When, despite the gales and throes of the day, there is a spark of beauty…

There is a kind of strength which cannot be culled, when you are able to lift your voice in a song. Tonight there were a few old standards of mine, which I revisited in a few free minutes; the heart softened more than ever by life found new corners to fill and dark spaces to illuminate. And as a chord progression changed, and the dynamics of a certain passage smoothed out — the voice, in a line made more poignant by recent events, filled with more humanity, and the fingers on the strings followed that lead — so that the song once rich was somehow richer, the melody somehow deeper.

While none were there to hear it, there I was, in the middle of it, while the winds and rain blew all around me. A musician like a magician changes the way the world works, and the better the song, the cleaner the heart, the more that alchemy roots itself in your moment…

It's all right. It is always all right, when you can raise your voice in a call or a cry.