awakening

One of my favorite storypeoples ever:

Awakening:
In those days,
we finally chose
to walk like giants
& hold the world
in arms grown strong with love
& there may be many things we forget
in the days to come,
but this will not be one of them.

My guitar sounds like pure sadness tonight, like the copper or the steel or the koa or the spruce can't produce any other sound, and even if say the steel wanted to be happy, the sad spruce would drown her out with its sadness leaking out of the grains into the air around me. Or is it just leaking out of me onto the strings? The only chord that sounds good is some variation of A minor, because all the others sound like different times in my life that feel too distant to pull back to me. E sounds like those crazy nights of connection in that dim room above Kelly Square at home when music flowed in and out of us as if we were some conduit of eternal languages, rattling the halls and windows with pure energy and god. C# minor feels like high school and too much sad Jesus, always trying to make myself better. And G, ugh, G sounds like too many happy Jesus songs. "every move I make..."

C sounds like Kenya, played on slabs and in rooms under huge skies and crisp night Kenya air, full of love and hopes and dreams and laughs about that which is here and gone.

B sounds like Sewanee, and belted Coldplay on stairwells and around campfires; Mumford and sons with Libby's banjo, fingers and hands moving too fast for dim light camera shutters. Friends around the campfire under starry skies so full of innocence and youth at the perfect summer camp that is Sewanee and is not the world we find when we leave. Some call it the real world, that which life becomes when you leave the mountain, but that's not correct. Sewanee, and that beauty is just as much the real world as anything else. Life CAN be that good.

Stages of my life and emotions and loves and sadnesses tied up around the 1, 3, and 5 notes on scales of keys, and this guitar been there through all of it, changing as I change, but always the same.

I feel like I need a new chord, because A minor leaks sadness, as if it knows too much and has seen the void and stood at its edge too many times, wondering if there was another side... And if there was, if there was any way to it other than straight through.

But, as Khalil Gibran writes in the prophet, the deeper sorrow has carved a well into your heart, the fuller can be the joy that fills the well. So I'll play my A minor, and not forget in these days when many things are forgotten to hold the world with arms grown strong by love.