3 gifts musical

3 gifts musical (I chose 4, because it made sense: "You are My All in All,", "He Knows My Name", each new song (and a beloved music teacher who encouraged me to write them).

This brings me to the 225th of 1000 gifts.  This past May, I found this blog written by a woman named Ann Voskamp, who's written a book called One Thousand Gifts.  Ironically, my first response to reading about her passion for living with gratitude was not to buy and read her book.  Of course, I will do that at some point, but for now, I'm content to take her challenge: in one year, to count one thousand blessings in my life.  It's a humbling daily goal, because I find that I'm quicker to see the things going wrong in my life than I am to see the things that are going right.  I'm quicker to blame and petition God because of what I don't have than I am to thank Him for what He's already given.  Living mindfully, I gather, involves not only recognizing where you've erred and need forgiveness (whether from people or from God), but also recognizing where life is beautiful and satisfying.

Voskamp publishes a "JoyDare" on her blog each month (here's the one for July), which is a calendar that gives a different "theme" of blessings to look for in each day.  Today, I had to come up with three gifts that had to do with music.  Only three? I thought.  I could write about my guitar and its story...and how I've been blessed with a voice to sing...about how I sing everywhere from the grocery store to the bathroom.  Do I think about lyrics?  Songs?  My own songs?  The situations surrounding particular songs?  People I've written about?  Situations I've written about?  The person a particular song reminds me of?  Oh, the possibilities.  I limited myself to the four gifts above and, as I've already noted, was humbled to realize that I have too many gifts related to music to count, or to fit into one post on Facebook (which is where I'm keeping track of the gifts, in hopes that I will spur some of my friends to take on this challenge, too).

I feel like I'll be able to talk to people more concretely and articulately about this whole experience once I've actually read the book in question.  I suppose a trip to half.com is in order...

Where is the music today?

There is a mass of white noise - other music by other people, the usual worries, anger that I've been trying to tamp down all evening, sleepiness - that has been wrapped around me all day.  I remember that when I was younger, I would occasionally press one too many digits on the television remote, accidentally calling for a channel that we didn't have.  The confused television would then respond with "snow"...and that sound.  That sound scared the living daylights out of me.  I used to run to the next room until my mum, bless her, corrected the problem, hitting the right buttons to quiet the awful noise and bring back my precious cartoons.  To this day, I am unusually careful with the remote.  (This is not to say that I watch that much television anymore; one of those things no one tells you when you're preparing for college life is that you will become very familiar with online television sites.)

Anyway.  White noise.  And there's a song hiding in it, tucked away somewhere in the middle of the snow.  If I could just write it, I think I would have some sense of being finished with this.  But it doesn't look like that will happen anytime tonight.  Tonight, my organic chemistry textbook is waiting for me in my room upstairs, but whenever I'm there, all I can see is my guitar and a long list of things I thought I would want to remember forever.

Tell the story.

You don't expect it.  You can't expect it, really, because if you do, all you end up with is forced rhymes, recycled melodies, and disappointment.  And get this - if you try really, really hard, you come up with something interesting.  Yes.  Then you realize it's that song you've been humming for the past week, and proceed to bang your head against the nearest wall.  Moral of the story?  Originality can't be manufactured.

You can't sit down and think, I'm going to write a love song that could be done at weddings today.  You can't decide that today is a day for writing a slew of fabulous, foot-tapping, radio-ready hooks.  You can't close your eyes and will inspiration to float down and mist your mind like perfume.  It just doesn't work like that.  If that were the case, I'd probably be living like a revered ascetic in a secluded forest someplace, living on nothing but my daily dose of divine inspiration.  The mundane reality is that I live a pretty ordinary life in a pretty ordinary suburb (albeit a suburb outside the greatest city on Earth).  One distinguishing tidbit about my situation is that for the past twelve years, I have written in the same place - on my bed.  This bed has traveled the world, from White Plains to Vienna to Ardsley, and thank goodness it has, because I actually can't write anywhere but there.

Sometimes the whole song does flow forward, head to fingertips, a current of thought and emotion.  This happens quite often, actually.  I'll have a few notes that tumble around in my head, twisting themselves into melodies or bits of a verse that hold my attention.  Or there could be a word that strikes me, spawns a few different trains of thought.  Either way, before I know it, I'll be finished.  There was once a whole song that bloomed out of the word "dovetail" in a half-hour.

But there are other times when I carry a little piece of a song in my pocket for a day, a few days, a week.  It is perfectly content to bide its time until it feels ready to blossom.  And then I comb through the finished song, line by line, asking myself questions.  Is that the word I really want?  Does that detail build my picture?  What emotion am I left with here?  These questions are easy, because they're only pruning shears.  They help me to trim things, to make the finished product spare but pretty.

What it comes down to is this: I have both quick days and slower days.  It's important to know the difference.  But the amount of time it takes to put together a song has no bearing on its quality, not for me.  Many say their best work happens when they put the most (or least) time into it.  For me, the more the process takes out of me, the better the song turns out.  For like all worthy endeavors, this labor of love takes infinite patience and a measure of courage.  How?

You must be willing to reach into your mind and lift up an experience.  Shake it, hard.  Shake it until the protective coating - the superficial social smiles, the denial, the song-and-dance routine - falls away.  This is never easy, but there's no point in writing the song, really, if it's empty.  So you peel away layer after layer until all you have left is what you've avoided for so long.  Then, you challenge yourself:

Tell the story.

The beginning.

She has long since stopped doing this, but I remember a time when my mother used to ask me why I stopped writing poetry.  When I was younger, I used to fill books upon books with poems.  To my bewilderment, I even won a contest here and there.  There was a day, though, when my focus shifted.  Where I used to hear poetry, I learned to hear melody...and I liked what I heard.  It filled me, smoothed over the cracks and set a protective hand on my chest so I could fall asleep.  This shift happened when I was perhaps eight, but I didn't understand it until much later. 

I had just finished watching an episode of "Sailor Moon" (a cartoon that hasn't been on television for years), and I was...satisfied.  The show had concluded with an image of a pure night sky, and I loved it.  I loved the stars.  I still love stars.  Stars smile knowingly, quietly, at our souls, and murmur sweet nothings to our hearts.  Their romance has been known to draw me outside just so I can drink the starlight and dream of a quiet walk on a softly lit pathway, with someone special...one day.  One day.

With this in mind, I gathered my supplies: one (1) freshly-sharpened pencil, one (1) pink eraser that still smelled like the box from whence it came, and one (1) half-used legal pad.  After edging myself to the exact center of the piano bench, I drew and redrew my staves and my clefs until they were perfect, and a blank piece of manuscript paper materialized before me.  I set this aside and turned to the ivories, a new and ambitious student.  I began to play, stream-of-consciousness-style, toying with notes, fraternizing with chord progressions, and flirting with cadences. 

But as accompaniment begot melody, I paused in slight alarm.  If I continue like this, I may come up with something cool and then forget it by the time I've finished playing!  I doubled back, going measure by measure.  I decomposed and notated each musical idea, leaving space for lyrics between the staves.  Each notehead had to be perfect, lest it be suffer erasure and reformation.  Double-bar.  Finally.  I carefully wrote my name in the top right-hand corner, and sighed like a proud mama hen.  Finished.  No - a title!  I'm missing a title.  I grabbed the pencil again, thought for a minute, and then wrote the words "O Starry Night" at the top of the paper.  Now, I'm done.  It was an eight-year-old's conception of love's conception underneath a starry night sky. 

I stayed at that baby grand all evening, playing and singing the piece over and over, pretending the two of us were at Carnegie Hall.  I experimented with bows and stylish flourishes.  Would it be professionally acceptable to curtsy?  Oh, I hope so.  I hoped it with all my heart.  I really wanted to curtsy.  I was eight, for goodness' sake.