My blog begins as so: “Touch the Sky” – Julie Fowlis, Brave (Original Score)
(Go listen to it.)
In music there exists a raw manifestation of human emotion; it has the ability to transcend blockades of communication words are unable to breach. Music is a melodic language that allows for a fundamental understanding and connection between people and cultures – both when words may be comprehended and not.
In addition to its ability to forge a wordless connection, people naturally associate memories with music. I’ll always remember my own dancing celebration on the last night of my seventeenth year on Earth when I hear ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” (admittedly a more lyrical connection than simply harmonic).
Emotions – passionate love, sorrow, elation, confusion, and any feeling in between – can be translated from music into everyone’s emotional language, as long as one is listening with an open heart.
I am ready to listen. I am eager to dance. I yearn to laugh, cry, and sing out, sharing my energy with the world. I have been living comfortably, beating with the rhythm I have grown up singing to, and I am excited to leap into an unknown time signature. I am ready for 8/28.
You’re expecting the catch – I can sense it. That challenge, posing adversity to the heroine in her climactic journey. Or even reality, setting in on the young adventurer.
Well, I challenge that constrictive monomyth (as I always have, adding to the vexation of my early English teachers) and that the “real world” will take away my opportunistic mentality. My story begins with happiness and an open mind and an open heart. Adversity will come, surely, but I don’t have to find it yet.
I am so ready.
In a year or few when I read back on these blog posts, I know the music that made my soul buzz and my heart jump a beat in each lively moment will evoke memories of those people and places and feelings I will have been exposed to, and spark emotions within me of most fantastic dimensions. The melodies to be sung in my journey to come will always bring memories of those I will have lived with and loved, and the time we will have shared.
I believe the most beautiful and powerful gift in life is the power one has over the energy they share with the world. The more positive energy I invest during my journey abroad, the more beautiful the music will be when I take a breath and reflect on it at a later time, someday all too soon.
