We sing

A favorite passage I came across recently:

We sing because we must. We sing because it fills our lungs with nourishing air, and lets out hearts soar with the notes we let out. We sing because it allows us to speak of love and loss, delight and desire, all encoded in lyrics that let us pretend that those feelings are not quite ours. In song, we have permission to rehearse all our heartbreaks, all our lusts…best of all, we can sing together, whole families knowing the same songs and giving them the same meaning. When I sing with my mother, I am struck every time that our voices are the same. There’s a moment of deep, genetic resonance in hitting the exact same note in the exact same way. When I sing with my husband, our voices clash, but we sing the songs that mean something only to us, most often the yearning tones of “Wichita Lineman.” When I sing with my son, I am teaching him something: not just words and lyrics, but how to survive. Like the robin, we sometimes sing to show how strong we are, and we sometimes sing in hope of better times. We sing either way. (Wintering by Katherine May, p.228)