About The Flying Rug

Years ago, when I first started in with music, my friends and I would often stand around in a little circle on a small rug, and we might play for hours. The music seemed to sound best that way, standing on our rug, each of us balancing our own sound with the whole.

Later, when we began playing out for gigs, we would sometimes bring the rug along with us to stand on while we performed. We told ourselves that it might put the audience at ease to see us on our rug, but I believe it was just to help put ourselves at ease, mostly.

I got to thinking about that rug, and how I brought another rug along with me when I first went off to school as a child. At nap time I’d lie down on that rug and the teacher would put all us kids at ease by reading us a story. Pretty soon, I’d be off sleeping and dreaming about all those wonderful people and places she was reading about. I got to see lots of those people and places for real too, when I was older, but that’s another story.

Anyway, that rug I had when I was a kid started looking to me a lot like this rug I was playing music on. Both seemed to magically take me places that I couldn’t get to any other way. And both always kept me looking ahead toward what was better, to what was around the next bend, or over the next rise.

Sometimes I wonder, what if our eyes could actually see around the next bend? Maybe then we could accept what life offers us right now with a little more grace and contentment. That’s the beauty of flying rugs too, I suppose, all up with wind and dreams and new horizons like they are.

Love, peace, and joy!

Mothy Groves