Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Thoughts

Growing up, I fell in love with music because the young men and women behind it had found a way to turn something so profound, so beyond words, so confounding and overwhelming as my own heart into something tangible. I could invest in each note, each word, each up and down, and release my pain and anxieties and fears and hopes and dreams, every facet of my own inescapable creation, to the trusted hands of an artist.

Now, as something of an adult-in-progress, and just as much an artist in the making, I've grown to appreciate these sounds not for doing something I am helpless to do myself, but for doing something I'm willing to trust someone else to do better. I trust these strangers, largely faceless and anonymous so far as I'm concerned, to share their darkest secrets, their most treasured dreams, in a format I'm able to grab, hold on to, and press close to my heart. I allow them to take my soul on a journey, open and unguarded, to places I'm terrified of, or exhilarated by, or maybe even comfortable in.

I've said before that music has become my faith. I think it's more accurate, perhaps, to say it's like the partner I hope, one day, I can trust just as deeply.

Someone with whom I can close my eyes and surrender my soul.

Face-to-face.

Completely without fear.