The Power of Music and Love

I saw such a deep and wonderful expression of love when I watched an interview with John Batiste and his wife Suleika Jaouad called The Power of Music and Love.

John, an extraordinary musician, was just nominated for 11 Grammys. They were for his new album We Are and for his work on the soundtrack of the movie Soul. Suleika is the author of the bestseller, Between Two Kingdoms, the story of her journey with leukemia when she was in her 20s.

Eight days before the Grammy nominations, on the eve of John’s 35^th birthday, they found out that Suleika’s cancer had not only returned but returned in a more aggressive form. The day the nominations were announced was the first day of her new chemo treatment. They were sitting in a chemo suite together as he received call after call of congratulations.

She said they were being asked to hold these two realities at the same time – the absolutely gutting, heartbreaking, painful things and the beautiful, soulful things – in the palm of one hand. She said it’s hard to do but you have to learn to do it, or the grief takes over.

The next step in her treatment was a bone marrow transplant. Because of Omicron, he couldn’t stay with her after the transplant. She talked about those days when she was all alone with only her fear to keep her company. She described the “quiet moments of hollow suffering where you suddenly sit with yourself and with what’s happening to you in utter isolation.” When she expressed this to John, he immediately went to his computer and created a lullaby for her. Then he wrote one every day while she was in isolation to provide support and strength and to fill her room with the healing properties of music.  She said as she listened to these lullabies, it felt like he was right there sleeping by her bedside.

She also said she has found it essential to express the unendurable. So they’ve each found a form of creative expression. John did this by writing lullabies. Suleika found her expression in painting self-portraits depicting her treatment and in turning her walker into a magical creation.

Next month John is debuting his American Symphony at Carnegie Hall, which depicts the tension between America’s ideals and its realities – our bright day and our dark night. In the interview, he played sections of it, showing how they represented the qualities of day and night, rotating between triumph and adversity, one blending into the other.  And that is what he and Suleika are living right now, the rotation between the brightness of his professional achievements and the darkness of her cancer.

John said his main focus during this time is that darkness will try to overtake them, so they need to “Turn on the light, focus on the light. Hold onto the light.” When he said that I felt some unsettledness, because from my experience, if I am afraid of the dark and if I resist the dark, I actually empower it. Yes, I have discovered the absolute necessity of opening my body and being to the light during these challenges with my health. But I have also deeply learned the necessity of not being afraid of the dark. The dark loses its power over you when you turn and look at it and even befriend it. By the dark I mean experiences like grief, fear, rage, overwhelm, and even helpless hopeless despair, all of which I have felt during this challenging time. So, my new mantra is, “Hold to the highest but show up for what is showing up.”

We are not used to doing this. We run from our dark just as we run away from a bear in the woods.  That is why in these blogs, my courses, my books, and my radio show, I illustrate, oftentimes using my own life, the pathway into safely meeting our dark. Life will always be a roller coaster and we can learn how to open to the joy and the delight of life at the same time we are learning how to stay open to the dark so it can move more quickly through us. So, as John said at the very end of the interview, “Yeah that’s life man. That’s it. Strap in!”