for people who genuinely love what they do – who open a restaurant to make magic instead of money, who know the names/interests/moods/diagnoses of kids that pass through the hospital every week, who step up to each day without complaining about its challenges and with respect for every piece of their work.

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for spaces and people, and spaces in people, that are dedicated to connection. People who help you lift speakers on top of 4-foot barrels to get the best sound, who tell you about the artist they loved in college who died too young, who grin and clap when you have to start a song over, who thank you for singing your heart out.

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for the chances I’ve taken and the mistakes that followed. For the spring where I found music gigs on craigslist and went to them alone, figured out how to do my own sound, unplugged my guitar too soon and made the room wince, forgot my cds, forgot my mics, forgot my set list, for the places it opened in me that were filled with humility and the ability to talk to other humans who connected to those moments of mortification.

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for being able to see all of these tiny steps as wonderful. To surrender all of the worry surrounding the details of who will come to the gigs, what songs I will play, and just be my very truest self without fear, doing the thing I love best.

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(for tonight.)

It seems to me that the only way I want to live is in faith. Faith outside of all religious contexts, in the most basic sense of the word, simply trusting that all of these small, pointless things we do are in fact building something larger. Every artist knows this – spending the hours creating something, bringing sounds or images into life, putting so much energy into something that may not last a day, that no one else may ever experience. It is an investment in the potential for a more loving, connected world.

I am lucky that my life revolves around these small acts of faith, although it is so incongruous with the majority of this culture that I slip into someone else’s eyes sometimes, and look at my days with incredulity. What is it I really do in the hospital? If I’m not a music therapist, if I can’t quantify the work I do with patients,  how do I know anything I do is helping these kids? And as for my own personal art, why am I recording out of my bedroom and not chasing a record deal? Why am I writing what I feel, and not the formulaic sounds and words that I know will work?

Last week in the hospital, I encouraged a teenage patient to try writing songs – that it would be silly at first, but it turns into a lovely way of expressing oneself. A while later, she asked if I wrote songs, if I would play one. I played her Snakeskin – a song I wrote in high school about turning into who we are through constant change and renewal; a song that, appropriately, has always felt true whenever I come back to it. It took me a few days to even appreciate the beauty of that moment, when my lost 17-year-old self could reach out and touch another lost 17-year-old girl, because I was so terrified of having done something wrong. I knew how serious conflicts of interest can be, how careful I have to be not to promote my music at work. I took care with how I answered her questions about how to listen to the song again, directing her to sites where she could listen and not buy. I made sure to connect it back to her, telling her I wrote the song in high school, before I was even singing for people. I still worried for the rest of the week. Coming back to it now, these systems just seem so stupid. I write music to heal myself, and I want to take it to others, and even though I know my day job is not the place for that, it just seems unfortunate we have to be so cautious when we have so much to offer each other.

I don’t know if that song changed her day, made her think differently. Or if either of those things would be positive. (I still worry that she might have taken something away from it that was damaging in some way, just as anyone might.) I don’t know how much these Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber songs stay with kids, if singing and playing a drum really makes anything better for them. But I feel their joy in these moments, and I feel sparks in my chest sharing it with them, and I believe these moments are making something bigger, just as the pages of written and rewritten verses, the nights taken to record and re-record a single voice part, all of this is wondrous in its own right and vital to this life I am building. My faith, my investment in people’s ability to fully love is manifesting in my unquantifiable, unproductive hours doing what I do. I hope to someday be completely unapologetic for this. I am taking small steps.

What a heavy week. This morning I kept leaving my desk at work to go cry in the bathroom. All the precious tiny lives. All the kids I see hanging on to life at the hospital, all of the people there trying to keep them with us, all the weeks and months and years, and everything undone in a matter of seconds. There are bigger things to talk about, but there must always be a moment for us to feel.

Yes, conversations about gun control and mental illness. Yes, closer scrutiny of who is profiting from this violence-enforcing culture of paranoia. But my thoughts go towards the family that the shooter came from, his mother the intended target buried in the school full of bodies that just stood in his way. There is something bigger. Lack of a gun would not have prevented some sort of tragedy, although it might have saved some lives. But maybe not (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/14/man-stabs-22-children-at-china-primary-school/). You don’t need a gun to turn your wounds upon the world. People will find weapons and ways to turn their pain inside out. Firearms are among the more extreme examples, but regardless of mental illness, we cause destruction every day when we neglect our own souls, when we cannot extend help and meet people where they are. Turn inward. Make peace. Then turn outward.