Making It Work -- Peace Flows From Wings Of Music's `Little Dove'

Esther "Little Dove" John is playing her flute for a man with a broken heart. The man's name is Jay Wilson. His heart stopped beating in November. Now, a machine helps it beat while he waits for a heart donor.

"If I have an accident on the way home, you can have my heart," John had said to him when she first arrived in his hospital room, before she'd assembled her gleaming Straubinger flute and began to play. She plays three numbers, filling the room with Bach, and causing Wilson's face to relax into a trance.

John plays the flute for peace - both inner and global. An accomplished musician, the 42-year-old Harvard graduate and Seattle transplant has released two compact discs, been a finalist for a Grammy nomination, has walked across America and Russia as a minstrel for peace, and has personally addressed the U.N. General Assembly.

But it is here, in the intimate space of a hospital room, where John feels she does her most important work. Nearly every week for the last 10 years, she's played for the sick at local hospitals: Swedish, Children's, Providence, and most recently at the University of Washington Medical Center, where Wilson has been awaiting a new heart for 3 1/2 months.

Sometimes John is paid, sometimes she's not. In the early years, she rarely got paid. But, anyway, money wasn't the objective; the objective was to bring comfort and healing to the wounded.

In 1987, John founded the Mission for Music and Healing, a

nonprofit group under the auspices of The Church Council of Greater Seattle. What began as a straggly handful of musicians has become a bustling 40-member troupe, funded through grants and foundations, that performs for patients in hospices and hospitals all over the region.

John plays once a week. This is the third time she's played for Wilson. "Her music transports you, takes you away from all the worries you have. It soothes the soul," says Wilson, an architect from Houston. "There aren't many things that even come close to being that beautiful, especially in a hospital."

John's own compositions are reflective, sensual, simple - lonely as only a flute can be. Her CDs have been released in the New Age category but could easily have been called contemporary instrumental or neoclassical. In all her pieces is a soft, rhythmic quality meant to induce calmness.

Music accompanies miracles

Sometimes, the effect of John's flute music has gone beyond comfort to minor medical breakthrough. At Providence Medical Center recently, John and a friend played for an elderly man who'd been catatonic for weeks. A nurse requested the performance on a hunch. After trying a variety of sounds, the two musicians started "a rousing little jig," and sure enough, the nurse was right: The man's toe began to bounce with the music.

The years have been sprinkled with such incidents. Indeed, music as therapy is becoming more accepted in medical circles as a legitimate aid to healing. And that suits John just fine because that's all she's wanted to do since she was a child growing up in White Plains, N.Y.

At 12, she wanted to be a rabbi to minister to people. As a teenager, she became a Quaker. "I wanted to relieve suffering - that was my big motivation." As a young adult, she became a Shaker and still attends a Shaker church on the Tulalip Reservation.

John is part Native American and part African American.

She graduated with bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard in the late 1970s and then went through a period of spiritual searching before moving to Seattle in the early 1980s. She says the name "Little Dove," a universal symbol of peace, came to her during meditation.

In 1983, she went on a six-month walking journey that stretched from her Capitol Hill home in Seattle to the U.N. building in New York City, where she delivered a message of peace to the General Assembly. In 1987, she was the "spiritual flautist" in a peace walk from Moscow to Leningrad.

Since then, a lot has happened, including the formation of her own record label, Dove Paloma Music, which was started in part last year by a small business loan from the City of Seattle.

Hard to earn money

Meanwhile, John continues to live hand to mouth, as do many other nonmainstream artists, surviving on grants and public concerts.

"I like what I do, but trying to support myself doing what I do - playing and promoting music that has a healing effect on our world - is very difficult."

Yet all over the region, hospital patients and ex-hospital patients have heard John's music, and, in their own private ways, have been nurtured by it - something that can't be measured by dollars or graphs or awards.

After her private performance, Wilson said to her: "Your music is so beautiful. I just get lost in it. I wish you could come back all the time. . . ."

That, along with the look on Wilson's face, is payment enough for John.

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