Last Saturday I played a big band gig in Bay City, Michigan.
Monday I intercepted a tornadic thunderstorm in Columbia, Missouri.
Those two pursuits–jazz music and storm chasing–may seem miles apart, but the passion that drives them is the same. And I have to think, as a person in whom both interests dwell with equal intensity, that they are related in other ways as well.
Each is, at heart, a search for beauty.
Each is a compelling and richly satisfying adventure, one that revels in exploration, challenge, intensity, wildness, and something within me that is bigger than myself.
Each unites knowledge and an endless thirst to learn with intuition and an unquenchable desire to experience something sublime.
In jazz, I prepare myself through countless practice sessions that culminate in the joy of a well-crafted improvisation. In storm chasing, my preparation lies in honing my forecasting skills, and the payoff is standing on a Kansas roadside, watching a tornado dance across the prairie a mile away.
In both pursuits, the discipline required is rewarding in its own right. Yet that adult quality of discipline leads ultimately to being caught up in the moment in a way that lets the child in me run wild and free.
In a jazz, solo, I’m swept up in the swirl of the music, the rush of ideas that tumble from my imagination into my fingers and out the bell of my horn. At the edge of a storm, I”m caught up in the environment; I feel the inbounds racing around me toward the updraft base, watch twirling filaments reach earthward from a rapidly morphing wall cloud, and yell in exuberance at the wildness of it all.
Both in playing jazz and chasing storms, in different ways, I encounter my heavenly Father. I experience his magnificent creativity, his awesome power, his childlike playfulness, and his tremendous worth. In jazz, I participate in God’s creative nature, and in so doing, I reflect it back to him as worship. In storm chasing, I stand apart from an act of creativity far too immense and uncontrollable for me to ever participate in. I can only admire it “in awesome wonder”–and see in it the face of the great Creator, and feel his extravagant, untamed pleasure.
One of my life goals is to get a decent video clip of myself playing my saxophone out on the Great Plains as a huge honking wedge tornado churns in the background a mile away. Crazy? Damn right. I like being crazy that way. It’s how God wired me. It’s a part of who I am–and the reason why this website is named Stormhorn.com.
