Music, among other things, is a bridge between the past, present, and future. That is, nostalgia, contentment, and hope. It inspires, it lends spices and salt to the bland emotions. It escalates wildly from apathy to action. It speaks to the heart of matters. It does, of course, more than I can ever hope to explain in hundreds of books, much less a brief essay.
What I want to walk across in so many words, is the bridge that it makes. The one I just talked about between the parodoxical stations of time. Because it does that, I think, it is a "balm to the soul."
It's a relationship. The music can be our voice in anger, grief, envy, joy, or any number of feelings that we want to let loose into a conduit.
But music heals too.
Sometimes when I'm sad, I want to feed that sadness. It's like when your lips are chapped, you sort of pull them apart and make your way towards the apex of the sting, once there you can smile at ease, because you've felt as much pain as you can possibly feel towards the matter. When I am filled with sorrow, I let the music feel me up and pull apart the lips of my lament, cracking them and releasing the eager blood. Searing the thin skin.
Sometimes it doesn't really matter the message of a song. Haven't you ever been grieved by a song that has a happy tune and lively lyrics? It is guilty by association at times. The best way to ruin a song is to listen to it in a dark time, because forever after when it plays it will be a mournful piece. I could make a playlist from those dirges. And listen to it until the melancholy memory pats me on the back and repeats the locational and situationally nonsensical, "there, there."
But sometimes the music therapy playlist just says "Hey, I'm a million miles away under an equally dark sky penning out this song on old paper and running my cold, callous fingers down the guitar strings. Smelling the ink and the metallic blood in each resonance of the chords. And feeling the same aches and tasting the same bitterness and sitting outside lost 'in all that dark and all that cold.' So let's go find a fire together. Heck, let's go build one." And the fiddler follows as you trek and trip through the trauma.
