{"id":51169,"date":"2011-12-27T19:38:54","date_gmt":"2011-12-28T00:38:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=51169"},"modified":"2011-12-27T21:35:16","modified_gmt":"2011-12-28T02:35:16","slug":"your-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/your-song\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Song"},"content":{"rendered":"

In keeping with today’s theme of the Sun-Pluto conjunction<\/a>, I have a little personal history to share. For as long as I could remember, I sang. When I was five, my uncles would throw dollar bills onto the living room floor, telling me those were mine if I’d sing them a song. As a shy, reclusive child my mother had to push me out onto that living room floor to perform and be out among other people. It wasn’t long before I learned that one of the few ways I could be before other people without getting teased mercilessly by my older cousins — which happened a lot — was by performing.\u00a0You might say singing saved my young life.<\/p>\n

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When I was eight, I started playing the piano and singing along to the radio. I mimicked operatic arias on the record player.\u00a0I made up my own tunes. None of the music was complete enough to make a song, but I just played and played.\u00a0I joined the high school choral group, making friends with the art crowd, freeing myself from needing the approval of the ‘cool kids’ who shunned me. I became a member of an art clique that nobody understood, but smart enough for all our teachers to favor. Music became a muscle that shielded me from nasty scrapes of cruel adolescence. But it was not enough to protect me from the cruelty of life.<\/p>\n

I was 18 when my father died, two weeks before going away to school.\u00a0I was then a soul amputee.\u00a0Singing no longer had meaning for me.\u00a0I could not bring myself to sing, and because of her profound grief, Mama could not bear to hear the sound of music in the house. I lost the music in my home and in my voice. But it had to find a way through somewhere. The music moved into my sexuality, used to fill the wound caused by my father’s loss.<\/p>\n

It was in the halls of the art department that I found another part of myself previously declared missing. When I found acting classes in my senior year, missing limbs re-appeared.\u00a0It was then for the first time in four years that I felt true happiness.\u00a0I acted, danced. I was in a show at least once a year if not more. I had to work at a ‘real job’, because I needed to eat. This has been my life for the last 30-plus years since graduating college. The pieces sewn back together, the spirit alive and functioning as best it could.\u00a0Yet, music was still lost to me. It was unreachable, \u00a0a mystery.\u00a0Inaccessible.
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As the years went on, with failed relationships and unfulfilled dreams, I found myself trying to detach from my body, trying to escape from my feelings. I didn’t know what I was feeling. I needed to re-learn how to access my heart, which had become a stranger. I had to become my own heart’s archeologist.<\/p>\n

The little five-year-old me who found her courage to sing before her uncles brought the torch with her for both of us to carry down into the labyrinth. To go further down, we had to sing.\u00a0To sing was to release memories, to run oxygen through the sluggish chambers of my feelings. I was beginning to feel my emotional body through my diaphragm, and\u00a0I found new musical notes, like when blood reaches an arm or leg that’s been asleep, allowing it to tingle and revive.\u00a0Even though the words to express them weren’t there, the notes were and the feelings started to flow.<\/p>\n

I started to search for more notes, and more, until there was no control. The notes were helping me find the truth lying asleep within my personal tombs. I had been numbed for all these years. Not just the early death of my father but the numbness from living a life not fully realized. It was singing: ballads and blues; tiny whispers and melodies; strange riffs and scat that helped me tell the stories of my life through the notes coming from my body. These were my stories, my songs, long waiting to be told. I was making a discovery: I needed music back like a medicine. Singing was healing my scars.<\/p>\n

On Solstice Night, I had the great good fortune to party with my musician friends, hosted by Keith Terry of International Body Music Festival fame. I call Keith — a musician, dancer and a scholar of music from across the world — a life teacher. <\/em>Creating music is intensely personal, internal and fragile.\u00a0By learning from and making music with others across the planet, Keith learned the value of supporting others, no matter their range or experience in this ethereal thing called music.<\/p>\n

As is the custom, everyone invited brought their instruments to the party to jam the night away. There were enclaves of music everywhere, from bluegrass to blues and jazz.\u00a0This solstice I found myself drawn to the blues. The man was playing a rocking road-house song called “Don’t Be an Evil Woman,” on a guitar that looked like an old friend. Between each chorus was a rambling guitar riff that allowed a singer to scat her way through, teasing, coaxing, and putting up a fuss without words, only music. We were singing of a man begging his woman to be true, and his woman clearly intending to do no good. At the end of the duet, we wound up finding ourselves meeting halfway in a dissonance that ended with an arrival on the same note. Somehow, we understood each other through the music. His song and mine told a story.<\/p>\n

Not everyone has music, but I believe we all have a song. An expression inside that operates at a level primary to our basic selves.\u00a0It’s our voice — whether through our hands, our feet, the clanging we do as we work in the kitchen, read stories to our children, peer down the microscope or add a steel girder to an I-beam. All I’ve given you today was my story on how I re-discovered my song. It’s a song like a river, like a cake, like old grief. It’s tender and longing for love. What does your song sound like? What does it taste like? Do you have a picture of it? If you’re not alone, who is singing with you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In keeping with today’s theme of the Sun-Pluto conjunction, I have a little personal history to share. For as long as I could remember, I sang. When I was five, my uncles would throw dollar bills onto the living room floor, telling me those were mine if I’d sing them a song. As a shy, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51169"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}