I fell in love with the guitar when I was three years old.
My parents let me stay up late to watch the Smothers Brothers one night, and the minute Tommy Smothers walked out with that big blonde Guild of his, I was hooked. “What is that?”
“That’s a guitar, honey.”
“Can I have one?”
Indulgent chuckling. “Sure, when you are bigger, if you still want one.”
They figured I’d forget all about it in a few days. They could not have been more incorrect. They had no idea what was going to happen to their lives once I got my hands on a fretboard. It has been nearly half a century since that fateful broadcast, and I have not forgotten.
I got the “fire in my fingertips”* and never looked back.
From the time I was around 16 years old I started writing songs in bulk; they began to pour out of me (partly because I discovered DADGAD and that’s just how it goes). It was incredibly exciting and fulfilling, but there was something nagging at me. Without knowing how to articulate it, somehow I knew I wanted my songs to heal, to help people, to have meanings that could offer comfort or insight or relief from pain. That stuck, too. That has always been the Big Why behind why I do anything with music.
And then I began to learn about physics, and discovered that everything, all matter, vibrates. Everything has a resonant frequency. Everything is made up of vibrating strings.
Everything is made of sound.
I began to actively chase the dream of creating a world through knowing the right sounds and the right notes and the right syllables and the right harmonies . . .
I studied for years. I didn’t go to college because there wasn’t a college on Planet Earth that could teach me what I burned to know. Instead, I went to radio school and worked at a jazz station for several years, expanding my ears even more. I studied music theory. I studied Bardism. I wrote more songs, joined some bands, toured as a singer-songwriter, wrote more songs, taught some lessons, joined other bands . . . and spun jazz records on the radio. Music was my all, my everything, my constant companion. I played records at home until I memorized them. I wore them out and bought more.
Sound became my religion, and . . . I . . . over-complicated things beyond all reckoning.
Because that’s what you do when you’re 19 and out on the road alone between gigs and there’s no one to stop you thinking about stuff so deeply that you fall down rabbit hole after rabbit hole and never quite find what you’re looking for . . .
Why am I telling you all of this? That’s a damn good question. Thank you for asking.
I do have a point, and I’ll get there.
In my twenties I learned there were people who called themselves Lightworkers. Marcia Brandt, my original guitar instructor (who was also my kindergarten music teacher), was one. She had given up teaching and gone to massage school, and took a very similar path with energy work that I did with the music. She lived it, devoured everything she could about it, ate it, slept it, taught it, learned more, studied it, experimented, taught more, and went far, far afield in the quest to live a life so dedicated to Light that she is practically incandescent. Eventually, she and I began working together deeply, to integrate Sound into Light Language.
It’s been over three years since we started working on that project, and we’re not even close to done. Some huge breakthroughs have happened recently, and we’re now at a point where we realize that we’re never going to be done, because like music, this is something that opens up bigger and bigger as you continue to practice.
You know you are in mastery when you can see the mountain getting higher the longer you climb.
But through it all, through becoming a Reiki master and teaching students of my own, through earning multiple certifications in Light Language and Bio-Magnetic Touch Therapy, through Witchcraft and Druidcraft, sound and music have been, well, the soundtrack and the real obsession.
It took burning out on gigs to begin to see music as a healing path by itself. Discovering the pure simplicity of individual tones and the interplay of intervals has brought me to a whole new place. It isn’t complicated. In fact, if it gets complicated yer doin’ it wrong. For example, Reiki is a wave, and has frequencies that it operates in. We feel Reiki as heat, sometimes gentle warmth and sometimes blow-torch intense. But it’s a wave, a frequency, and I can use my voice to create a wave that adds tension or helps to release or balance something. How do I know what particular pitch I need to sing at any given moment? Well, it’s a feel-thing. Intuition comes into play. I hear a pitch in my mind and that’s the pitch I sing. Or maybe because I have asked Reiki-San to make me an instrument, it’s Reiki-San who is doing the singing and my vocal cords just happen to be handy. All I do is close my eyes and take a breath.
In the Beginning was the Chord. And once Sound had made some Stuff, Light came along to illuminate it. Going beyond and behind the Light to work directly with the Sound has been a homecoming for me. It’s been a life-long search, and like so many quests, all I needed was right here, in my body, in my hands. The fire in my fingertips lights up my whole life.
*Thanks to my friend and frequent muse Scotta Jones for that little turn of phrase!