Juxtapose

It was something of a wonder tonight to sit at a folding table with my brother, Kathleen, Greg, Suze, Lael, Madli, and James playing the guitar, and hear our voices in three-part harmony, straining the walls with reverb and shimmer. Music breaks down the walls of my heart and my soul and picks at all the wounds on them until they bleed. It grasps the singular natural ?talent? that I have always had and plucks from the fibres of its core a song that comes to my lips. There need only be one turn, one lilt, one half-step of a change in the measure of a song or a piece that makes my chest constrict with awe and my hands go to my face and I will love that song or piece forever. The whorl, the pressure of the music weighs so heavily on me. And so it was tonight. I'm not always into the idea of closing my eyes when I sing. When singing in front of an audience, the idea is to engage them in the emotion, to transmit with face and voice and eyes the raw energy of the message and notes. But when God is the audience, no engagement tactics are necessary. So my eyes were closed so I could listen to the broken hallelujahs coming from us each, each note (to me) suffering and aching with the sorrows of sin and rising with the grace of God. And up they went, breaking through the walls and the floors as my hands propped up my neck and I heard someone?s beautiful voice next to my left ear. The words and the sound of the mesh of voices sapped me, left me weak and euphoric, my stomach quaking as if I hadn?t eaten for days. And then, moments later, as if a fast had been broken and I had eaten myself to bursting. Some cry at beauty, but this is beyond me, and so my voice didn?t quaver. My soprano didn?t take the highest notes and the sharpest clarity as it does so often, but I broke away from the rest and rode along on the rumble of the alto, dropping low and sharp and flat on my own and then back to meet up again with all others to form the single pitch that quavered to an end as the guitar?s e string hummed itself into silence.