I went to the Ross tonight for Student night and saw Heima, a documentary about Sigur Ros, a band from Iceland. The film documents the band's 2006 Icelandic tour. Singer Jon Birgisson begins by saying how much they owe their native country, and how they wanted to give back. The concerts were not heavily marketed, but they were free, and in locations all across the country; one was in an abandoned factory, another in a small village at the mouth of a fjord, another at the foot of a huge dam whose construction the band was protesting. Interspersed with commentary and memories from the band and their team of accompanists, the movie is largely made up of these performances against the backdrop of the stark, evocative Icelandic landscape, along with many shots of the audience's rapt, exalted faces.

All I can say about this movie is that it was incredible. (That's a lie, I'm going to say a lot more.) I didn't think a documentary about a band that I didn't know much about before would make me feel this way. Watching Heima was an experience that I doubt can be repeated with the same effect. Almost every shot in the movie reinforced the idea of beauty, whether it was the beauty of a waterfall, red kites against a blue sky, blonde children playing on a beach, or a community of people gathering together for a free concert.

The alchemy of music, the way we create it and yet it transforms us, was something I took away from watching Heima. For instance, there was this old man who made marimbas out of rocks and rhubarb sticks. He's walking around the beach, tapping on different splinters of stone, to see what sound they make; he's out in his rhubarb field, testing out the old stalks. And out of this dross arises gold--an incredible sea-stone marimba that Sigur Ros plays in one of their concerts!

The concerts themselves were transcendent. The faces of everyone involved in the music--band- and audience-members alike--were so focused and peaceful and free. At one point one of the band members talks about how they create their music. They find a space, and begin playing, without a lot of talking, and when they find an "atmosphere" they like, it becomes a song. Sigur Ros had a quartet of women accompanying them on strings for this tour, and the women remarked on how unplanned everything was, how the strength of the band was that they could sense what each other was doing with the music, and their music worked off of this intuition and convergence.

It reminded me of a couple moments in my life that just came together, almost magically, like that. When I used to sing for Fusion at Andrews, I felt like the music swept us each away until, audience and songleaders, we were all feeling the same emotions--gladness and peace and joy--and each song would build on the last, crescendoing until an enormous climax of music and praise, at which point it died back down into quiet, meditative singing and prayer. Of course, this could all be in my head, but as a songleader, you get the privilege of seeing everyone's faces turned toward you, alight with the magic of music, so I don't think I'm completely off base.

The other moment doesn't involve music, but silence. This past September, when I drove up to Michigan to visit, we all went to the beach after lunch and began playing frisbee. We had had a crazy-big potluck, and several of us were kind of peopled-out, so we just stood in the sand, throwing the frisbee around the circle, not saying very much. And the motion of the waves and the back and forth of the frisbee in the air, along with the bright hot sun and the gulls flying overhead--and most importantly, the quiet--made me feel like the moment was a living thing, harmonious and complete. Nothing could have been added to make it better, and I wanted to put it in a bottle and take it back to Lincoln with me.

There's a lot of shit in this world, and at times it is a sin to ignore it. To pretend that Darfur isn't happening while I live my fun shiny Target life. But lately I've been focusing on what it means (and what it takes) to be happy. And I've come to the conclusion that happiness is largely (not mostly, but largely) a choice. And, without ignoring the bad and doing nothing to make the world better, I want to fill my life with influences like Heima, with things that remind me there there is beauty in the world, that humans are not bad and evil. Because just as the good doesn't cancel out the evil and my frisbee-moment didn't make genocide disappear, the bad does not cancel out the good. Good exists. And tonight watching Heima made me feel that to be alive in the world, to be human, is a very very good thing.