Harmony - Not the Crappy Guitar, Either

I was very impressed with this story (attributed to Jung) from the book Do Less, Achieve More by Chin-Ning Chu:

The Rainmaker

There was a village that had been experiencing drought for five consecutive years. Many famous Rainmakers had been called, but all had failed to make rain. In the villagers' last attempt, they called upon a renowned Rainmaker from afar. When he arrived in the village, he set up his tent and disappeared inside it for four days. On the fifth day, the rain started to fall and quenched the thirst of the parched earth. The people of the village asked the Rainmaker how he had accomplished such a miracle.

The Rainmaker replied, "I have done nothing."

Astounded at his explanation, the villagers said, "How can that be? After you came, four days later, the rain started."

The Rainmaker explained, "When I arrived, the first thing I noticed was that everything in your village was out of harmony with heaven. So I spent four days putting myself into harmony with the Divine. Then the rains came."

Chu uses the story to frame her lessons on living a more productive, successful and inspired life, but I couldn't help but be struck by how our American village is out of harmony with everything, even with itself.

Years ago I read (and reread) the early 20th-century Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan's brilliant book The Music of Life, which first inspired me to look for the harmony in life inside and outside myself. It's a lesson I certainly haven't mastered, but I've kept coming back to it over the years. Our society has precious few role models for creating harmony, and music might be the only good metaphor left in our competition-obsessed culture.

All humans seem to need the beauty and harmony of music of some form or another, and up to a certain time composers, like the Rainmaker, were in harmony with the Divine, or the Universe, or Mother Nature, or whatever you call it. The composer and musician knew the effect of their music on the listener, and knew their responsibility was to create harmony. Maybe we all have that responsibility, and like the villagers, we've fallen down on the job.