Free Bird Live. Although it happened over 5 years ago, I remember the first time I ever heard Lynyrd Skynyrd’s masterpiece, the live version of Free Bird, like it just happened last week. I was in Breckenridge, CO outside the delicious local crepe stand and it came on in the car and I was legitimately moved to tears because of the sheer beauty of it. A monumental event, after that it became the paradigm of musical beauty in my mind, unrivaled by any other song. Well, I have yet to be moved again by man-made beauty to the point of tears, but I certainly was today.
Our little group toured the inside of the Chigi Palace, which is where we live. We live in the far corner, almost the basement, isolated from the rest of the palace, which is now a museum. The palace was once the summer home of the Chigi family, which boasts a pope as a member of the family (Pope Alexander VII to be exact). We toured several of the rooms and some of the outlying land, including the ruins what would have been a huge bird cage where one could step inside and have tea with the birds flying around, several rooms with painted ceilings, an outer court area that was reminicient of the Hunger Games, an outer corridor lined with impressive European mounts of various antlers from big game, and then we came to this certain room where we were not allowed to take pictures. I stepped inside onto this floor that was a mosiac of numerous different colors and different size pieces, and on the far end of the room were 3 huge, elaborate windows that looked out onto the outer courtyard area and the grassy area below. The walls were covered with hand-painted and pressed ancient leather tapestry, kept preserved due to a palace worker’s diligence during WWII when soldiers came and stayed in the palace so the worker took the leather tapestries off the wall and locked them away in a hidden door in a top floor of the palace. Now they are back on the walls and are, by themselves, breathtaking. They are deep green, rich red, and gold. Their design has been pressed and painted and sewn together and covers all the walls. Finally, as if all this is not enough, the ceiling and walls directly next to the windows are painted as if one were to be sitting down looking out the windows, then the surrounding walls blends in perfectly with the ceiling. There are little walls with birds and monkeys perched on top, then birds and clouds billowing across the ceiling. It was as if time had stopped and I was standing there, so overwhelmed I felt as if I could not breathe. I couldn’t ask our guide (who also works at the Chigi Palace and is one of our instructors) enough questions, but at the same time I could barely even speak. It was the most beautiful man-made thing I have ever seen. I felt so small, so humbled just standing there surrounded by it all. I lost all self-awareness until I realized as I was standing there that I had tears welling up in my eyes and I felt as if my heart would either stop beating or explode in my chest.
The only other thing in my life that I feel remotely like this about is Dicksonia, the old plantation house on our land. As many of you know, it is absolutely my favorite place on Earth. Beautiful, majestic, and having deep family ties, I could and have just sat there for hours. This was something else entirely. But, ironically, it did not make me love “the Big House”, as our family calls it, any less or see its beauty diminish in any way. Instead, as I was trying to process what I just saw as we shuffled out of the room and listened to the man talk about safety tips in Rome (all I could think of was what I just saw and if it was even real), I could only think of the Big House. It brought out beauty in her that I had never seen before, it made me love her even more. C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce, speaking of
“But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face...
Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’
‘Isn't that a bit hard on their own parents?’
‘No. There are those that steal other people's children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.”
Only partially do I remember it's beauty, but nevertheless it shocked me, woke me up from some slumber I had been living in and peeled scales back from my eyes. I felt as if I was being baptized into new life by freezing cold water, shocking and awakening all of my senses into new life. But it didn’t make me love my own beauty, Dicksonia, any less. It made me love her even more.
And the funny thing is, as I am writing this, I am almost glad that I could not take a picture of it because a picture would not do it justice. It was that beautiful.
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