This one’s a little softer because it was not a time of night when a kind neighbor sings loudly. They are all the same songs that I usually play. I haven’t had a lot of time to learn new ones, but I hope to soon.
My experience with music has been so strange. A part of me just needs to sing, even if I can’t always sing in tune. I have a list I maintain called Creatures that Sing. Humans are songful creatures, among many others. I believe that our culture is tuned to encourage the songfulness of just a handful of people, and I wish it weren’t so. We tend to experience another person’s song as a sort of performance that we might judge as good or bad, but we don’t have to. That way of thinking carries some baggage. For one, the prospect of sharing our songfulness becomes complicated if we don’t think it will be experienced as good.
That’s the biggest thing I miss about church. For many people, there is just a single person in their lives that encourages their songfulness, and that is the worship leader. They are true saints. The wind in their sails is the idea that God loves our song, not as a showcase of talent but as an expression that carries meaning and emotion. If we listen to each other sing the way God might be listening, the way a worship leader listens, the way a bird listens to another bird, I believe we will experience music on a very different level, and on a level that welcomes everyone.
I’m working on an app called Streetlight with the idea of calling to the songfulness in all of us. In this way, I wish to be like a worship leader. But it doesn’t take an app. I think the reason why birds are always singing is because all the other birds are always singing. This might sound simple enough to be silly, and Rustbeard tells me it is not strictly true in a zoological sense1, but there’s an important social algorithm here worth considering. The song from another has a potential to resonate in us, and there is a natural impulse to respond with a song of your own. It’s why we can’t help but sing along sometimes. This is wiring we share with the birds, gratefully so.
Songs carry so much. Birdsong carries bird stories and humansong carries human stories. They are a way of processing our emotions and our lives. The human experience can be strange and wonderful and difficult and not always easy to understand, but in lieu of understanding it, we can always just sing about it, and that might be just as good. It reflects another kind of understanding, not the kind that is sure to bring answers, but maybe it brings a reminder that we are not alone, that we really do fit into this grand experience of humanity.
We usually use the word song to refer to a particular composition of melody and lyrics, and I’m using it differently here. These words and melodies were all created by other people. Even if I could write my own songs, I would still sing these too, with a deep appreciation for where they came. They all resonate with something in my life, they hold for me a particular beauty that is deeply personal. So when I say my song, it is that resonance of which I speak, which I hope can be heard by others. The word just fits better within my thoughts than my singing and my text editor keeps telling me songfulness is not a word and it seems like it is starting to get upset2. We all have a song in us that we can share if we wish, like our understanding of birdsong.
So this is the song in me, just as it is. It is the bird in me on a branch doing bird things, and it makes me happy. If these ideas or my song speak to a song in you, happier so.
This fanciful idea comes from listening to meadowlarks trade songs out on the prairie, but in the interest of not spreading false bird facts, nature is more nuanced. For example, male songbirds sometimes sing to assert their territory and to attract females, and they will cheerfully sing all by their lonesome. But they learn their song listening to other birds, a youngster raised without tutors won’t learn the true melody, just a soft, jumbled song.
I suppose the word I’m looking for is music. But now I’m too attached to song. Music describes the sounds and how they are arranged, but a song is a unit of music that holds a story, told through words or something more.
