thought? And while we’re on the subject: Who cares?”

As I write this, I believe that we can change our reality by changing our perceptions. Will I believe that tomorrow? If I had been one of those people who survived Katrina in New Orleans or the bombing of the World Trade Center — not from the comfort of my living room, but at ground zero — would I still believe this is true? I might take the other tack. I might start to believe that it doesn’t matter about my perceptions. I am simply collateral damage in the battle with nature or the battle with fundamentalist extremists.

But I did have my own kind of personal catastrophe. I survived cancer. Twice. I came out of it believing that one of the things that saw me through was my ability to envision myself whole and healthy. Simultaneously, I was able to surrender to and accept the reality of the situation and my own limitations in altering it. This allowed me to reach out for as much help as I could possibly get. So, yes. In other words, “Sit back, take a deep breath, and accept your reality”. This I believe, too.

So for me, I have two seemingly diametrically opposed ideas which I hold on to for dear life. Will a new life-altering event create a new belief system? And how will I know that unless I hear another essay on NPR?

Our Little Black Box

About ten years ago at Christmas, back when we lived in Tennessee, I gave Art a radio. Art is not an easy man to gift – Whatever he wants, he simply acquires, and what he desires is usually pretty simple. But he had expressed an interest in a short-wave radio, which delighted me. Finally, a present I could buy that would make Art happy.

I went to Radio Shack at the Bellevue Mall, and there it was: a simple, black radio with an AM, FM and shortwave band. It stood about five inches high, seven inches wide, and maybe one inch deep. It probably didn’t cost much more than $10.00. I brought it home and wrapped it up with two double A batteries. When Art unwrapped it, you would have thought it was the Hope diamond. His whole face lit up. We installed the batteries immediately and found the BBC on the shortwave. So while we unwrapped our gifts, we could hear the lovely strains of a boy’s choir broadcast live from the cathedral in Oxford. It was such fun!

The radio has now become a fixture in our day-to-day lives. We never use the shortwave band – for some reason, I am not able to get anything on it anymore. But the AM and the FM work beautifully. We just feed it a couple of double A’s every six months or so, and it hums along obediently at the touch of an index finger. I turn it on every morning while I make breakfast, listening to “Morning Edition” on NPR. Again, while I’m making dinner, I listen to “All Things Considered”. On the weekends we tune in 790 KABC to hear “Money Talk” with Bob Brinker. Saturday afternoons it’s “Prairie Home Companion” and the news from Lake Wobegone. Sundays while I change the sheets I like to listen to “The Splendid Table” or “Speaking of Faith”. (Of course, we contribute to NPR. The guilt would kill us if we didn’t.)

But the humble little radio. What an instrument of magic! With its three-inch speaker, it brings the world to us. It sits quietly on the kitchen counter in the evening, patiently waiting for us to get through the evening’s entertainment on the bigger, gaudier appliance in the living room. Its little chrome antenna folds in on itself, much in the way that two little hands would be pressed into the prayer position. If it is admonishing us for our fickle behavior, it does so silently. And we do love our Netflix subscription. So we are “equal opportunity” media consumers. The radio knows that and indulges us, nevertheless.

Oh, I know. It’s silly bordering on insane to anthropomorphize a radio. And yet, what a good friend this plain little gizmo has been to us. Sometimes it goes missing when one of us has moved it into the office or the bedroom so that we could listen to it while we do our chores or answer e-mail. Then we shout across the apartment, “Honey, where’s the radio”? But it always shows up, eventually. I actually heard myself tonight declaring, “I don’t know what I’d do without that radio!” Then, before I had time to be embarrassed, I heard the love of my life quietly answer, “I know what you mean!”.