Meditations: On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life
by By Moore, Thomas
Category: Religion , General

Sometimes in their chanting monks will land upon a note and sing it in florid fashion, one syllable of text for fifty notes of chant. Melisma, they call it.Living a melismatic life in imitation of plainchant, we may stop on an experience, a place, a person, or a memory and rhapsodize in imagination. Some like to meditate or contemplate melismatically, while others prefer to draw, build, paint, or dance whatever their eye has fallen upon.Living one point after another, is one form of experience, and it can be emphatically productive. But stopping for melisma gives the soul its reason for being.