One month ago, I was stuck at the 16-hour mark of a 45-hour practicum. My momentum to pack up my guitar and music equipment each weekend and make the trek to nursing homes where I sang for residents one-on-one had ground to a halt. After months of chipping away at my hours on and off, and 50 patient visits, I had reached a mere 16 hours. The door hadn’t quite shut in my face, but it was feeling very hard to swing open: covid surged in the healthcare facilities over the winter, I felt pressed for time and energy between two jobs, and even when I did visit patients, getting to the music was hard when they wanted conversation.

Stumbling upon the Music for Healing and Transition Program in the spring of 2022 was an answered prayer. As I felt the tug on my heart strings to cultivate my music skills so I could offer song to others, a Google search pointed me toward Music for Healing and Transition. It just so happened that this national program offered in-person classroom sessions right across the river in Cambridge during the summer.

From the first day of class, when we learned about centering ourselves to sing and play not as performance but as healing presence, to the culmination of the training, where we played for patients in the hospital, I felt the path opening wide to live into my God-given vocation. But as of this spring, the seeds planted at the program’s outset felt choked by the busy-ness of life teeming over them.

It was a pilgrimage to the Taize Community this April that changed things. In the weekend I spent in silence, with sunlight, starlight and song seeping into my bones, I felt a tender beckoning.

“I will be the Song,” God whispered. “I want you to be my singer.”

Humbled and overjoyed to be called–just as I was–to be a channel for God’s Song, my passion was sparked again. The encouragement of family, friends and mentors kindled the budding flame.

Over the past month, I completed 22 more hours over 55 therapeutic music sessions. I’m now at 38.25 hours, with just 6.75 left until I cross the finish line.

My fingertips are calloused from guitar strings, my voice has at times almost given out, but wow, my heart is full.

My courage has grown. When someone doesn’t want music, I don’t have to be afraid that I’m useless, because someone else down the hall will. Time and again, I pray for the direction to go, and I feel that God sends me where I need to be.

I have always carried love songs in my heart. As a child, I sang them on out on the bus and on the swings. As I grew, I hummed them inaudibly, or channeled those feelings into the wordless melodies of classical piano music.

But now I get to sing directly to the hearts of the people I serve.

For you, there’ll be no crying / For you, the sun will be shining (“Songbird,” Christine McVie)

You fill up my senses like a night in the forest / Like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain (“Annie’s Song,” John Denver

It’s amazing how you can speak right to my heart / Without saying a word, you can light up the dark (“When You Say Nothing at All,” Paul Overstreet & Don Schlitz)

So close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it’s all right (“You Can Close Your Eyes,” James Taylor)

Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down (“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Paul Simon)

The Song that has always bubbled like a spring within me now gets to cascade over–for whomever I am singing to. I get to sing when people are “weary, feeling small,” when “pain is all around,” when they just need some rest. I get to be in the moments of silence, in the moments of wordless melody, with them. I am often transported to a softer and stiller place.

As I prepare to move to Albany this August to pursue a CPE residency (chaplaincy training), this therapeutic music training feels like a crowning of my time in Boston. An integration of all I have been fortunate to experience here through studies, music and ministry. Just like packing up to leave when a patient has fallen asleep, I’ll leave Boston singing all the way out.

One surprisingly warm afternoon in late winter/early spring of 2022, I walked to an ice cream shop with a good friend. Sitting on a curb, eating (I hesitate to say enjoying, because we both laughed over how we did not enjoy the flavors that day!) our ice cream, I teared up over confusing emotions I was going through. She asked me, “Do you feel God in other people?”

I paused. I feel God’s presence in nature, in silence, in movement, and most of all in music. I feel God’s presence in church, on street corners, in the lake. But I had not thought as much of God’s presence coming through others. “I don’t think so,” I responded, with dual sadness and curiosity at what could be missing. I longed to feel God’s presence beyond myself, my emotions, my perception. I longed for an encounter, as Martin Buber writes in I and Thou, of Thou—the Other, through others.

Without my intending or even knowing it, this question simmered beneath the surface of the following months, inviting me into deeper encounters. It wasn’t that I hadn’t experienced rich friendships and relationships before, but a new need was kindled inside of me, a need to survive in, through and with each other.

In no particular order, here are some of the blessings of relationship that 2022 brought (though this is by no means exhaustive!):

• A road trip to Wisconsin with a colleague and dear friend, sharing our life stories all the way
• Three visits from friends abroad, and rich conversations and travels with all of them
• Reconnecting with Holy Wisdom Monastery, and with the beloved church choir I was part of in Little Chute, WI
• Quality time walking and dancing on the beach with cousins on our trip to Maine
• Invitations into gatherings at communities, Catholic, Quaker and Episcopal
• Running into old friends— one from music camp and one from undergrad— and rekindling our friendships
• Spending a week in Bainbridge Island, WA with my dear friends who welcomed a little one into their family in late June
• Relishing a growing sense of community at BU, where we were able to share more meals and spontaneous conversations
• The opportunity to take two classes at Harvard Divinity School and connect with a new place and new friends
• Deepening relationships with the girls I have babysat for almost two years now
• With one year under my belt, settling into my job directing a church choir, and the joy and privilege of getting to know everyone better
• More visits with family who live close to Boston
• My first visit to Walden Pond, where I communed with the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, took a spontaneous swim, chatted with fellow hikers, and made friends with the little frog pictured above

A month ago, while mentally submerged in a paper I was writing on the sacramental, relational dimensions of music, I returned to the home of the girls I babysit after dropping one of them off at gymnastics. The 10-year-old greeted me in the living room, and we got into a conversation about how our days had been. She shared with me about her science project, and I shared with her about my paper. I just kept feeling in my heart: this conversation is making my day.

I had been sitting in the library, writing about the sacramental power of relational connection all day—and here I was, finally getting to live it with someone I care so deeply about. Those 15 minutes of sharing were the highlight; they made it all worth it. Walking home through the comforting familiarity of my neighborhood that night, I felt a deep recognition that we make life worth living for one another.

This year also brought a new relationship to Boston. I got to know the city better (though this doesn’t prevent me from getting lost!), especially as I began bike commuting. This only happened through the support of friends who gave me a helmet, a bike, and much encouragement. Cycling has given me a newfound freedom and perspective. It brings me joy.

In moving from Brookline to Brighton, I am further from campus, but have a back patio, as well as a neighborhood full of kids and cats. I love my new location in that I can easily walk or bike to Brighton Center to buy fresh produce, visit the library, pick up dry cleaning, and yes, get ice cream. I am closer now to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, where I love to jog.

At this point, I’m not sure who is still reading, but I’m humbled by your companionship, even if we never meet! That was all the important stuff; now I’ll offer some concrete details about where I am and where I’m (possibly?!) headed. I am entering my final semester of the MDiv program at BU School of Theology. This summer, I will do my first unit of CPE at a local hospital. I am also working toward certification as a therapeutic musician, using my voice accompanied by guitar. I have completed the coursework and exam, and plan to start my independent practicum soon. I look forward to the evolving connections between chaplaincy, music and community in the journey ahead.

On the last day of our therapeutic music classroom training this November, I had my first experience of playing in the hospital for patients. As I sang one woman to sleep, I felt love from a source beyond me, flowing through me, into her. I realized I could be a channel. I knew I was where I needed to be. I already felt affirmed by that experience, but to top it all off, as I dropped off a colleague at her place after the training, a woman jumped off the street, wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt and holding a clarinet. “I’m here to play music for you!” she exclaimed. Odd, I thought—those were the exact words we had used in introducing ourselves to the patients earlier. She began spouting off blessings for Divine love, peace and joy, playing her clarinet in between to emphasize and affirm them. It felt like an over-abundant display of God’s love and sense of humor. I was giddy as I stopped by the river on my drive home to watch the sunset and call my mom to relate the whole experience.

I used to think my vocation would snap into place like a blinding light, a big arrow, a clear path. Over the past year, I have felt many puzzle pieces coming together. It is less a “big certainty” and more a quiet knowing in my heart. I try to stay obedient to the music, and to the silence, that calls me. This can be hard with the rush of school and work and engagements. It’s all a balance, and I keep being pulled back to gratitude for it all. Yesterday morning, before I left for choir rehearsal at the retirement community where I work, I felt suddenly drawn to get down on my knees and pray. I had to thank God that I get to make music every day, and even get paid to do so. This is the dream I’ve carried since childhood, and though it’s not coming true in some prestigious way I may have hoped as a teenager, it’s coming true in the important way: making music with others, and learning to use music to help and heal. I am beyond grateful.

I know that social media and other such platforms are critiqued for being places where we share “the best” and leave out “the worst.” And indeed, in this post I have shared about blessings and gratitude rather than the painful experiences of the past year. I don’t mean to imply they did not happen, but in the spirit of this post, in the lens of gratitude, I hold them differently here. One of my biggest ongoing struggles is with anxiety, and through therapy, prayer and friendship, 2022 began to open up a new way to experience my anxiety: as a gift. As a highly sensitive and fairly anxious person, I often experience these limitations as the opposite of a gift. Recently, I have started to recognize that in becoming aware of my anxiety, I have the opportunity to ask for the grace to be returned to trusting in God. My anxiety, in a strange way, nudges me back to attention, back to what’s important. It’s becoming more about awareness and acceptance for me, and that is my prayer for 2023, for myself and others. Maybe the parts of our lives where we most feel the absence of God do not actually point to God’s absence, but can be a point of connection, a place of prayer, with the immanent, transcendent God whose power working in us is greater than we can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20).

Here’s to another year of bike rides along the river, choir rehearsals, deep friendships. Thank you, thank you to all who are part of my journey, to all who have spent time with me or offered a prayer. I hope we can connect in 2023, and I wish you blessings, peace, and all good things.

It has been seven days without headphones, without radio, without much recorded sound. I want this quiet, this listening, to continue. I stay without radio for an eighth day, and write:

Today the car ride home from work was precious. I had this sense, with the radio off, that I was truly enough–that we are truly enough. Constant media forces itself down our throats so we feel we always need more, need to be more. Space and silence and quiet tell us, by their empty presence, that we are enough. What a gift. Blessed are those who hunger.

When I traveled and lived abroad, I became accustomed to long stretches without electronic communication. Every day had the possibility for a little bit of adventure, a little bit of pilgrimage. I felt pressed up against the wildness of life, close to fear and surprise and wonder. I processed life through my journal rather than my phone.

This week of Sabbath from headphones and radio has been a recovery of this sense of pilgrimage, but now the pilgrimage happens in my very own city. I have paid attention to sun and sidewalk, leaves and birds, friends and squirrels, music and noise.

Sometimes this is very difficult. On Saturday night before the concert at Symphony Hall, I eat dinner by myself in the Prudential Center, in a big corridor where people are spaced out and I feel safe to unmask. I eat without plugging in, without being on my phone. I notice each person who stares at me. I have to choose this awkwardness of encountering people, over the comfort of shutting them out. And every so often, I receive a gift, like the disarming presence of the Minnie-Mouse-adorned child who walks over in curiosity.

Other times, I want to shut out my emotions by blasting the car radio and singing along, even when I’m not in the mood for loud music. I want its numbing effect, but am faced instead with reality. I am surprised during one quiet morning walk to notice just how much the bass emanating from a car radio permeates the atmosphere. I am becoming more sensitive to rhythms within and around me.

During this week of making music acoustically instead of relying on YouTube and Spotify, I have discovered new chords on guitar: am7 is a favorite. I have also discovered how much I long for a piano, and I buy a weighted electric keyboard off Craigslist that will suit my room well. I am singing more instead of relying on others to sing for me.

This week has reminded me of deep truths. I am enough. We are enough. And it has opened new perspectives, especially in my interviews with two people who practice deep attention to listening in their own lives. These interviews are too rich and too personal for me to unpack fully in this space, but here are some questions I am sitting with:

What if what we’re seeking after isn’t silence, per say, but attention? This kind of deep attention can happen during stillness, during song, even during daily activities. Perhaps it is a spaciousness that does not correspond so much to decibel level, but quality of presence.

What if perfection is not at all about what we think it is? Can it be something different from being conventionalized?

What can we gain from being open to what is given to us: allowing someone else to choose the music we hear, and allowing ourselves to fall into the experience, rather than cyclically self-selecting things we know we enjoy?

How is the work of the artist, and the path therein of putting aside ego, akin to preserving Sabbath space?

How can our prayer be a listening for what is already happening?

Can you feel the silence?

I’m now sitting in the library at BU. Minutes ago, a squirrel posed, elegant and proud, for me–for the world.

Can you feel the silence? Can you feel the listening?

Attachment to my devices blocks me from feeling the silence. But outside, by the frozen river where the branches rested and the geese sat, I could feel the silence. I rejoiced in it. The silence became my song.

The silence became my song.

This profound shift from “music is my life” to “my life is music” continues to ring. Today I tasted the warmth and softness of freshly baked bread. And then that squirrel captivated me. I’m so glad I was there to witness that moment of so much life and courage.

Sometimes in the quiet, singing bubbles up inside of me, from the well of my being, or maybe my Source. It goes deep. And somehow, in the face of everything that has felt wrong in my life–in the face of everything I’ve struggled with–I know that if I can hear that song, I will be okay. Mighty okay.

I was born to listen to the essential giftedness at the heart of all things. The Billy Joel song “Just the Way You Are” has rippled through this whole season of life. It prays in me, with me. It reminds me of these depths of love. God has got me. God is not letting go of me.

It is an expansive love to which I am called.

Lord, how can I respect the boundaries of my life? How can I listen to myself? How can I be obedient to your prompting, your movement? I want to love You with all I am. All you have given me, God, I give to you.

I emerged from the quiet last night for a performance of Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto, by Igor Levit and the BSO, at Symphony Hall. It re-opened in me a deep joy and longing of listening so deeply to music–something I have not felt on that level, or perhaps haven’t been open to, in a long time. The tender sections, of the first but most astoundingly the third movement, felt like pure listening. It was sincere love. Sincere beauty. Sincere presence. Can you feel the silence?

After a week without much recorded music, I am so alive to the sound of the organ. I weep at the majesty into which I’m folded. I lie on the floor and let the vibrations wash over. And I journal:

What happens when I realize that all I have longed for all along, I already have? The love and acceptance of God.

My life is music. I am being converted from “music is my life,” to “my life is music.” From clinging and holding on, to trying to discover and unwrap this gift slowly, the one in the dream (a dream from awhile back wherein I was gifted with music).

This church feels so welcoming, and being embraced by the sound of the organ is like a big embrace by Music herself. The Singer or the Song?

I feel God inviting me to recover ‘The Want:’ to want myself.

A listening walk around my ‘big neighborhood block’ to process a beautiful conversation I had about living quietly. See some reflections on my Sabbath project interviews in the final post featured on this page, “Sabbath Postlude.”

I spent a lot of time in the car today, and that’s where I found most of my quiet. Here’s the parking lot at sunrise.

Today I found how terrified I am driving. I didn’t block it out at all with the radio. I was just there with it, and the roads, every inconsistency in the asphalt, every turn.

I wanted to turn on the radio in the car to drown out how frustrated and upset I felt after work. But I had vowed not to. I had to sit with all those feelings, until at last I broke into tears, God broke through to me.

I don’t remember the words or content of that exchange anymore, just the invitation to love myself, to respect myself, to be and become love.

Driving around by myself can be lonely. I long for someone in the seat next to me. Today, I understand the longing for that seat to be filled as a longing for companionship, a longing for God. For now, I embrace that empty seat, that invitation:

Be and become love.

I cannot pin anyone down to that seat; people will come in and out, and I just get to love them.

The practice of picking up the girls I babysit to bring them to gymnastics becomes a practice not just of opening up my car door to them, but opening up my heart. Inviting them into this quiet space together. They didn’t even ask for the radio.

Sunrise in Brookline

This morning, I thought I was going to miss the sunrise but I didn’t. It surprised me. It overtook me, as much as I was trying to overtake it.

There’s something important I’m here to do, and I need to be here for it, all of me. Present to it. Present to life.

The miracle is here — we only have to wake up.

Today was an adventure. Clockwise from top left: wandering through Boston Public Garden, enjoying the sounds of the T, catching the late afternoon sun at Dean Road Park in Brookline.

Day 3 of my “open-eared Sabbath” project.

I may have never noticed those leaves in the park, those few beautifully wilted leaves who were still hanging on, who had made it all the way through the wreckage of winter. But something prompted me to look up–that sound of leaves in the wind.

I could not believe it, how resilient they are after all this time, crinkled and brown and still clinging to their source.

After the rain, the snow, the sleet, the wind, I wonder how–how they made it when others did not.

And maybe that is just the mystery. No one has the answer to why some fall and some stay. We can only wonder.

Today on the T was the only time in my life I will ever hear that exact soundscape. The blend of those exact languages and dialects. Their polyrhythms with the wheels on the track. It was a song like no other.

On the train ride back, a toddler held by her mother but with feet forward into a little niche, held but precarious, looked at me, and I at her. I was also precariously balanced, my backpack taking up half the seat. The train, and each other, were our entertainment. No phones, no distractions, just being here. Just being held by this moment while tipping into that uncertain edge of future.

Sabbath today for me is not clutching on to these precious moments. Letting this pass, as moments are made to do. With my phone or notebook, I am normally wont to capture, and something today places a hand on my shoulder and says, ‘To live this moment is to let go of it. Let it go, and what needs to stay will remain in the sieve.’

Sabbath today isn’t about digging or diving to the bottom. Today I feel myself float to the top. It just takes unplugging so that my self can surface.

When I rise up above the earth,

And look down on the things that fetter me,

I beat my wings upon the air,

Or tranquil lie,

Surge after surge of potent strength

Like incense comes to me

When I rise up above the earth

And look down upon the things that fetter me.

“When I Rise Up,” by Georgia Douglas Johnson

I don’t want to drown out the quiet.

It is my companion, one of my oldest friends.

It is almost a place: a place where I can pick things up, and put them down, and let them be.

A place I am part of: not the director or designer, no special role except to delight.

And this deep and steadfast love I feel: for quiet. For stillness. The treadmills stop and we just are–apart from that incessant drive to gain or lose, lose or gain, we just are.

The other day, I asked a friend how he enters into prayer, and he said, “No special way. I am the prayer.”

In the rainy morning, walking down Beacon Street, the whoosh of cars so loud, so present. Sometimes I am the car, but today I’m glad to be the still sidewalk, the intimacy of the buildings I must pass footstep after footstep. There is no blocking out the sound of steps behind me, or approaching; these are real people to be reckoned with, to be seen or from whom to avert eyes. We share this space, these sounds.

I used to sit by myself on the school-bus, head pressed against the glass pane, feeling the drone of the engine and letting my melody flow above it. I do the same thing on the T: my songs are “Midnight Train,” “New Person, Old Place,” “Just the Way You Are” (Billy Joel), and too many to count. When I sing, I am at equilibrium with the world–allowing the energy in me to flow out naturally–swimming in the tide.

When I sing, I am the bird at home, whose song belongs.

I don’t want to fight against the sound of the T, I want to be part of it all. To sing along.

Silence,

When I hold you at arm’s length, when I am afraid too long, I forget how you help me to love. I am afraid of your emptiness until I draw near and realize that you allow me to love everything. It’s without you that I feel missing; in you my missing, my emptiness, becomes complete.

This is the first post of my “Open-Eared Sabbath” series, where I share journal entries, soundscape recordings and photos from my week free from headphones.

I am taking a Sabbath from recorded sound so I can stop wondering and planning what I ought to be listening to at any given moment:

What music will put me at ease? Which podcast will educate me? What service did I miss that I need to catch up on?

These are fine questions, but I want to spend time in the margins of silence and noise that are all around me. I want to drop in to what is here, who is here, where I am. For once, I don’t want to be transported somewhere else.

This morning, my headphones broke. I was trying to plug them in, and somehow the charger ate some of the inner metal parts. It’s ok–I can survive for a week without blocking the world out. Here’s to an acoustic week.

What if I didn’t fill mornings with so many words and aspirations? An ambient hum of some machine is faintly audible. So it the occasional plop against the window, crack of the house, roommate turning on and off water. I love the quiet. I love this quiet.