Soulsinging

The Sentience of Trees and Other Things

Softly blooming from the recesses of memory comes singing, wafting into my present time. More like a humming, emanating from my little girl self. I remember swaying along with the trees, arms outstretched, singing to and with the trees as they conversed with the wind. I remember feeling no boundary between my physical self and the physical world around me. The flow of energy from me to not-me moved effortlessly, unimpeded by physical form.

I marvel how, as a child, I could travel along the earth and air’s constant hum with my inner child’s humming voice. It was a kinship forged in music, from as far back as I can remember. Always it has surrounded and permeated me, steady and constant as the air, its presence unmistakably distinct from all other senses.

Sadly, a moment seems to arrive in children’s lives when their inborn conduit to the universe’s sounds gets switched off. It never shut off within me, though. Perhaps I was wandering the woods singing when the other children were rounded up and turned (tuned?) off.

Eventually, maybe by age seven, I realized that not everyone sang with air and trees. I sensed that I should limit such musical communion to the privacy of the woods. In our small township, I knew of only one other person who heard things differently, and she bore the label of the village eccentric. Helga Moor, the flower lady who lived down the road just outside the tiny borough of Saint Lewisburg, talked to the birds similar to how I burbled along with what I heard from the trees.

Whenever we stopped by Helga’s house for flowers or vegetables, she would alternate between talking with us and conversing with the birds fluttering around her gardens. My sisters snickered that Helga was a weirdo, and I must admit that try as I might, I could not decipher what the birds said to her. It wasn’t music to my ears. But if she claimed to understand birds and other critters, then I surmised that my hearing the earth sing was just as real.  Nevertheless, I decided not to share this facet of my being with anyone else, not even Helga. I needed that conduit to remain open.

Indeed, music sustained me and made me whole again, many times over. Music became my mirror to reflect the reality that I wanted, needed, to be true about myself. The journey of my life has been marked by musical pathways that led me to heal and connect to others, affirming shared human creative resourcefulness.

Music, my talisman for surviving, also enabled me to define myself beyond what had happened to me. It forged critical connections to healing sounds of abundant love. From my soulmate Dave to other people and experiences that nurtured my “survivor” self, I grew into a thriving, whole person.

Memory’s Sonic Landscape

This book celebrates the distinctive role of music in healing from traumas that began in childhood. Assembled here are selections from my warehouse of memories about musical resilience, celebrating the synergistic power of music, nature, and unconditional love. My soul resounds with an indomitable spirit, rooted in the song of the earth connected to other resilient souls.

I continue to draw upon these strengths that protect the integrity of my spirit and also the dignity of vulnerable others. Never underestimate the marginalized, the wounded, the disbelieved children who make it to adulthood. We are scrappy little mutts who win at the long game of pain.

Linking my personal story to universal themes of thriving, I share here the ways I experienced music as a bridge between pain and healing. Like many others, music has brought order to a veritable “narrative warehouse” of life stories. The selected anecdotes reveal my creative pathways from or through traumatic incidents, with music part of the equation for healing.

Foremost among the traumas I faced is maternal incest. It began when I was perhaps four years old and ended when I was around nine. But these traumas will not be described in detail in this book. Far more important are details within those stories of igniting a creative response to traumatic experiences.

Layered over the trauma of incest were additional ones, from sadistic pediatric dentists (two of them!), sexual assault in college, substance abuse, and persistent bullying by my sisters. I also am a breast cancer survivor. In every one of these situations, music led me away from collapsing into the pain of the traumas. My life’s path is that of thriving, beyond an identity built solely from the sum of what I endured.

To be sure, it takes an indomitable spirit to keep going in the face of daunting obstacles. But this book is no ugly chronicle of the bad things that happened to me. Blurting out itemized descriptions or a litany of dogged survivalism would cast my story in a tale of “terminal uniqueness.” That would block any shared exploration of trauma’s veritable ecosystem of thought, action, and perspective at play among the experiences of all survivors.

My adaptive ecosystem is centered upon Music; others may have a different creative core. I hope that telling my story through music might illuminate the pathways of healing through creativity as less mystical and more common. Parts of healing journeys may then become something shareable and repeatable. Neither I nor my story need feel alone any longer.

For me, music sounds fundamentally spiritual in nature, a buzzing spectrum I sensed in early age. I noticed shifts in my inner hearing when I felt the energy of trees as a type of singing. There’s a Psalm about making a “joyful noise unto the Lord,” that I internalized as meaning all living things inhabiting the woods surrounding my home was part of God’s world. That all life vibrates with distinctive energy patterns resonated – literally – with the outer music I heard when singing in children’s choir. From the earthly sounds of the forest to the choir and the radio and the piano, I attributed it all as proof of God’s presence emanating from “everywhere.”

My story about the creative building blocks of my adaptive, resilient self is situated here as a foil to the traumas I name in this book. But recounting their complete details would bring an unmusical “thud” to this narrative. The turbulence of abuse invades both physical and sonic space; projecting discordant sounds that overwhelm a person and disrupt the harmonious energies of relationship. In my mother’s case, the echoes of her childhood horrors fell upon me in physical ways, but also at the sonic level in emotional and cognitive damage. The resulting jumble of sounds that I absorbed from her took years to untangle and, in due course, silence.

I certainly don’t intend this book to read like a maudlin, martyred “dramalogue” of my grievances as a lifelong victim. Nor do I aim to indict posthumously my mother’s acts in a measurement of my wounds against her better intentions and deeds. The ensuing pages, although admittedly written reflectively upon terribly abusive experiences, illuminate how individual agency can prevail and restore a wholly competent self. My healing process recounts a long journey of unlinking the sounds of my mother’s stories – and the sounds of other violence – from my sonic landscape. Aspects of our respective violent scories do figure into this book, but ultimately toward delineating our divergent trajectories.

A Musical Timeline

The first set of stories describe music as helping me compartmentalize the trauma of being molested by my mother several times over the course of many years. I learned a great many adaptive skills from her, herself an abuse survivor. She was also, at the same time, a doting and intlligent mother who encouraged my music studies, unconsciously (perhaps) showing me a portal out of the toxic enmeshment she perpetrated.

Interspersed throughout the pages of my story are selected photos and artwork from my adult years. I’ve also inserted some links to musical “storymaps” related to a chapter’s narrative. Having no clue how to draw or paint, I nevertheless plunged into using whatever materials made sense at the moment. I suppose I could say the same about some of the musical adventures I have taken. Suffice it to say that I, like most people, have tales to tell anyone who will listen (or in this case, read) with interest.

The second set of stories describes the crisis of facing my trauma as an adult, and the degree to which I relied on music to interrupt self-destructive tendencies. In the final set of stories, the transformative power of individuating fully from my mother results in dramatic changes to my relationship with music. Each of these sets of stories situates trauma alongside intervening catalysts – firstly music, but also unconditional love, education, vocation, and more – to clarify healing as a creatively resilient process.

In crafting a timeline for this book’s narrative, I focus on distinct cycles of growth rather than consistent passages of time. The sequence of stories loosely outline a biographical chronology, with departures into necessary foreshadowing/backtracking for scenarios that warrant a fuller discussion of relationships between trauma, response, and music. Engaging with relational jumps through time will, I hope, underscore the cyclical nature of the healing process. This in turn reinforces the cyclical nature of creative expression, clarifying points of reflection, growth, and emotional closure within the totality of traumatic experience.

That these incidents happened over the course of many years underscores the severity of ongoing abuse as a constant, corrosive threat to an individual’s well-being. At the same time, I also experienced normative, pleasant, even happy experiences. Understanding how we all juggle “bad and good” as a built-in neural survival mechanism can explain how people like me can grow up, go to school, get married, get a job, and conduct an otherwise normative life. I often wonder how many walking wounded wander around the planet undetected, hiding as I did behind a facade of normalcy.

This book’s narrative certainly verifies incest’s cumulative effect. Yet I decree that I have spent enough time (years upon years!) parrying exclusively with memories to discharge their emotional toxins. This is not to diminish the importance of finally saying out loud what exactly happened; for it marked a monumental launch into another level of resilient healing. Nevertheless, at this stage in my life, I am far more interested in sharing creative shifts that interrupted self-destructive trajectories.

Healing journeys gather formidably resilient strength over time. I gathered enough of it to finally discard all pretense of fear, doubt, and defensiveness about disclosing what happened. Having reached a point where I no longer shadowbox with the memories, I sense the inner hum of a healing soul that resounds a symphony of tremendous sonic power.

I consider this book a critical edition – a veritable conductor’s score – of my life’s composition.

A richly rewarding set of lessons about endurance, renewal, and redemption arose from the pile of memories I finally faced in adulthood. How I responded when my mother hurt me; how I absorbed and converted the effects of those wounds; what I drew from the abundant resources of nature, music, and unconditional love – these comprise the essential details within my narrative of becoming whole, of thriving with a resonant sense of mental and emotional well-being. Only from these perspectives can I possibly understand my relationship to my suffering as well as the sufferings of others – including my mother’s – as a shared journey toward wholeness.

Through it all, the song of my soul has remained steadfast.