Inspiration Monday: Finding Your Voice

This past weekend, I attended the funeral of a good friend. He was a former Navy musician, and a professional french horn player most of his life. He was an accomplished vocalist, an old-school barber-shopper with just enough ham in him to steal the show even in a gigantic chorus. My friend loved music with the zeal of a missionary and evangelized it like it was a religion. It was his one true voice, and he shouted his joy for the world to hear his whole life long. I was honored to play trumpet in a brass ensemble for his funeral.

I hate funerals. Even the lovely ones mean that someone who mattered is gone even though they still
matter. Most of the time, I find myself sitting tense in a pew, picking at my fingernails and chewing on my cheek to distract me long enough to survive the service. This time, I sat in the pew and held on to my trumpet. I don't know what it was about it, but holding that piece of cold, familiar metal in my hands throughout the service comforted me like a security blanket. It held me together and reminded me of the joy it was to play music with my friend. Holding my instrument close to me, I didn't have to think whole thoughts in jagged, sad sentences. It was like my whole body was remembering. How many times did I sit that way, with my trumpet slung across my lap while he told me jokes with his french horn tight in his fingers? How many easy days were there when we shot the breeze and talked composers, hating on Sousa with his oom-pah horn parts and sadistic trumpet licks? So many times he ran up to me and pressed a CD into my hand. "You've got to hear this," he'd say, and he'd mean it. To him, music held all things worth knowing in the world, and what better way to tell your friends you love them than to share all the secrets of the world with them?

My trumpet belonged at that funeral because it was as much a friend of his as I was. It was how he heard me, how we understood each other. There was no better, more natural way to honor a man who was made of song than to stand in front of his loved ones with my instrument and play music for him. I got to say goodbye to him in his own native language.

It got me thinking about all the ways we communicate with one another. I'm a writer (well, a person who writes), and I do a lot of thinking about how to say things so that I can get what is in my head into another person's head with the least amount of interference. Then I usually throw that out and try to think of a prettier way to say it. When I'm writing fiction, I write myself in circles and turn myself inside out trying to figure out how to capture a character's voice and make them seem real. I am a trained therapist and work as a case manager with an oppressed population, so I am always going around saying things about speaking other people's languages, and listening between the words for what a person might be struggling to say.

But maybe it is easier than that. There are so many ways to raise a voice, and who says a person can only have one? Music is a language I speak, and it is a part of who I am, always. Is it any more or less so than writing? Why can't they touch? I draw, paint, and bind books. In every piece of art I make, I mean to say something, even if I can't always verbalize what it is. There's a piece of me in everything I create. (Sometimes literally--I am not so good with the X-Acto when I move fast. I am not above bleeding for my art!)

This was an EXCELLENT cheeseburger.

What is art, anyway? How did we ever come to the ridiculous notion that artistry can only exist in aesthetics? Could you not find your voice making really excellent cheeseburgers? I think so. I think you can find your voice in any number of places, doing whatever it is that connects you to the rest of us. Everyone has something to share, some quiet, some loud, all worthy.

Go out and find your voice. Chances are you already know what it is, or you think you do. Look closely. There will be places in your life where you feel stifled. Don't grumble--sing! Find a way to bring who you are to where you are and be whole. Share your true self with others in whatever language you have.

I love this quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music ... Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.” 

If you find yourself making cheeseburgers for a living, make them with love and build them like works of art. It doesn't matter what it is you do, you are who you are all the time. Bring your voice with you where it falls your lot to stand and you will never be alone. Someone, someday, will stand up and say, "I hear you."

Panda Express never lies. Ever.

Things I Learned on Blog Hiatus

1. Three animals are better than two. The animals do not necessarily agree.

2. Early episodes of The Simpsons never get old.

3. Gnocchi are delicious. This was news to me.

4. My friends are amazing and incredibly supportive. I already knew that, but it bears mentioning.

5. I lose my keys an average of four times per week.

6. I still love the Narnia books.

7. I also still love Stephen King books.

8. SweeTarts are addictive. Even the orange ones.

9. I am biased against orange candy.

10. A lapsed musician is still a musician. My copy of Arban's and I had a reunion party with the whole trumpet family.

John, Paul, George, and Ringo. (Not really)

11. I love to write. Anything. Always.

12. My body has staked a claim on 2pm as nap-time. There are no exceptions, whether I get to nap or not.

13. The number 13 is not particularly unlucky.

14. Cat hair sticks to everything. Every. Thing.

15. Fortune cookies from Panda Express never lie.

16. I am starting to like pink. The ghost of my teenage-self is very upset by this.

I prefer to think of it as "light mauve."

17. When I am nervous, I forget how to spell (among other things).

18. Watching my husband shop for clothes is adorable. He hates it, and that just makes it more adorable.

19. I still don't understand football.

20. According to my eye doctor, I have beautiful corneas. Well, thank you. I try.

21. I still have my lucky pencil. I got it nearly ten years ago when my college band director went around the jazz band docking grades for anyone who didn't have one. I found it on the floor just before my turn and it has lived in my Bb trumpet case ever since.

Excalibur.

22. I had to add one more because I cannot in good conscience leave a list with an odd number.

Back in the Saddle

Last night, I blew the dust off my trumpet case for the first time since my dental adventures began and I hauled my carcass to a rehearsal. This rehearsal was filled with actual musicians with actual musical abilities and the sounds that they made were emphatically, undeniably musical.

Me, not so much.

However! I kept the horn on my face the whole time and some of the notes I played pricked my memory and waggled their little fingers at me: "Don't you remember? We used to do this all the time. We were a team, and sometimes when the moon was full, we were good. Together, we were the music."

Regardless of what actually came out of the bell, my mind swished around the old notes, the ones from before that were sweet and full and brilliant. Before long, I was drunk with it, swept right back into the way it used to be when my horn and I spent every day together, back when we were the music.


It got me thinking about some of the people who have experienced homelessness that I have had the privilege of working with over the last few years. Some of them survived on the streets like stray animals for decades, longer than the scant three I've been on the earth, and they did it without fanfare, without certificates and trophies emblazoned with "Best at Staying Alive", without so much as a blink from passersby. I'm willing to bet that every single day of that time, at least one stray thought took them back to before, when they didn't have to ask permission to do the simplest, unavoidable things, like go to the bathroom (and be turned down). No doubt they thought about the times when they were called "sir" or "ma'am" by store clerks instead of "shoplifter" or "suspicious" just for how they happened to be dressed (which, again, they don't have a whole lot of choice in). For some of them, they could look down at their hands or rumble up a hum in their throats to remember a time when they were the music, too.

I salute everyone who has ever taken a dive over the side of their horse for one reason or another, and had the guts to put their foot back in the stirrup, swing over their leg, and settle back in that saddle.

None of us would get very far without a few second chances and a little patience from the good hearts of the other musicians in the room, the ones who know that we've been where they are, and that tables (as tables are apt to do) could turn at any moment.

Tools of the Trade: Facilitating Daydreams

Today I thought I'd highlight some important tools of the trade that are crucial to my creative consciousness, but which do their work quietly and without heralding their importance to the world. Without these things, I could not do the one thing that fuels my every creative and not-so-creative endeavor: daydream.

I could write an entire post about the necessity of daydreaming (and I probably will), but there are a couple of things that help me be able to daydream, and therefore, to write:

My feet.

My iPod. (Actually, it's my husband's. Shh. Don't tell him.)

A solitary place to walk.

That's it. Without those things, my creative engine short-circuits and my energy is off kilter. Sometimes I have to go and "walk it out" to give my brain time to fire off all the sequences it's processing and pair them to the mood of the music I'm pumping into my ears. From there, I can begin to make sense of the little ideas and snippets that I can't figure out how to put together. While I'm walking, my mind gets a chance to wander in cadence, and it helps get things in line. Not to mention that having an opportunity to open up my senses to new stimuli that I can't directly control can send my mind off in unexpected directions, unlike my desk where nothing changes except the smell when it's time to bathe the dog.

The Feet

Mine are the big ones on the right, pictured with fellow Converse Comrades.

My feet kind of suck. They are flat and they hurt. A lot. They were actually the reason that I stopped working as a bookseller. I put a big ol' stress fracture in my navicular bone and very intelligently worked for six months with a limp before I went to the doc.

Do not do this.

I was in a boot with crutches for the better part of a year, and this turned me into a soggy ball of anxious laborador who waited by the door for Husband to come home every day so that he could drive me in the car while I stuck my head out the window and wagged my tail. I wrote a lot during that period of time since I couldn't go for my walks, but none of it was good...because I couldn't go for my walks.

My feet still hurt, and I still abuse them, but I love them so. They are more than transportation. When it comes to my creativity, they are basically an extension of my brain.

The Music

iPod 5th generation, 2005-2013 RIP (Died of battery cancer. Very sad.)

I am a musician and I married a musician and most of my friends are musicians and I imagine that most of my characters are musicians even if they don't say so. Music is not just an important part of my life, it is part of my DNA, like blue eyes and sarcasm. I devour songs, stringing them in one ear and out the other, sucking all the inspiration off of them and leaving nothing but bones behind. I am always trolling for a new song or band or melody or lyric. I slurp them all up. Without music to keep up my energy and set the mood, my walks become painful and exhausting and my writing empty and without ambiance. I can say unconditionally that I am addicted to music. I hope I never recover.

The Path

I am a solitary creature. I crave aloneness like oxygen. If I do not feel alone, I cannot think. At all. Ever. I do my best writing in the middle of the night when my brain finally feels comfortable that every other sentient being in perceivable range is locked firmly in the "off" position. 

That goes for my walks too. If you're sitting on your porch and see me coming, I will pretend to tie my shoe and walk the other way. I will go back into my house and come back an hour later praying with all my might that you have tired of porch-sitting. Don't take it personally. It's not you, it's me. I go it alone, or I cannot go it. Period.

My neighborhood is great for walking. It's quiet, it's safe, and there are multiple paths I can slink and slide around if I see any other person stick their head out of their home. (Obviously not having gotten the memo that when I am outside NO ONE ELSE is allowed outside. Anywhere, for any reason.)

Achieving Success

If a walk is successful, it means that I have managed for some short period of time forget who and where I am and absorb myself in the more fertile patches of my mind where story ideas and characters are spawned. The music keeps the pain from my feet at bay, keeps my breathing steady, and helps me forget. My feet keep moving, one step and then the next, keeping my energy pumping a cadence. The road sits a silent servant beneath me, rolling on and on until my idea crests its apex and sends me running back in the house for a pen.

Of everything I love about my walks, my favorite part is, was, and always will be running back in the house for a pen.