I can’t think of where to start so I am starting in the middle and working out from there. Sometimes writing is throwing a pot.

I have never cried in a patient’s room but my eyes were precariously close to spilling today. A 2-year-old girl with Down’s, her hair thinned and almost all gone, has been in the hospital for weeks now, has stared at my hands playing guitar and lit up when I place a ukulele in her lap, her fingers scuttling over the strings and skins of the drums. I go in alone and sing to her, grinning when she whisks an eggshaker back and forth. Today I invited my partner in to play with me, and something happened when she heard us singing together, saw the guitar and my hands next to hers playing the bongos. She smiled up at him, sighed and cooed, nodded her head up and down as she played with such focused intensity, in between just sitting and staring at me, him, me, her mouth hanging open. I met her mother’s eyes and we smiled back and forth, back and forth the singing and sounds and joy.

We are born from this. We do the work alone, the hours training our fingers to move, the time spent writing down the sounds in our heads, but who we are is created in these moments. The songs we write and the way we sound together and the looking into each other’s eyes. Light infinitely reflecting, resonances and overtones vibrating between us, opening upon opening upon opening. Fear makes us resist it, but we need each other so.

Some of the best songs I’ve written evolved in an ever-fluctuating community of musicians, poets, dropouts, hipsters, hippies, nomads, healers, gathering every Thursday night on beer-soaked couches to get crunk and make and experience art. I sing them and hear the voices of people who are all over the country now. I remember that feeling of being held in every step I took, the harmonies and riffs we wrapped each others’ words in, the love and support for the tender selves we revealed. All of us perfect in our unfinished glory.

There are certain things I believe we are meant to do and this will always be one of mine. Making this space for people to be human and share their voice and feel things. The rest of this life, the grocery shopping and the bill paying and the work schedules and the TV shows, the small shocks of normal, are just the motions we go through. This is where we are born. This is where we live with each other, with our own hearts.

I am starting – well, continuing – this trajectory with a small monthly show every third Tuesday, a tremendous gift to me in these past couple years, and a space that I want to welcome more people into. Poets, performers, storytellers, music-makers, anyone and everyone I know who makes things that are real and true – we have so much to offer each other and we so rarely have the space to share freely. It is a small start. It is a push in the direction that has been calling to me forever.

I put myself into this blog as a way of putting my voice out there and inviting yours to resonate. Another small start. But please let the world hear you. Let others feel your breath when you speak. Open your mouth and resonate with the voices around you. Let the world touch you. This is where we are born.