Hair

Having long hair, I tend to shed hairs wherever I go. Hairs that are recognisably mine – long, wavy and golden-brown. Like a little note that says “I was here”. Particularly anywhere I’ve brushed or washed my hair. Or slept.

So even though he’s tried to expunge me entirely from his life, somewhere in his flat there are probably still some stubborn strands. Hiding under the furniture. Woven into his pillowcases (how they weave themselves into fabrics so tightly I simply don’t know – but they do). Between the pages of the borrowed books I returned to him when we split up. On the shoulder of the clothes he wore when he put his arm around me.

And as he cleans his house with the obsessive precision that we once laughed about, he will remove my straying hairs one by one. Clean them from his life. Does it give him a pang to see them and remember the curtain of my hair that fell about him as we kissed? Or does he see them as remnants of my clinging to him, unwholesome reminders which he is glad to throw away? Almost certainly the second, I fear… how much things have changed!

One day there will be no more entanglements, and he will have purged me entirely from his life. But for now foolish hairs still hide themselves in the corners of his life. Like the foolish hopes that hide themselves in the corners of my heart.

There was a fairytale hero – the maiden or the prince? I don’t remember – who walked across a bridge made of a single hair. But the gulf is too wide to be bridged by a few fragile hairs that cling where they do not belong. I can’t see either of us taking that walk across the emptiness between us. Indeed I know in my heart there would be no happily-ever-after, even if one of us tried to reach out again. So I must continue to let go. I must walk tall, my hair blowing in the breeze and swinging with the rhythm of my walking and my dancing.

Most of me is already walking towards my future. But like the scattered strands of hair I left behind, there are a few bits of me that still cling on to what is now our past.

[The second post on this site, breaking the silence, started with a 15 minute writing practice, inspired by red ravine. The idea is to write without stopping for 15 minutes, without going back over what you wrote. This is a shortened version of the second one I wrote - with the topic "hair"!]

How it feels to sing…

How does it feel to sing? Very, very open.

The way I sing demands that I open up both physically and emotionally. And that’s a wonderful feeling, but also a scary one.

Physically there are hundreds of tiny adjustments that I’ve learnt over the years. Thankfully I don’t think about most of them any more. I just think about singing, and as if by magic my back straightens, my chest opens, the back of my neck relaxes and the crown of my head lifts. And I feel very aware of the air inside me, of the natural reflexes of breathing working freely and powerfully. Through all the years I’ve been trying to learn to sing the challenge has always been to achieve precise coordination of muscles most people never need to be aware of, without letting tension creep in. It’s fascinating, because that’s almost impossible to achieve if you try to make it happen. So it’s often a question of finding the right images or feelings that spontaneously put the body in the right state to be a vocal instrument. And then set my voice free to do what it knows best.

It’s strangly similar to meditation- you have to let go of wanting a particular sound, and just observe what comes. Because every time I try to control the tone quality, or the volume, or whatever, I end up losing some of the richness, of the individuality of my voice. If I’m worried about a high note it’s natural to want to control it, but if I do that my voice tenses up and it won’t come out as well as it would if I trusted my voice and let it make its own adjustments. Like being in a relationship – it’s scary, but there’s no substitute for just letting my voice be itself.

And that’s where the emotions come in. The sort of music I sing is generally very emotional, and I’ve always found words and music a very potent combination. So standing up to sing in front of people means sharing something of who I really am, what I feel, what I believe.

Am I mad to want to do this for a living?