music

Another late night, another short post. We had our Lenten Mass at school today. One of my fellow new teachers offered to start a choir for the girls earlier this year. She's put in time and energy, and as is typical of our girls, their commitment has been spotty and shaky. It's so frustrating. It's so difficult to feel like your time and effort means anything when you have a regular meeting and a different 2 girls show up every time (though 10 find you in the hall to say they want to join your fill-in-the-blank club).

But she had a good little choir today--though apparently some of them had never been to one rehearsal. And she picked some more obscure songs, but all had great beat and were more contemporary than some of the traditional (though lovely) Catholic hymns you'd normally hear at a school liturgy. She ended with a spiritual called "Change My Name." Well, wouldn't you know that all 350 girls in the school suddenly stopped some of their whispering and began snapping their fingers and dancing in their seats.

It is the power of music. Music has always been important to me, but in the last seven or eight years, I need some music every day. Maybe that has to do with the advent of the iPod, I don't know, but I do know that I notice music more too. I'm more likely to keep tuning in to a TV show that has good music (of course, that means iTunes gets more of my $!) and I sing to myself more than I care to admit. Music is a mood setter--and a mood changer. It connects with us on basic and primal level. There are very few songs or artists that I'm "eh" about. I find that I have very strong gut reactions to music--I really like or love it, or I really want to get as far away from it as possible and never hear it again.

Music is prayer. It is meditation. It clears my head, centers me, lets me think. It can make me smile and it can make me cry.

I could write for hours and pages about music. I mean, I'm writing right now because of music. Music led me to a fantabulous folk festival, which led me to a cozy living room full of friends and fellow writers. It was there that I gained the courage to put myself out into the world, it is there that I found parts of myself I never knew existed. It is in that space that I heard dear friends sing songs for the very first time, many of which live on my iPod now--which means I have my friends in my pocket.

To wrap up this post, here's a little Townes Van Zandt for you...a song I downloaded last night and have been listening to it almost non-stop ever since:

If I needed you, would you come to me?
Would you come to me for to ease my pain?
If you needed me, I would come to you.
I would swim the sea for to ease your pain.