My Father's Music

My father can play three songs on the piano. One is Debussey's Clare de Lune. The other two are also classical pieces. I have no idea which ones. But I would love when we would go to my Aunt Laurie's house-- immense and modern, with huge rooms and (to my eye) impossibly high ceilings, her baby grand sat in sharp relief against the white walls and white shag carpet of her white living room-- and my dad would play.

I sat next to him on the piano bench, almost too eager to breathe, barely containing myself for the length of his short repertoire. He didn't know the entirety of any of the three works, but he knew enough to keep us all transfixed. Before the last note died, I would burst out "Again, daddy! Play it again!"

And he would. He would bring his large hands-- so much more comfortable holding a golf club or a cup of coffee-- he would bring his hands up and  begin to play. And for those few minutes, I was mesmerized by his hands, fluid and graceful, saying everything that mattered, everything that he couldn't say: Of course I'll it play again. I love you.

Dad wasn't much for words. Used to make me crazy. Read this, Dad; can you believe what it says? Watch this, Dad; what'd'ya think? Listen to this, Dad-- what do you say?

Hmmmm.

That's nice.

I guess so.

I don't know.

Hmmmm.

I was like a puppy all during my childhood and adolescense, jumping and wagging and slightly desperate for his attention. Notice me, Dad. Engage. Talk. Debate. Argue. Something. Anything. And mostly, I would skid head first into the wall of his quiet.

But when I asked, he would lift his strong hands to the keyboard and play for me, one more time.

Years later, long after I had moved out of their house into my own, we would joke about it (well, "joke" in the very-few-words-but-still-shared-sentiment of my dad's world). After I had talked to my mother for however long she would grant me, after the obligatory how-are-you-what's-new-are-you-dating-anyone back and forth of our conversations, she would invariably end our call with "Here. Your father wants to talk to you," and she would hand the phone to my father.

"Hey Dad."

"Mmhmm."

"Poor Morry," I would say, laughing. Morry was my grandfather, my mother's stepfather. Her mother would do the same thing, every time. Whenever she was done with her part of the conversation (always in some weirdly truncated shorthand, so worried was she about the toll charges that she was sure would bankrupt her or us), she would shove the phone in Morry's hand, insisting that he wanted to talk to us. After a painfully uncomfortable and mostly silent minute or so, peppered with pat questions and unheard answers ("How are you, Papa?" "Fine, fine.") that trailed off into gentle sighs that filled up the remaining space, until we could all (thankfully) hang up.

"How's it going, Morry?" I would tease my father.

"Fine, fine," he would say. I could hear his distracted smile loud and clear.

"You don't wanna talk, do you, Dad?"

"Not particularly. Everything ok?"

"All good, Dad. I release you-- you can hang up now. Love you."

And so it went. I understood the why of his reluctance at some point, finally. He made his living with his words. If he wasn't talking to a client, he was arguing their cases in court. He spent his days talking, so by the time we picked him up at the train station at 5:45 every night, Monday through Friday, week after week after month after year, he was done talking.

Dad lived in a world that merely shadowed our own, intersecting it in the background and the in-between times-- early morning just before leaving for the train or the golf course; dusk and dinner, sitting at the head of the table, inhaling whatever meat-and-potatoes dinner Mom had made. My brothers were lucky. They had Indian Guides and Little League, smaller and infinitely more tender points of intersection. I was always so jealous that they had found this private, boy-language that engaged our father in a way that I never could.

For me, almost always, he was a silent, bread-winning presence, a not-quite stranger who came and went according to his own rhythms. Every so often, I would find the bridge between our worlds and be filled with the music he coaxed from the piano, a language all our own.

We grew comfortable in our every-so-often conversations. They rarely veered from the gentle paths we had carved for them. "How's it going?" "Fine, dad. Go ahead, Morry-- you are released." What more needed to be said? Love was wrapped around every letter, every vowel in those short sentences.

My story would end here, in that gentle back and forth game of verbal shorthand at which we had become so adept. It would - it should - but doesn't. Apparently, those warnings they slap on the side of a pack of cigarettes are true: smoking is dangerous for your health. For Dad, it became true in spades: throat and tongue cancer. When he was diagnosed, we were told that if he had to get cancer, this was certainly the best one to get, since it was mostly curable and survival rates are quite high. Of course, an 89% survival rate is high until it's used in connection with your dad. Then it's impossibly small, while 11% looms larger than mountains and sky together.

After a year of chemo and radiation and hope and prayer (not necessarily in that order), the doctors found that while the tongue cancer had been eradicated, the throat cancer seemed to have snagged on his vocal chords, wrapping them in strands of ugly, deathly cells. There was no choice but to remove the voice box. And so, on September 10, 2012, dad underwent a trachyectomy.

I went to visit him, shortly after his surgery. He was still raw and tender, still a little lost and unsure.  Always a man of small conversations and few words-- he was wrapped in silence. We had gotten him a white board to write on. We wanted to get him an iPad or Tablet. He refused them all. He was too impatient, too used to the rhythms of talking and vocalizing. He would start to write, and then his fingers and thoughts would tangle, and he'd push the board to the side, waiting mutely for us to fill in the blanks.

And then he would bring up his large hands, swirling them through the air between us, fluid punctuation to whatever he was trying to say. Impassioned, expressive, swooping movement meant to be his voice:

Ferris wheel, ferris wheel, fireworks!

Or something to that effect. I read his hands about as well as I read his lips. I realized, though, that the words didn't matter. Or didn't matter much. I was transfixed, once again, by his hands, saying everything that ever needed to be said-- everything he had always said-- I love you.

Love you back, Dad. 

Happy father's day. 

#BlogElul 9 - Hear

We are commanded to hear. Of course, the commandment, as I read it, is more about "Listen up - something really important is coming, that you need to hear," I take it to heart: Listen. Hear. And I hear everything. All day, every day, there is a lot of noise out there, and it doesn't stop. And every noise seems to proclaim "Listen up! Hear me!" and I do.

I want it to stop. I am afraid of the quiet. And so it goes: a constant barrage of noise, from soothing to seething and reeling and roiling, there is an eternal psalm of noise that needs to be - yearns to be - longs to be heard.

I dwell in the distraction of all that noise.

There are times I hear better than others. I can hear my child laugh from a great distance. I can hear him weep or cry out no matter how loud the cacophony around him is, and I hear his breath at night. I hear him with my heart, where there is no such thing as distance or clutter, just connection.

I tend to hear music, instrumental, piped in, live. Doesn't matter. I'll be sitting with friends over coffee, chattering and fluid, and suddenly hear the faint strains of some piece of music (usually bad elevator music that has no life or pulse in it, and I am grateful when it is not that); "I hate this song," or "I love this song," I will say, and am met with "What song?" Can't they hear it? I'm forever amazed that the music goes unnoticed, unheard. But I hear it. I am witness to the notes that play.

I am woken by dump trucks, startle at sirens, calm at bird song and get lost in the sound of water. I have found God in the sound of the waves that lick and jump and tangle with the shore. 

I am commanded to hear, and so I do.

There is one sound that I look for, strain for, miss more than anything: my father's voice. I didn't love it. There is no special resonance in it. He was a baritone - the in-between pitch of Everyman. Normal. Pleasant. He sang beautifully, but I don't remember his songs, or his voice when I reach back into the memory banks of my childhood. He sang Barber Shop in a choir years later, long after he had moved to Memphis. It was his joy, his love, his retreat after the long hours he sat on the Federal Bench. He often sent me CDs of his performances. They went unlistened to; I am not a fan of Barber Shop quartets.

And please - don't misunderstand! My father hasn't died. He is just voiceless. Two years ago, in order to treat the cancer that had invaded his throat and voice box and tongue, the doctors performed a trachyectomy. They removed his voice box in exchange for his life. We are all good with that. 

But I miss my father's voice, even though I can't seem to remember just what the hell it sounded like.

He has a mechanical voice now. As my son, much younger then dubbed him, Robot Zayde. IT is painful and difficult for him to speak. So, he doesn’t talk much. Not that he ever did; he disliked talking on the phone, answered questions with an economy of words that astounded me (considering my motto is “why use ten words when a hundred will do?). He is quiet. He is content. All good.

A few nights ago, I had a house full of people. Sadly, we had all gathered to sit shiva for my mother’s brother, Uncle Phil. While I have thrown myself into my Judaism over the last handful or two of years, searching and stumbling around, looking for meaning, looking for God, my family has not. At my bat mitzvah forty years ago (oy!), I called my parents “lox and bagel Jews.” Not much has changed since then. While holidays are celebrated gastronomically, they tend to avoid the more formal expressions of Judaism. When my son became a bar mitzvah a few years ago, although they couldn’t manage to make it to the synagogue on Friday night, at least everyone was there on Saturday morning. And so it goes: we have all taken a different path to God.

Shiva was what it always has been for me – a celebration of life, a time to mourn and remember and find strength in community. If I – when I falter, I am caught, ever and always. It is, to me, the best of who we are, this uncompromising demand that no one ever grieve alone. So the house was noisy and crazy and full to the brim. Even that day, the day my uncle was buried, there was a coming together that made sure we each of us knew we were not alone.

The minyan service seemed to take its cue from the day: quiet, hesitant, leaning in and reaching up to one another. Hebrew and English mixed and twisted together, forming a tight bridge, or a handhold – something to grab onto. The air and the walls buzzed with softly droning chants, as people murmured and mumbled their way through the evening service. We made time for words, and then time for silence.

As we came out of that silent meditation, my friend began to play the familiar chords to Oseh Shalom, creating her own bridge between prayer and memory. And into that holy space, of peace and wholeness, my father brought his hand up to the mechanical device that allows him to breathe and speak, and he sang with us. “I am here;” he sang, “hear my voice – I am with you, and moved by you, strengthen you and find comfort in you.”

I am so grateful that I was able to be a part of that sacred moment, a part of that song. It was not the voice I remembered, my father’s harsh, mechanical and flat voice. It was much more beautiful than anything I’ve ever heard. 

(c) Stacey Zisook Robinson

2014

#BlogElul 6 - Search

There was a pencil.
I swear to God
there was.

And that note,
the one I scribbled
in bright red
lipstick
on the back of that
menu,
the one from the
Chinese restaurant that we like.

And I couldn't find that
thing,
You know, that thing
That thing that I've searched for
everywhere I thought it should be.
That store -
That sweater -
That job -
That word -
That note.
You know:
That note that sounds
like a bell,
or a gong.
or heaven,
or your breath
just before dawn
when the light is crisp
and the air is gold
and your fingers tangle in my hair;

That starts from a point,
a single point
of space
or heat,
Just that one pinprick of a place.
It sounds,
and it radiates out,
and it flows up
Like honey,
or glaciers,
or wind,
and carries
the music of God
and the sound of your
Laugh,

and that sound -
that note,
the one that I've
sought
and search for
and seek yet
again.
That note:

It carries me
Home.


(c) Stacey Zisook Robinson
2014

The Music of God - Part II

(To read The Music of God (Part One), click here.)

Here's a curious thing: the English words "miracle" and "mirror" come from the same Latin rood: mirari, which means "to wonder at." It is meant to convey a sense of awe and amazement.

Funny. I read this in a fantasy novel a thousand years ago (Ok, maybe not a thousand. Maybe it was closer to 35 or 40. But you know, as big as "a thousand" sounds, I gotta tell you-- at the age of old-plus-two, "35 or 40 years ago" sounds positively ancient). It was Peter S Beagle's The Last Unicorn. In it, Schmendrick the Magician (and how could you not absolutely adore a magician named Schmendrick?), tells another character (a Unicorn masked as a human woman, who is searching desperately - and then less so desperately as time stretches out for far too long (though maybe it was just long enough) - for others of her kind) (Unicorns, that is, not humans, or even unicorns masked as humans).

Anyway, the now-human unicorn, writing a letter to the King or some other power-that-was, in order to make a request asks the Magician how to spell "miracle," (because she was looking for one right about then) and Schmendrick replies (I paraphrase) "Miracle is spelled with two Rs, since it comes from the same root as "mirror." Schmendrick then proceeds to blithely muck up his magic and spells for almost the rest of the book, until the very end, when he stops trying to do it right quite so hard, and just hopes that it will all work out in the end.

Spoiler alert: it does. Sort of. I guess hoping is a kind of wild magic all its own.

I remember, all those long and dusty years ago, because it really is a marvelous and poignant story, I remember thinking "Wow.I love that! What an awesome thought, totally fraught with meaning. I have no idea what the meaning is, but I am absolutely certain that it's huge." (Again, I paraphrase)

As with Schmendrick, I then proceededed to blithely muck up my life something fierce, until the very end. Well, not the end of my life, but certainly, for years and years and countless years of pain and pity and fear, of brokenness and isolation and silence-- until the very bitter edges of that life. I was a mess, and my life was worse.

And then I got sober.

I seem to use that plot device more often than not. I say that, somewhat tongue in cheek, but really; it was a death-defying moment, getting sober. It was a watershed, the parting of the seas of my addiction to More, my almost lifelong love affair with self destruction. It was an instantaneous and painfully attenuated moment: from one second to the next, in the blink of an eye, the beat of my heart-- on one side, the certainty of death and madness. On the other, a path. A chance. Freedom.

Hope (that is a wild magic all its own, even for me).

Ah, sobriety.

Ugh.

I do not know how I survived those early days (months) (ok, years). Being a drunk was easy by comparison.  I was infinitely (intimately) more comfortable with my well-lubricated life. I craved separation: anything to put some distance between me and my tormentors. So what if the tormentors were me? I blamed you for my isolation, anyway. And I blamed God for my pain.

Suddenly, life went from slippery and slick to raw and naked and much more present than I ever imagined or wanted. I swear, there were days (hours) (minutes) that I felt as if I were caught in a steel sharp-toothed trap, and if I could have gnawed away some phantom limb to escape it,  I would have.

Suddenly, I went from having no people in my life to having too many, all of them shiny, happy, cheerful people who liked to hug and laugh and speak in platitudes until I wanted to scream. But I couldn't get enough of them. I craved their company and dreaded the idea of going home, to my apartment filled with its ghosts and its silence.

Suddenly, I went from no God (or at least a distantly absent One) to a very present God. I knew, without a doubt, that I had a God in my life, and I knew, without a doubt, that my God was God's evil twin brother, out to screw with me, trip me up and make me sweat.

Maimonides argued that God could only be defined in the negative. To do otherwise would limit the might and power and limitlessness of God. I learned, slowly-- and not without my own pain and drama-- I learned to define God in hindsight.

I learned to find God behind me, in my past. I called these the God Moments. You might call them coincidences or random chance. Happenstance, perhaps, if you were trying to impress. I'm okay with any of that. I am not very particular in what name you or I may use to call God. Much more important for me, in my infinitely grateful hindsight, is that I call out-- in anger (and, oh, I was filled with anger, there at the end and for the long stretch of my beginning) or joy, pain or doubt or sorrow or wonder. Anyhing and everything. 

And I did. I learned, in fits and starts, I learned to call. To trust.

But there was still no music in it (certainly none that I could hear) (and certainly none that I would let you hear). For all that I was learning to find God again, I would do it without the one way that ever made sense, that ever worked, that ever connected me to whatever name for God you may want to use.

I would not sing.

When i get very quiet, when i get very honest, i will grudgingly admit that, in actuality, I was afraid to sing. Afraid of my voice and what it would sound like after years and years of disuse (not to mention the years and years of abuse). Afraid that even when I sang again, if I ever did, I would no longer be able to find God, no longer be able to dance that holy path up and out, in joy and reverence and grave. I was terrified that I would be trapped in my silence forever.

God, but it was noisy in my head without any music-- noisy and jangly and dissonant. Fear is like that-- sharp-edged and soulless, a chaos of silence.

And then, somewhere in there, somewhere in all that silence and fear, I took my son to Sunday school for the first time. He was six. I hadn't set foot in a synagogie in years. I hadn't had a formal conversation with God in just shy of forever-- so long that I wouldn't have known what to say if I felt the need (desire) (want) to say anything at all.

But Nate was six, and it was time. I knew no one, picked the synagogue out of a hat (or the pixelated internet version of a hat), and walked him into a brick-and-mortar building at the end of a long and lonely road. I walked into this structure and heard the strum of an A-minor chord being played, and I was freed.

Just like that. Freed. If not instantaneously, pretty close to it. I stood in that brick-and-mortar building and suddenly it was a holy place. That one chord, that melancholy, joyous, yearning chord found me, found my silence, and unlocked the chains I had so carefully set in place, to bind me to my fear.

The music of my soul, the song of my heart: yearning. It is neither want nor need, though they are certainly present in it. That song is more a reaching up, a reaching out-- in hope, in joy, in despair and desolation. It is a flame that flickers and leaps upward, dancing and guttering and glowing through it all. It's an A-minor, sweet and knowing and raw. It's a question, a prayer, a fluid and graceful arc that moves in you and through you. It's the heart's cry in the darkness "Where are You?" and the breathless hope of God's answer "Hineini -- here I am."

Hope is its own wild magic, its own sacred benediction.

With that one chord, I found my voice again, left the silence behind. It was the voice of my desire, and in it, I found blessing and grace. In it, I found miracle an mirror both, wonder and awe and hope. And when I opened up again, finally, when I lifted my voice in song again, when i finally believed that my hope was stronger than my fear, I found my song, and myself again.

And in that song, there was God.

Hineini.

Stacey Robinson
March 2014

The Music of God (Part One)

When I was born -- or something near enough to that so that it doesn't matter-- I sang. I can't remember a time I didn't sing. Spiders. Buses. Bonnie on the ocean harmonized with Christmas carols and Hinei Mah Tov. I drank it in and sang it out-- every note, every key, every word.

Even then, I knew that when I sang, I was free. Or freed. Something. I felt light and joy, and I loved how people would stop when I sang, and watch me, in wonder or something close to happiness. And when I was finished, when the song was done, invariably, they would coo and smile and tell me how beautifully I sang.

And in that exact moment, I knew that I was beautiful. I knew that I was loved. Just for that instant, even as my face grew pink and warm, and my toes curled with their compliments, and I felt like squirming under their attention, in that instant I knew that I could sing and it was good.

I don't remember a time I didn't sing. From first grade junior choir at synagogue to the middle school chorus and my high school stage (with summer theater camp weaving all in and through those years), name a musical and I was probably in it. Name a song arranged in four part choral harmony, and I sang it: first soprano, reaching flawlessly all the way up to F above high C. And oh-- it was all amazingly good! For the space of that performance, and the handful or two of minutes while the applause lasted and the congratulations echoed off the auditorium walls, it was good and I was loved and God was near.

And when I was 18 or 20 or some other difficult and existentially angsty age, I decided I would never sing again. There were a thousand reasons for my declaration, every one of them reasonable,  well thought out. 

They were all lies, of course.

I didn't sing-- refused to sing-- because I was angry--with the world, my life, my family. And God. Oh, I was especially angry with God! And what I wasn't angry with, I was afraid of-- everybody, everything. Singing was the one thing-- the only thing-- that allowed me to step outside my own head and breathe, really breathe, and feel the presence and comfort and absoluteness of God. In a world where the ground was constantly shifting, where people loved you and told you lies, where less-than and lost were my constant companions, there was God. And one day, at aome impossibly vulnerable, hormonal age, I crawled outside the confines of my head, and was met with emptiness.

Where once there was God, now was a howling, empty loneliness, coupled with the absolute conviction that I was alone and God had gone. Somewhere. Anywhere. Certainly gone from me. I thrummed like a taut wire: abandoned by God and fairly buzzing with tension in the face of my inability to fit inside my own skin or into the steady cadence of life the rest of the world seemed to find so easily.

I tried. I tried to find God, to fill that gaping open space. For a bunch of years, I searched, but eventually, I couldn't bear the thought of my abandonment. A few years into that howling emptiness, so vulnerable and so desperately raw, my twisted logic led me to the only possible conclusion that made sense: having been rejected by God, I therefore rejected the one thing that felt like holiness, the one thing that lifted me to sacred. I'll show You, I declared into the silence that suddenly filled me: I will not sing. Instead, it was so much easier, so much more right, to crawl inside a bottle and hide there for a small space of eternity and my own personalized tour of hell. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

So, for the next couple of decades, I didn't. and I did.

For the next couple of decades, I did not sing. For the next couple of decades, I hid inside a bottle of whatever was handy, as long as it burned like liquid oblivion going down, and made me believe, if even for 37 seconds, that I was not alone in the universe, and the voices in my head stopped whispering their siren song of self-destruction.

For the next couple of decades, I yearned for the connection I had once found in singing. And for the next couple of decades, I denied myself the grace of it, with ever sip, every glass, every hangover. There was a lot of denial.

For more than twenty years, I did not sing. And then I got sober.

I got sober, and they told me, all those happy, shiny people who filled the smoky rooms and the cracked leather couches and the gunmetal folding chairs that had seen better decades, let alone better days-- they told me to find God.

I didn't need to find God. Hell, I knew exactly where I'd left Him. Her. The Deity. I hate the grammar of the Divine. God was locked away in a private little room, watching. Watching everything through a window that looked out onto the world far, infinitesimally far away. God's face was the face of Compassion itself-- filled with kindness and light and love. And God wept, as He watched, at the evil and cruelty and waste and sadness that filled the earth, day in and day out, world without end, amen.

God wept, and I saw that Her hands were bound with barbed wire, powerless to act, impotent in the face of a desperately broken world aand desperately broken people. What good was God, if God could only watch, and weep?

I may have known (unequivocally) exactly where God was hiding, but I searched anyway. They told me to, those happy, shiny, sober people. And they had something I didn't have, something I desperately wanted: they had joy. They had happy. They sat comfortably in their own skins, didn't seem to want to crawl out of it all the time, into a hole or the dark or... away. And I wanted that. all of it. I wanted to be made whole, to fit, to be forgiven. So if the price of all that was to seek God-- seek God I would, in twelve step meetings and self help books, spiritual guides and therapy. I would practice willingness,  because they said it was the next right thing to do.

I managed to make a friend at a meeting; turns out we had more than trying to stay sober a day at a time in common. He was edgy, sarcastic, broken, looking for redemption and God, and he was Jewish. My lucky day.  He tended to go temple-hopping on Saturday mornings and invited me to hop along. Not every Saturday, but every so often, I'd hop along with him, and look for God in God's own house.

I stumbled through the prayers. I didn't remember the choreography or the Hebrew. I was convinced that I didn't fit, didn't belong. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, and felt gauche and ungainly. I had that odd and unsettling, questioning, searching, just-at-the-tip-of-my-out-of-reach-almost-discovery-of-I-wish-I-knew-or-maybe-I-hope-I-don't-discover sensation of being closerthanthis to an answer kind of thing. But it was elusive and missing, an almost-whisper of grace.

And then one Saturday morning, the choir sang.

From above me and behind me, a host (I swear it was a host, not just a handful or two of earnest choristers) a host of heavenly voices filled the sanctuary with this glorious, transcendent sound, a rising arc of prayer and joy. It was rich and full and resonant. I could hear in it, in every note, every chord that stretched from one note into a thousand (I swear it was a thousand) before tumbling back-- like water, or laughter-- into a single note again, and there was God: unshackled, unbound, present in a way that took my breath away.

And I knew -- knew-- that everyone around me felt it. They got it-- they were in it and of it and surrounded by it. They were whole and filled and it was all meant for them. This was the day that God had made, and they were welcomed into the miracle of that moment. I could feel their faith, their acceptance-- of God, of themselves, of the world around them -- radiating outwards, a parallel arc to this music of God.

I stood transfixed. I felt the power of that faith, the grace and majesty of it. I wanted it, every drop, every heartbeat, every breath. I could feel the hunger in me build, a surge of want and need. I stood at the jumping off place, poised and motionless at the gate. A step. All I needed was a single step through, and I would find it, all of it, all my yearning answered-- faith, redemption, forgiveness. God. 

And I couldn't.  I couldn't step or leap or even move. I could only stand, rooted, outside of that glorious, joyous song, knowing that there was faith and forgiveness and God. For them-- all of them, the world entire. But not for me.

I stood, and I wept, and I did not sing, knowing that my fear was stronger than any faith, louder than any music, vaster and more complete than God.

I was silent, and I knew that my silence would last forever.

03 Tishrei 5774: Yearn

I may have mentioned this before, but there are two things that I do well. I admit to this relatively freely, and have only pressed the delete key into service about seventeen times in an effort to either perfect that statement or to quell the squishy, icky, self-conscious feeling I get when I get all braggy and out there. Thing is, I've had independent confirmation of these two things-- even by people who don't know me. I mean, it's one thing when a friend compliments you on something. They kind of have to do that, in that friendly-I-love-you-and-I-support-you kind of way that friends have. But when you get that same compliment from a stranger, or someone you don't know well at all-- it has a sticking power that moves the validity of the compliment up a notch or three.

So-- two things. First is writing. I love to write. I love to put words to the bright and shiny (or dark and twisted) pictures in my head. I love the words-- all of them, and have been known to worry at a particular word or phrase for what seems like forever, in an effort to find the exactly right and perfect word. I listen for the cadence that wraps around my words, adding a resonance that rings true to my ear. I listen for the music of the words, listen for the clear bell tone, like a resolution to an unfinished chord.

Music. My first love, and it gets woven into so much that I do. Even in my writing-- I hear its music, hear the songs pour forth, their rhythms and measures building and flowing. Music is the other thing I do well. Singing, to be exact. I do it a lot. If writing fills my head with sound and gives life to the words that chatter and sing and play there, their notes rising and falling in a waterfall symphony that teaches me the lessons of my heart and illuminates the dark and twisted passages playing hide and seek there, music has always been the one thing that gets me out of my head. 

When I write, I find me.

When I sing, I find God.

This may be the very reason why, when I was twenty or so, and angry, and lost, and filled with existential angst, and broken beyond repair (as I decided I had to be), that I gave up singing. I remember saying to myself "I will never sing again." And I didn't, for a very long time. I may have sung in the shower, or with the radio in my car. But as for singing, real singing that got me to that place-- that transcendent, holy place where the music flowed in me and through me and went upwards and outwards and carried a note and my soul along with it straight to God-- that didn't happen. I shut that down, locked up tight and silent and walked through my days trapped inside my head.

It was noisy in my head, without the music. Noisy and dissonant and jangly. For two decades, I was trapped in my own silence. even when I got sober, even when I went to look for God, I stayed silent. I was afraid to sing, afraid of my voice, what it would sound like after years and years of disuse (not to mention the years and years of abuse. Afraid that even when I sang again, really sang, I would would no longer be able to find God, and would be trapped in my silence forever.

And then, somewhere in there, somewhere in that silence and that fear, I took my son to Sunday School when he was six. While I was in the synagogue, I heard the sound of an Am being played, and I was freed. Okay, not instantly. But that one chord, that melancholy, joyous, yearning chord, found me, found my silence and unlocked the chains I'd so carefully set in place.

Yearning. It is neither want nor need. There is need and desire in it, but it is more a reaching up, a reaching out, in hope, in joy, in despair and desolation. It is a flame that flickers and moves upward, dancing and guttering, and glowing through it all. It is an Am, sweet and knowing and raw. It is a question, a prayer, a fluid and graceful arc. It is the human heart's cry of "Where are you?" and the breathless hope of God's answer "Hineini-- Here I am."

I found my voice, left the silence behind, when I heard the yearning of that music. It was the voice of my own desire. In it, I found benediction. I found blessing. I found God. And when I opened up again, lifted my voice in song again, I found God again-- and God welcomed me home.

Song, Unfinished

There are very few things that I will admit to doing well.  That is, that I will admit to doing well without a whole lot of arm-twisting and cajoling, all the while secretly loving all that arm-twisting and cajoling.

I mean, let's face it: it's kinda nice, when people argue your merits for you, to you.  Sure, some of those people are family, so they almost have to (even in those weirdly dysfunctional families that are tangled and messy and just a little bit nuts; they still (at least in public) sing your praises and claim connection to your talent).  Others are mere acquaintances, some casual, others less so, who say these nice things because, surprisingly enough, they just may be true.  No one is holding a gun to their heads, and the don't seem motivated by blackmail or ransom.  Nice.

But I do admit, pretty freely, that there are a couple of things I'm good at. 

Writing is one of them (she says with only a small amount of knowing self deprecation).  I am in love with words.  Have you ever watched a little kid learn a new word?  You can almost see how they taste the words, roll them around in their mouths to make sure they feel right, taste right.  I try to do words that way when I write: they can be so succulent, juices sweet and tart and running down my chin so I have to slurp them up, and forget using napkins or even my sleeve, it's skin-on-skin to catch every drop of them.  When the word is right, it tastes like dusk in summer, or moonlight on snow.  It is apple-crisp and bursting and whisper-soft, all at once.  It fits, and I will go to any length to find the perfect word, to craft a perfect sentence. 

I am awed by the raw power of words.  Whoever first uttered the phrase "Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never harm me" was a liar of the first order.  Bones heal. Words wound, which is infinitely more cruel.  They fester and ooze and corrupt.  They don't wound; they kill, if not the body, then surely the soul.  And yet, they have the power to heal a heart and change the world, and create joy and celebration. 

Writing helps me to understand who I am and live a very examined life.

And if writing helps me to learn about myself, if it helps to keep me honest and grounded and connected to the world at large (and my life in particular), then singing is the thing that helps me to fly, to crawl outside the boundaries of my own head and find God.  It is holy and sacred and transcendant, in a way that writing, for all its power and glory can never do.

It is no surprise that, somewhere in my fledgling adulthood, deep within my angry and existential angsty period, when my search for spirituality and meaning more often than not led me to a drink or six, that I gave up the two things that mattered most, that helped me to find myself and God.  And believe me, this was a conscious and deliberate decision on my part.  Abandoned by God?  I'll show You:  I will deny You (as I was denied).  I will reject You (as You rejected me).  "I will never sing again,"  I said deep inside my heart, "I will not write."  And I didn't, not for two-and-a-half grueling and lonely and desparate decades. 

I was trapped in my own head, a tiny universe of one, silent and solitary and dark as fear.

It was a bad couple of decades.  Getting sober helped.  Having a child unlocked so much.  Day after day of searching and seeking and hoping, the darkness slowly got brighter.  Finding others along the way, who offered their own illumination and could help point the way, they helped.  It all helped; it was all balm to my hurt, but I was not healed.

And then one day, after my long, self-imposed exile, I walked into a synagogue.  More surprising: I asked if there was a chance to sing.  I didn't know I was asking to have my life changed.  I certainly didn't realize I was asking to be healed, or made whole, or find God.  I got all those things: in that instant, all my unasked-for yearning was answered.  I found something, through my voice- through music and song- that I didn't know was possible.  I certainly didn't know it had been missing.  I found a connection to God that was startling in its simplicity.  It was prayer and forgiveness all at once. 

What began as an off-the-cuff question became an avalanche of joy.  I learned how to dance a path to God, to celebrate and sing a new song.  More (and here's the wonder, for me): I learned how to help others find their own path to God.  It wasn't easy. It meant learning to be vulnerable, letting people in, not always singing the prettiest note, but rather the most honest one.  It meant showing up, unafraid, and allowing myself to believe-- even if only in the moment that I sang-- that I could be redeemed, that I would be forgiven.  When I did that, however falteringly, however much I stumbled along the way, I blazed a trail strewn with a light that all could follow and so sing their own songs to God, find their own voice of foregiveness.

If I sound all noble and charismatic, forgive me.  It isn't like that at all.  A little wonky, sure.  A bit God-centric, absolutely.  I was like a kid who'd just been released onto the playground after a long confinement : I wanted to feel the sun on my face and swing my arms and race the wind-- and take everone aong with me.  It was all energy.  It was all glorious, joyful play.  "Come sing!" I shouted. "Come play with me!  Oh!  What fun we will have, all singing and praying and laughing together!"

And they came.  Not everyone.  Never everyone,  but many did, to my delight and astonishment.  And it wasn't all just me; far from it.  Leaders and followers- we exchanged places in a stately dance, again and again, sometimes a smooth and studied legato, sometimes a quick staccato rhythm..  It was fluid grace and joyous celebration and intense, prayerful wonder. 

The more I sang, the more I sang my prayer, the more I found God.  Found me.  Found you, and my place with you, the place that I fit, that I belonged.  I was home at last. 

And then one day, quite by surprise, I couldn't sing anymore.  Couldn't find my voice, sing pretty.  What had been effortless was suddenly strained.  What had been unthinking beauty was now spotty and intermittent.  My heartfelt prayer, my connection to God and grace now dust and shadow. 

I had a friend once, who prayed with his guitar.  That was his voice.  You could see, when he prayed, when he cradled his guitar to him, made it sing and cry out, made it laugh and weep and whisper and shout, he became incandescent, a light of sacred beauty.  And when he set his guitar aside for a time, when the silence of his nylon strings filled the sanctuary-- you could see how that silence filled him as well.  What light had flared so brightly, shining into darkened corners and weary hearts, guttered and dimmed.  I was so sad for him, for us all, who were denied that spark of holiness that each of us has, not for ourselves, but as an offering to others.  I was so sad that he could not find his voice without his guitar, varnished wood and nylon and metal, slim-necked and faintly worn paths that fit his fingers so perfectly, tuned to the music of the spheres, an altar upon which to place his prayer.

Sad, yes, and so hurting for my friend.  And so secretly smug (I admit now, shame-faced), because I had my voice.  I could pray without music; my very prayer was music.  As I said, to anyone who would listen: "At first, I came so I could sing.  In time, I came so that I could pray." It was all prayer, all praise, all holy and sacred.  And I sang, and raised my voice, and found the spark and made the offering and shared the gift and sang and soared and danced and was filled.

So now, I cannot sing.  How, then, can I pray?  How will God hear my voice without the music that carried it- without the music that carried me?  This was my gift-- not that was given to me, but the thing I had to give, my offering of thanks and gratitude.  This was my salvation, a small bit of grace that illuminated the wilderness and filled it with sound.

How can I pray into this silence? 

How can God hear my song when the notes are trapped inside my head?

I do not know the lesson I am supposed to learn here, if there even is a lesson.  I don't believe I have a God who tests me.  My God, of infinite kindness and compassion, of endless grace and gentle foregiveness, waits for me to cry out in the darkness.  This I believe.  This I know.  But I cannot cry out in a voice that feels so broken to me, sounds so strange. On the willows there, I hung up my song; how can I sing in this foreign land?

So I stumble along, into this new-found silence.  I feel quite lost; desolate and weary, and desparate to sing a song unto God that will be pleasing, that will reach God's ears. 

I don't know if I have lost my song forever, if this is permanent.  But perhaps I should stop searching for the familiar notes, the well-trodden pathways.  What I need is a new song.  Not for God; God hears the music between the notes, the songs our souls sing, and is gladdened by it all.  Perhaps I need a new song for me, so that I can find a new path to God, an undiscovered territory that is deeper and richer and resonates with a different joy.  Perhaps my song is not ended but unfinished.  Perhaps if I listen in this silence, I will hear a different melody, so that I can sing a new prayer.

It is all prayer, all grace-- every shout, every whisper, every cry of despair.  It is all God's music, even the silence.  So I will stumble, and pray, and shine light on new pathways, and sing a new song, and find me and God.  Ever and again, I will find God.  And together, we will sing.