05.16 Heart Sounds

All I have ever wanted was to be able to sing music that sounded like my soul the way that the ocean tastes like salt.

People who can do this make it look easy - like breathing.  

Dancers are like this too.  I am in awe of dancers. I love the way they make poetic sense of their bodies and articulate  feelings with every movement.  They glide and leap and bow and move exposing every experience and tell their own stories, even when they are telling someone else.

It is so awesome to me how difficult it is to choreograph the individual out of a dance or arrange a person out of a song. It is almost impossible

I studied music. I practiced music. I imitated music. I ignored music. I consumed music. I loved music.  I wanted to be music.  I withdrew from music.

There are lots of uninteresting reasons why this struggle is so real for me.  I have counted them and filed them away, but i haven’t detached from them enough to make them disappear.

Currently, I feel like the inability to merge with song stems from an internalized oppression of the highest level.  This affliction is born from the harsh and unrelenting pattern of perfectionism at any cost no matter how futile the effort.

I have such huge disdain for perfectionism and yet here it is somehow keeping me from making soul sounds.  How is this a thing.

I think I am brave.  I know I am brave. However, I have never been quite brave enough to surrender to music.

Everyone who deals in the currency of energy and has evaluated my presence and has told me that i need to sing.  Whenever I hear someone say this, it sounds like when someone tells you to wear a seatbelt or floss.  Its like not singing is putting me at risk for not being able to enjoy my life. 

As a child I used to sing constantly.  I used to never run out of things to sing.  As an adult, I have to try hard to remember songs that are fun to sing.  As I write this, it sounds crazy, but this is what being an adult has done to me.  

…so, the other day I found myself in the car singing. Badly.  I kept trying to figure out how to fix it.  I thought about the key of the music, the speed, the articulation of words, the breath, the rhythm, my proximity to all of those things independently and together.  It was seriously not fun and it sounded horrible.  

Suddenly I realized I was singing with my head - not my heart.  It sounded like head music.  Which is basically, is audible garbage.  It did not sound like my soul or taste like the ocean.  It was made from all of the fear and insecurity in my head that won’t shut up.

Then I remembered this thing that Brigette Martin said to me once:  

 "You can’t let your mind take over your heart.”

I am grateful beyond measure that this lesson showed up when it did.  It stuck around like a waxy little seed through a cold season and bloomed right here at the end of spring.

It’s worth noting, I don’t know how to do this, but now I know my work.

Music is an instrument of liberation - I will practice and abandon the idea of perfection.