Things That Endure

The Sound of Music, resistance, and what lives within us

I was napping on my sofa when I was suddenly awakened by the singing of children:

doe, a dear, a female deer. ray, a drop of golden sun…

My neighbors have two young daughters. I could hear them running up and down the side of the house, singing this iconic song. Visions of children and their nanny frolicking in the Alps filled my head. I used to sing this song when I was a little girl. I sang it a lot. A lot. I owned the 45 and would play it on my portable red record player on repeat.

The Sound of Music was one of those movies that came around like a season. It was something you knew by heart, like The Wizard of Oz, making it back to the TV screen once a year.

What I didn’t understand back then, though, was the backdrop.
The tension that lives beneath the music.
That it’s not just a story about singing nuns and children running around in clothes made from curtains.
It takes place on the eve of Nazi occupation: Austria being taken over by a regime that demanded loyalty and submission.

It’s a story about a family who refuses to join a system of oppression they couldn’t align with.
A man who will not swear allegiance to something that violates his integrity.
A woman who follows her inner knowing, even when it doesn’t make sense.

I didn’t know any of that as a kid. I just loved the music. I loved the feeling.
And maybe that’s part of the brilliance of it. The joy comes first. The joy opens the door.

And now, decades later, I hear these two girls—with a Polish Catholic mother and a Jewish American father—singing this song outside my window. And it strikes me: they’re singing about joy, from a story about resistance. A story where people chose exile over compliance. Where joy didn’t cancel out the threat, but moved with it.

What Maria disrupts in the home mirrors what the family eventually must confront in the world.

The captain—still grieving, still holding it all together in the only way he knows how, tries to control his children the way the regime outside seeks to control a nation: through order, obedience, silence. And just like the political forces pressing in on Austria, that control begins to tighten, to suffocate.

But Maria doesn’t meet it with resistance. She meets it with aliveness. With song. She doesn’t fight the system. She brings something more human into it. And somehow, that changes everything.

The shift starts in the home. In the spaces where love and structure have been bound in tension. Where the grief of loss has hardened into discipline. Maria loosens something. Not through rebellion, but through remembering.

The children already know how to be alive. That’s why the governesses kept leaving, because the children wouldn’t obey the rules. They rebelled against them. What Maria brings isn’t a lesson. It’s an allowing.

And in doing so, she reminds the captain, too.

The transformation is intimate before it is political. But it’s the same pattern.
Control becoming compassion.
Rigidity softening into connection.
A return to something more honest and real.

And once that shift happens inside the family, staying becomes unthinkable.
He can’t stand alongside what he now feels so clearly.

And here we are now.

In a different time and place, but with familiar undercurrents.
The world is restless. The ground feels unstable—globally, politically, economically.
Things once taken for granted are no longer guaranteed.
We don’t know what’s coming, or how to meet it.

And in the midst of all of it, I find myself returning to the moment when I woke from a nap to the sound of two young girls singing Do-Re-Mi.

Joy, rising from within uncertainty.

It reminds me that we are always holding more than one truth.
That we can feel despair and still be present to beauty.
That grief can break the heart open. That loss can live right next to love.

When a close friend passed away a few months ago, the sadness and grief were unbearable at times. But alongside it, something else came forward: a heart opening.

Maybe that’s what The Sound of Music is really about.
Not avoiding hard times, but moving through them with presence.
Not pretending things are okay, but finding small ways to stay human anyway.
Through music. Through connection. Through choosing to remain open, even when the world makes it hard.

That’s what I’m trying to do now.
To stay open and grounded.
To hold the uncertainty of the world and the aliveness of this moment.
To remember that what happens in the small spaces between people, in homes, in the ways we choose to stay connected—these moments can ripple outward.

And how even in the most challenging moments, there can still be singing.

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