Harmony
by Dwight J. Friesen
The world keeps asking for a single note.
One flag lifted above every other.
One story told loud enough
to drown out the rest.
One certainty.
One tribe.
One voice.
Yet every spring, the forest declines.
The cedar does not become fern.
The river does not become stone.
The wren does not surrender its song to the eagle.
Difference is not a problem creation is trying to solve.
It is the way beauty arrives.
Harmony begins here:
not with agreement,
but with attention.
With the patient work
of listening beyond ourselves.
With the discovery
that another voice need not threaten my own.
That truth can be spacious enough for many notes,
held together by a deeper music.
I wonder if this is why grace so often sounds
less like a trumpet
and more like a choir rehearsing—
tentative,
imperfect,
learning when to enter,
when to yield,
when to sustain,
when to fall silent
for the sake of the whole.
Not uniformity.
Not the loneliness of a solo.
But the risky gift
of belonging to something larger
without disappearing into it.
This is the way of the old mystics.
And rivers.
And migrating birds
turning together across an early summer sky.
No one commanding.
No one controlling.
A thousand subtle adjustments,
each life responding
to the lives around it.
Perhaps love works this way.
Perhaps communities do too.
Not as walls built from identical stones,
but as living songs—
each voice carrying its own timbre,
its own history,
its own wound,
its own wonder.
And beneath it all,
a melody older than fear,
older than empire,
older even than our divisions,
inviting us still:
not to sing the same note,
but to learn
how to belong
to the same song.
Peace, dwight
“Harmony”
