Monday Meditation: What makes the Blues the Blues?
Joy in Grief and Grief in Joy
Photo taken in Verona, Italy, June 2026 by the author at Depo Clandestino
Dearest Becoming Ones:
This morning, I have been thinking about tension.
Not the kind of tension we try to avoid, but the kind we must learn to inhabit.
The Blues teaches us something about this. Musicologists will tell us that one of the characteristics of the Blues is its relationship to unresolved notes, those blue notes that bend and stretch against expectation. The music does not rush toward resolution. It lingers. It groans. It testifies. It refuses the lie that every wound can be immediately healed or every sorrow neatly resolved.
The Blues knows what many of us are learning again: life is often lived in the unresolved chord.
In the cracks. The negative spaces. The wounds.
Photo taken in Verona, Italy, June 2026 at Depo Clandestino
Perhaps that is why the Blues remains such a profound spiritual tradition. These sounds emerged from people who knew suffering intimately yet refused despair. It carried grief without surrendering joy. It held tension without demanding certainty. The Blues teaches us how to dwell inside contradiction and still sing.
There is no joy without suffering and no suffering without joy.
“There is joy in the grief and grief in the joy,” said recently to me.
And perhaps that is where many of us find ourselves right now.
We live amid enormous tension. Political tension. Economic tension. Ecological tension. Relational tension. Many of us are carrying tensions within ourselves: grief and gratitude, exhaustion and hope, fear and possibility. We are taught to seek immediate solutions, immediate clarity, immediate answers. Yet much of life refuses our timelines.
What if wisdom is not found in resolving tension as quickly as possible?
What if wisdom is found in learning how to stay present within it?
This is where the Benedictines have something to teach us.
One of the central Benedictine vows is stability. In a world of constant movement, distraction, and escape, stability asks us to remain. It is not merely about staying in one geographic location. Stability is a spiritual practice of presence. It is the discipline of returning to the place where we are rather than constantly longing for somewhere else.
The Benedictines understood that transformation often happens in the places we would rather leave.
The monastery becomes a school of attention.
The same walls.
The same people.
The same prayers.
The same soil.
Over time, one learns that holiness is not somewhere else. It is here.
I think this is why place matters so deeply.
Place teaches us how to belong.
The hills of Verona. The tidal waters of Cork. The familiar roads of home. The chair where you drink your morning coffee and where I drink my tea in the afternoon. The tree outside your window. The local café where the barista knows your name. The places that hold our stories become teachers if we stay long enough to listen.
Place roots us when everything else feels unstable.
The Blues and Benedictine spirituality might seem like unlikely companions, yet I wonder if they are teaching a similar lesson.
The Blues says: Stay with the unresolved note.
The Benedictines say: Stay with the place.
Both are invitations into presence.
Both resist the frantic desire to escape and the frenetic pace of empire.
Both understand that becoming requires remaining.
There is a temptation right now to flee from tension. To numb ourselves. To distract ourselves. To move so quickly that we never have to feel what is happening within us or around us.
Yet contemplation asks something different.
Contemplation asks us to stay.
Stay with the grief.
Stay with the uncertainty.
Stay with the beauty.
Stay with the questions.
Stay long enough for the deeper wisdom to emerge.
Not everything can be fixed today.
Not every relationship can be repaired today.
Not every social wound can be healed today.
Not every fear can be resolved today.
But we can remain present.
We can breathe. Alone and together.
We can notice the ground beneath our feet. And, eventually, the ground of our collective Being.
We can attend to the place where we are.
We can learn, little by little, how to sing in the key of the unresolved.
The Blues calls this testimony.
The Benedictines call this stability.
I wonder if both are teaching us how to become human.
So this week, I am endeavoring to notice where tension lives in my life, and I invite you to notice where tension lives in your life.
Rather than rushing toward resolution, what would it mean to simply accompany that tension with compassion?
What place is asking you to pay attention?
What unresolved note is asking to be heard?
Perhaps another possible world begins when we stop demanding certainty and learn instead the sacred art of presence.
Poco a poco.
Paso a paso.
One note.
One breath.
One place at a time.
Paz,
RCE+