The bird that sings just to sing

It’s been a rough day. Details don’t matter as I try to center myself. I got outside. I remember over thirty years ago where the place where I am sitting was undeveloped farmland. I used to walk the train tracks at night.

Now there is a major highway through the field. I am sitting on land kept in open space.

I stopped to sit here because I can hear a mockingbird. So far I haven’t heard one back home this spring. I don’t know why they sing all night, endlessly singing the songs of other species.

The moon isn’t quite full and our singer tries out calls I have never heard. Sitting here these past ten minutes I have heard at least thirty distinct calls while vehicles race by on the highway about 200 feet behind me.

If you forgive the anthropomorphism, there is so much joy in the mockingbird’s call. I don’t need to know the reason. I just find myself recharged as I think about tomorrow and the next day.

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Now I'm here on a couch that used to be in a different house. I've gone back to listen to something I recorded back in October 2013. I've recorded hundreds of hours of material over the years of me singing songs, improvising them in the moment.

I don't entirely know why I do this, but it's a way I process information. I feel like there's something so much of me that wants to be expressed but I have no idea how to share any of it in a straight-forward manner.

So I hit record and then begin to play and sing. When I am in very stressful moments, I remember back to what I sang.

When I sing, I become a different version of me. The content of the lyrics is always my life, lots of inside references. In my mind, it all makes sense. Like anyone reading this, I am a full person with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And all of the parts in between.

I think about who I am about how I hide so much of all of this. I think about how my desire to make music for an audience has somehow transformed into producing as much work as I do with the newsletter.

But listening back to me nine and a half years ago, I hear the improvised lyrics and every single time they take on new meaning.

I wish I could be brave enough to share this, but this is mine. I am fortunate to have had a weird series of events happen that enabled me to have the skills to capture myself in a sonic journal in which I get to be me.

A version of me.

My journalistic work is another version of me.

My time with my elderly parents and my increasing involvement with the basic functions of their life is another.

Sometimes it's all just about living. I can't live anyone else's life for them, but I'll share the stories from mine.

Why does the mockingbird sing?

There never needs to be an answer.

Just more tapestries.

My increasing awareness that there is much about how we live that needs to be fixed,