HAPPY THANKFUL

To all who are celebrating it today, a very Happy Thanksgiving to you.

While I feel pretty mixed about this holiday, its history, and the mythologies that it promotes, I do think that there is much merit to having a day of gratitude in which we share a meal together. Perhaps now more than ever.

One of the things I am most grateful for this year is the return to live, in-person music-making. I’ve been fortunate enough to be making music again in front of live audiences since early June, which has felt like the greatest unexpected blessing. While many thought that this would only last a month or two at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, I initially feared it would be years. And as we neared a vaccine roll-out, I was still hearing from many people that singers would not be invited back into concert halls until the first months of 2023, at the earliest. So when I suddenly started getting invitations to perform earlier this summer, I was relieved beyond belief. While it’s been an overwhelming experience to jump back into the touring life at full throttle, I have been grateful for every second of it. If anything, these long months of lockdown have really underlined for me how important music is to my being, and how vital it is we be able to share it with each other in real space and time. To be able to do all of those things again means everything to me.

As I’ve ventured out into the world again, I am perpetually struck by how traumatized people seem to be sharing real space with each other. The advents of our technology that empowered us to stay safely connected to each other through our screens also seem to have inured us to the comfort of isolation. In doing so, it seems to have widened the gaps between us, pushing us further towards the poles. Communicating through cameras that can be shut off or tweets that only limit self-expression to 140 characters, the nuance of our discourse is too easily discarded. It feels impossible to be heard as we shout into the virtual void, only prompting us to raise our voices louder. Now, as we re-enter real space, it feels less safe to exchange ideas, and our defenses are at a maximum. As the borders of our reality have shrunken to the limits of our immediate physical orbit, a sense of community is lost. We’ve been conditioned to erect barricades to protect us everyone around us, whom we now encounter as some sort of potentially dangerous “other”.

Last Friday, my friend, pianist Henry Kramer, invited me to join him for an evening of the music of Franz Schubert that he had curated as part of Columbus State University’s concert series in Columbus, Georgia. We began the program with Schubert’s song, Heliopolis I. The song tells a tale of a man walking through a cold and barren Northern landscape who hears of a utopian place called the city of the sun. One line of the poetry held extra poignancy for me: as the man looks around seeking directions to this promised land, he says: “men could tell me nothing, for they were entangled in conflict.”

Singing those words for our audience in Georgia, I was struck by their relevance to the present moment. Our increasingly entrenched societal conflict is preventing us from all achieving what we want the most: a better world. While I am certainly not arguing that we should “all just get along” and accept some sort of unacceptable status quo, I do hope we can begin to find community again, and learn how to sit with and respect each other’s differences of perspective, experience, and opinion. As we prepare to celebrate this day by overeating with our families and loved ones for the first time in two years, I hope that this is a valuable step toward learning how to be together again.

Today, despite all its messiness and discomfort, I am so grateful for the opportunity to share real space in real time with people: both strangers and loved ones. I am thankful to be able to learn and grow from the challenges and the joys that come from being in community.

Wishing you all a very happy holiday.

PS Speaking of alternative perspectives, the Washington Post’s podcast, Post Reports, has an excellent feature this weekend on today from the Indigenous perspective. If you need a podcast to keep you company as you baste your turkey, I’d suggest checking it out HERE.