just my heart talking

An inside day today, for the weather went from rain, to splodgy sleet to airy quavers of snowflakes parachuting past my window.
So I got the guitar out and practised a few songs I'd not sung for a while. Here's the thing...
A guitar is just wood and tightened wire. Like a piano is tightened wire. Wind instruments compact a breath through brass or reed. It's really all there is to it. Things put together in the material world. And of course it's not.
Music does this thing that speaks in cosmic tongues, it penetrates deeply across language and cultures, pierces the soul. What is it about tightened wire and compacted breath that, when put in certain intervals and beats, makes us weep makes us move our body in elation makes us gather our hearts together makes us see ourselves in each other?
To me music is proof of something greater than us. That is to say, something greater than its component parts. Play a song to peoples of the world and you will get a unison of emotion, of deep understanding at this mystical thing the music is shaking out of us. In purely scientific terms, it is just tightened wire and soundwaves vibrating at different frequencies and intervals. Yet it reverberates in us in a way that words cannot. It reaches in and squeezes at the very vitality that makes us alive.
Just a personal opinion of course, because sometimes when I sing (not very well) I feel I am expressing myself the way the sky expresses the rising or sinking sun, a cloudy day. It is just what it is. I feel it. I feel the atomic vivacity of oscillating electrons. This sense of myself pulsing in gravitational waves. I sing the body electric, sing this ineffable expression of everything the universe has put together to let me recognise myself here in this perpetual moment.

Anyway, today I was trying to remember how to play a song by the brilliant Ron Sexsmith. I eventually got it and I recalled the time, about two years ago, when I was chasing after impossible things only to hurt myself it seemed.
That morning I was at school, in a resource room tuning up a cheap guitar for the guitar club I ran after school. I got it in tune and strummed a few chords. I felt something vibrating in the air. I was lost and aching and feeling vulnerable. So I sang the song into my phone.
Listening to it now I feel that moment when I expressed exactly where I was and exactly what I was feeling. I can dip in to that feeling all that time ago. Only music can bring such immediacy out of deep space and time and offer it anew and immediate as the very moment you felt it.
Here it is: just my heart talking.