First Song

First Song | Oil and mixed media on wood (hieroglyphic script) | ©Laurie Doctor

In the beginning, before writing, all speech was song. It is said, in the beginning was the word, and in this story, the word is a song. Even before your first breath you were given a song. Finding the note that belongs to you is a remembrance, something you have always known, but forgotten, a recognition as close to you as your own face. Something no one else has, and or will ever be again. When you hear that song, it strikes yes in your heart. You belong. Everything belongs. You mount whatever horse is waiting.

Through song, somehow all your efforts and wrong turns are rearranged into a new shape that has always been. Waiting. Grace is this intervention, the silence between notes, banishing thought. Recognizing your own place in the world, finding and being found. The song is not singing to you, but to that place inside that knows who you are.

You don’t need a reason to sing. Song knows no reason: it rides on air, moving and eternal. Anything can happen in a song — your hands become wings, your ears open, your feet float above ground. The song itself is in all places and your one point of orientation, like a compass pointing north. Just one note can break through frozen winter — like the Carolina Wren hopping on her skinny legs, tail waving toward the sky, singing and leaving tiny footprints in the snow.

Song is the universal expression for suffering and triumph. Song carries whatever has been concealed across millennia: all the music in the air, audible and inaudible, all unbearable things — grief, betrayal, heartbreak, blinding light, and unaccountable joy — all the nameless things, both terrible and sublime. Everything that cannot be told. 

Song comes into being when touched by air: breath plus song makes memory audible in the sky. All sorrow and joy is carried in song. All your prayers and incantations, doors unopened and roads not taken, what might have been and what shall be. Your work is song — not so much something new as a remembrance, a recognition. One note that belongs to you seizes and releases longing in one gesture, singing you to heaven’s gate.

The flute of interior time is played whether we hear it or not,
What we mean by “love” is its sound coming in.         
When love hits the farthest edge of excess,it reaches a wisdom.
And the fragrance of that knowledge!
It penetrates our thick bodies,
It goes through walls—
Its network of notes has a structure as if a million suns were arranged inside.
This tune has truth in it.
Where else have you heard a sound like this?

— poem by Kabir fromThe Kabir Book, Translation by Robert Bly

What is your relationship to song, to allowing song to guide your way with work? I’d love
to hear from you.