If Music Be the Food of Love

Dearest Readers,
Does a melody ever make you want to cry? And not just cry readers - bawl your eyes out until you have nothing left, like you could gather all your emotions in your hand, open your palm, and let the wind carry them away? Sometimes I want to do that, just so I could have a second start, forge a new path for myself, clean out the furnace and put on a new log. But I don't think life works like that. I was just talking with a friend today about marriage. He said that he wanted to take a year-long honey moon so that he and his wife could reenter their lives completely reoriented toward each other. And I think in some ways, that would be nice. To take a vacation from the world, come back to find all your neighbors moved and tangles of weeds in the front yard, then start fresh. Pack your bags and move to a new city, a new life. A new world almost.

But somehow we carry ourselves - and not just ourselves, but our friends and families, the chipped blue paint on the front porch, the scar from the rusty watering can - all with us. We can't escape who we've been made and who we are being remade into. Maybe its all in our mind. But we can't remove our mind and wring it out like a dish towel.

In some sense though, we don't have to let our thoughts fester in our minds, to let the juices sink so deep that they dry into the foundation. We remake ourselves, freshen our lives with books and gardens, get away from ourselves by staring into the sky and then come back again to rediscover who we were all along.

And that readers is what happened to me. I was sitting in the sanctuary after church, just me and the stained glass. Everyone had gone home. The counters were cleaned and the dishes put away. And I played the piano and sang, and it felt like if I just kept singing, somehow I'd be able to break through the glass keeping me here - cut down the trees and see the horizon for what it really is: a crisp clear line in the setting sun, shades purple and gold rather than the watered blue that I can see from between the branches if I strain my eyes upward toward the heavens.