When Poetry Began to Sing

Click here to listen to my original song "Everything," my debut single.

 

For as long as I can remember, words have been my home.

They’ve gathered in journals, wandered through speeches, hidden themselves in grant proposals, and spilled onto pages as poems. Whenever life became too large to hold, words made room for it.

This week, something new began: the poems want to sing.

A line arrives in melody. A verse refuses to stay on the page. It wants breath. It wants harmony. It wants a place where silence and sound can tell the story together.

My first single, “Everything,” blossomed as fully formed rose out of a thorny season that many of us know intimately. The season of overgiving.

Staying late.
Trying harder.
Making ourselves smaller so someone else could shine.
Believing that if we loved well enough, worked faithfully enough, sacrificed generously enough, eventually we would arrive at enough.

Instead, we discover another truth.

Sometimes everything we have to give still isn’t the thing someone else is looking for.

“You wanted something different from who I am.”

There’s a quiet grief in that realization.

Not because we failed.

Because we finally understand that no amount of striving can transform us into someone we were never created to be.

For years, I thought the lesson was to give more, know more, be better.

Now I know that the lesson is to return home.

Home to our own voice.

Home to the parts of ourselves we’ve tucked away to keep the peace.

Home to the beautiful, imperfect person who was enough before she ever tried to prove it.

As I listened to the finished recording for the first time, I realized this song wasn’t about work or relationships at all.

It’s about every altar where we’ve mistaken self-sacrifice and self-erasure for love and dedication.

And, beneath the sadness, there is hope.

If you listen, you’ll hear your heart quietly shift.

“It could be enough.”

Just one word changes the landscape.

Could.

Like the first hint of dawn before the sun clears the horizon.

Like a seedling beginning to split the ground.

Like grace.

This song marks a new beginning in my life.

A sweet companion for my beloved poetry.

This song has an ancestry. Its inspiration wandered through k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving,” paused beneath the astonishing canopy of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now,” and eventually found its home. “Everything” is born.

🎵 If you’d like to experience my debut single, “Everything,” click here just to listen and please leave a comment.

I have a feeling there are many more songs we don’t even know are waiting to be sung.