to the musicians

Dear musicians,You wrote this.And this.And still, then, this.You see, you have made more than music. You have put words in front of me, sounds in front of me, that I turn to when no words seem sufficient. When all has been said, or felt for so long it may as well have been said.I turn to you, Explosions in the Sky, because you are signaling something more than I cannot understand but I wonder, fear. I turn to you when I'm wearing black running shorts too big for me, lying on my bed with my eyes closed in the face of making some real mistakes with myself, the kind that put you on your bed late on a Sunday as the sun bleeds pink into your room and you cry, not the tears of guilt anymore, but of simpler exhaustion. I play you because I don't know what else to do.But somehow you are the answer.I turn to you, Horse Feathers, for the violin. For the song of the year, for everything you realize as you sing that it feels like you are just beginning to learn. I can hear you echo when the last train pulls out of the station late on a Friday night, and it's as if the stars themselves caught wind of the Last Waltz and played it back to me, looked down in something like pity or compassion, something like grace or peace or understanding or tenderness, and whisper your music. I listen for you in the night sky.And somehow the violin plays.I turn to you, The Civil Wars, because when I watch you singing "Poison and Wine" I think of the day when I am telling my daughter the hard stories about love and I imagine that we'll sit on a park bench and I'll play the song, and whisper in her ear that all of this hard is also all that is becoming beautiful, the bass notes to accompany the sweetness of the guitar. I imagine as the song plays, each of us with one earphone, our heads together, that I will tell her that in love aching is a part of the whole, a thing not to be shunned but accepted, embraced. I hold her imaginary self in my heart with you playing in the background.Somehow this teaches me.I turn to you, Bon Iver - I turn to Holocene, strangely, to give me my heartbeat back. Because there are the days when I catch my breath at the clarity of the truth, the invitation to do a difficult thing. I turn to Holocene to listen for my closest friends. I turn to Holocene in the middle of the work day when I imagine writing a poem with a line about peeling potatoes, something so ordinary it ought to become beautiful to us, or as I make the same right turn out of the school driveway to go home, or when I sit in astonishment at the words of the Collect in a Sunday liturgy. I turn to Holocene to write and reimagine. I turn to Holocene to allow my heart to beat, even for a moment, to a rhythm I feel inside my bones.Somehow you play me back to myself.So, musicians, you who struggle for 10,000 hours, who light candles with your sounds and silences, who make a way for the tongue-tied and trembling, who build songs that carry us forward even as we fight, who play the world, and are played by it -who, somehow, create out of nothing, something -I am so grateful. I am so blessed. I am, entirely, awed. Love,hilary

on holocene (and growing wings)

They played "Perth" first. We are almost as a second thought, as they look out at the thousands of plaid shirts and skinny jeans gathered under the white tent, almost surprised to see us there. They turn their heads back to drums, guitar, close their eyes to everything but this miraculous emerging sound.I hear the music, but I'm lost somewhere inside myself, inside my preppy clothes and self-consciousness. I scuff at the pavement, rub my hands up and down my striped cotton sweater, wish I had studied the lyrics or knew how to stand in the crowd with the music and the people and the cheap wine smell. Somewhere behind me I hear a couple giggle as they share a cigarette.Then they play "Beth/Rest", the song I love but don't really understand. The words wash over the crowd and the strobe lights ricochet off the white faces, the instruments, the water to our left. I can't see the moon but in the song, somehow, I hear the night, the landscape, the horizon line.I sway my hips from side to side, conscious, still a bit out of place. I can't quite shake the idea that I shouldn't be here. This music is for the cool kids - the ones who knew this band years ago and followed Justin Vernon before Bon Iver. This is for people who live braver, more on the edge, who can actually play a guitar and who can sit on the beach in late summer humming "Calgary" while drinking espresso.But then? Then they play Holocene.The pavilion of thousands empties. All I can hear is Justin singing, and the drums battering my ribcage. The people behind me are still smoking, whispering that this song is "so good" but they seem hundreds of miles away. I close my eyes. He sings that line, the one that always gets me: And at once, I knew, I was not magnificent.This is the song I played while I drove down side roads the night of graduation day, after all the leaving, before all the arriving.This is the song I played to wake up on cold February mornings.This is the song I played to sway babies to sleep in my apartment in the haze of the afternoon.This is the song I played to make promises, and, sometimes, when they are broken.He sings Holocene and I come back to myself. The guitar repeats its wandering journey up to that top note, the drums roll, and the night suddenly, wildly, is about growing wings.We all have a Holocene. Isn't that part of the reason we keep making music, even when we sing only to mirrors and each other, even when we try to hide our voices in the bigger swelling sound of a church choir, even when we only know how to play three chords on the guitar and the cello isn't yet a part of our body, but an awkward dance partner?We make music to remember the sounds of all the things we can't put words to. We make music to imprint ourselves, to make snow angels across history, to grow wings. Yes, that. We make (and hear) music to grow wings.Last Thursday I went to the Bon Iver concert. He played Holocene, and I grew wings. I stepped for a moment inside a bigger self, inside a self unafraid to be her self.Dear readers, could I ask you something? Could you play your Holocene today? Could you let it repeat itself over, and over, growing your courage? I keep dreaming that with all these small gifts of brave things, someday we'll all take flight together.all my wild and winged love,hilaryPS. Another one of those songs? This ("I Will Wait" by Mumford and Sons)