I wrote a song yesterday. I haven’t done this sort of thing in a long time. I woke up with a melody in my head and the words just came, so I flooded them onto a word-processing document until everything resolved.
If felt good to do this. It felt like weight being set down. Pressure being released. Aloe rubbed over a burn. It felt the way the creation of art is supposed to feel: a transmutation of feeling into something tangible. Emotion birthed into the material world to be at play.
I haven’t touched music since I was young, but throughout life I’ve watched my musician friends in aw. Every time my close friend, Scotland, would work on producing her songs with her sound bar and little sampler, headphones over her ears, I’d watch with undivided curiosity. Just as I did watching my friends in orchestra as a student. I was captivated by what I wasn’t. In life I’ve always been an artist, but never a musician. Accept for that one time.
That one time when I was a kid. A pre-teen. Wishing for a guitar so I could sit with my best friends in a garage on a hot Saturday, strumming chords and dreaming about the experience of playing together once we were good enough. We were the band. The mid 90s incarnate, eating freely the bounty of Seven-eleven. Hearts filled with the promise of adventure and abundance in the years to come as we grew into adults. My whole life was ahead of me.
And now I’m here somewhere in the middle of it. I’m not sure what to make of everything that has transpired. There has been some good and some bad… ugly too. I’m grateful for all of it. Those who I’ve met along the way, and every adventure I’ve embarked on and grown from. As much as I have lived life to the fullest, as it has always been my charge to do so, none of that living- that creating- has involved music.
But I did a funny thing this summer. I tempted fate. You see, I’ve noticed that when I draw something- it usually comes to pass in one way or another. Call it what you will, projection of my subconscious, self-fulfilling prophecy, it doesn’t matter. There is a link between what I draw and what I do… and what happens all on its own. Well, this Summer I drew myself (just a sketch) sitting someplace with a tiny guitar at my side. Why? I have no idea!
The universe has impeccable timing (because of course it does). By chance I ran into my oldest friend. My childhood best friend. The one I use to sit in the garage with as a child back when life was unlived. And as circumstance happened to allow, he had a hallow body guitar on his back right then and there. The moment I asked him whether he still played, he was able to strum a tune in that very moment. We were at the renaissance faire. Only there can you casually bump into someone after an entire lifetime AND happen to have a string instrument on demand… and of course that is exactly where it happened by chance.
That night wicks into my being like minerals absorb into the soil to feed the roots of a plant. I remembered my drawing from the summer; sitting on the ground with the little guitar. It was like sensing the onset of a sine wave moments before it begins to build. Now I’m on it, the crest of the wave. It’s loaded with the serendipity of circumstance; the texture of the here and now.
Just by chance, I’ve been metabolizing my entire childhood into my present life. In a hurry, I had to pack boxes with belongings that have lived at my parent’s house for decades, forgotten. An entire era of my early life was neatly stacked beneath my childhood bed, now disassembled. Experienced as both gut checks and teary smiles while mindlessly shoving mementos into boxes to take with me. Those ghosts are now piled in the corners of every room here at the home I live in. The pages of my past are now layered over my present. Things that were distant, buried even, are at the edge of my mind again throughout the day.
Of course it’s this way. It feels like entangled particles. Or a page folding itself as such that two points can touch that otherwise wouldn’t. It feels like everything is pouring itself into the moment, building in this very way so that I can continue a quest I accepted long ago but never finished. So that I can alchemize the past beautifully and contextualize it for what is next!
So! As I sip my coffee this morning (I accidentally made it too strong today), I am sitting with this tiny ukulele at my side. I dug it out of the back room last night. I wove a strap for it from rope and tuned it up. Before going to sleep I stood in the bathroom with it on my shoulder and made some silly sounds while watching myself in the mirror. I don’t remember anything I learned from back when I was a kid, but the feeling was the same. I smiled. I cried. I’m holding back some tears as I write this now. It’s good. All of this is really good.
Every game I’m playing right now has turned out to be about music. Getting the band back together from the edges of the cosmos in order to fix the break in space-time. Using music as the universal language to settle unrest within a culture that has forgotten how to communicate civilly. Healing the earth in the language of the universe: sound. I’m an idiot and I can’t often see things that are right in front of me. It takes a lot of cues before it dawns, but as of now I understand the assignment (or I’m just doing that projection thing again).
In any case, I’m on the wave. I woke up with a song in my head. It came from somewhere. That’s the signal. I’ll follow it. Here I go.
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