Benedicamus Domino!
One of the myriad of reasons for my beginning the emotional and spiritual journey which I am attempting to trace in this blog is to find something which I think I have let myself lose along life's rocky road. This thing is a conscious and waking love of the beautiful and the good things in this world, and moreover a conscious wish to contribute to their creation and preservation. I once, perhaps arogantly, considered myself to be a bard, a person who used music and word to tell stories and to bring to light truths both ancient and timeless. But it was another who gave me the courage to think of myself in this light, for he was a smith, a teller of tales, and a lover of trees and stars. He was a man born out of time, I'm sure, with a bright and deep soul and a heart which, though wounded and scarred, sought what my heart sought: companionship and love.
This man was Daniel Paul Buchanan, and it was his self-assurance which taught me how to value the gifts that I have been given in this life. However, when he died, I began to view myself again as nothing significant, as merely a young and frightened girl who wept and screamed to the darkness of night for her world to make sense again. I ceased, almost without knowing it, to really think of myself as a musician or a bard, and whenever I caught myself thinking the old and lofty thoughts, I felt guilty and suppressed them. Life with Dan was a happy dream from which, I really began to believe, I had been awakened just in time so that "real life" could go on as it had always been meant to do.
This, however, is an incorrect assumption, and it is time for me to pick up the old threads which I have let drop. I am an artist. I can be an artist. I need not feel guilty about pursuing my music or my writing. It's true that to call myself a bard is likely too pretentious, for I was never taught as the ancient bards of many cultures were taught, but I do feel very strongly that I need to be a creative person again, and I need to do it for my own fulfillment as well as for whatever my efforts might bring to others.
My real attitude toward my own creativity, especially on the musical front, came home to me a few months ago, when someone gave me various suggestions for poetry which could be set to music. This person viewed it as natural that I would be looking for such things, and I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I had let that side of me languish once my first album had been completed. Oh, a few songs had been composed in the intervening years, but nothing too serious and nothing with an eye to creating a second album. I had to ask myself why this was, and it was then that I realized that for many years now, I have been trying to distance myself from the girl I used to be: the girl who was not afraid to approach music and song-writing as serious occupations and who, while intending merely to make a demo tape to show to perspective producers and the like, took the bull by the horns and decided to just go ahead and make an entire album.
I never realized till now how much Dan's presence in my life had inspired me to do this, but it did. His attitude rubbed off on me, I suppose, but after he died, I began to revert to type again, though I really shouldn't do this. I need to do what I need to do. Trees do not swim, nor does water flow uphill, and I without being creative am not myself. I do not have joy in my life if I cannot work to make beautiful things. So, I have decided to stop underselling myself and just live the way I want and need to live, no matter what others think. As a result of this decision, I have finally, after many years, written another musical setting to a lovely poem by Walter De la Mare. I've had the poem hovering in my brain for five months or so, and finally, glory to God, it has become a song. Here is a link to the poem: A Song of Enchantment./
I must find the broken pieces of myself and put them back together, and one of those pieces is my love and longing to create: to write, to sing, to play and to compose. To do otherwise is to deny what God has given me, and I've been doing this for far too long. Well, no more!
Deo Gratias!
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