The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. (Lau Tzu)
Despite not being in the best shape vocally, today went better. After the various dropping-off of toddler & husband, the dog and I went for a rambling, exploring sort of a walk in the Windsor Great Park near Savill Garden. There are proper woods there, the air thick with pine, nettles, ferns and tunnels of rhododendron bushes so dense you’re not sure you will find a way out at the other end.
I heard someone say recently that once you have children, everything else is just window dressing. And it’s true. Despite longing for moments of solitude, I don’t know what to do with them yet. In the two-ish years since my son was born, I’ve had so little time truly to myself that I find the experience of actually having it to be utterly overwhelming. Mostly, I find myself crying with the sheer letting go-ness of it all. You don’t realise how much you’re carrying until you put it down. But now, for one day each week, I do have time, and so the question is, what do I do with it? How can I dress this window with something meaningful?
People talk about ‘getting back’ to things after becoming a parent, but really, there is no going back. I cannot think of anything in a separate frame in which my son is not in some way present. When he was born, I went into the hospital as ‘I’ and left as ‘we’, so that is where my meaning is, for now at least, or at least that is where my creative thoughts keep dragging me, to delve through the undergrowth of what it is to be a mother, a mother to a son; the burden of it, the joy of it.
Despite spending a lot of my time singing in churches, I’m not a particularly religious person, and the story of Jesus’ birth and death was always just that - a story. But today, thinking about my own experience of motherhood, I found these texts needling their way through to me in a different way. I spent some time learning Bach’s ‘Ach, bleibe doch, mein liebstes Leben’ from his Ascension Oratorio, BWV11. ‘Stay a little while longer’, Mary pleads with her son. ‘Stop growing up so fast’, I whisper silently to my son as he astounds me with new things every day.
Towards the more contemporary end of things, I was also finding my way into Middle English with Stuart MacRae’s ‘Stond wel, Moder, under rode’. What at first felt almost indecipherable without referring to the pronunciation guide for almost every word gradually revealed itself to me as I found myself absorbing these old mutated versions of my own mother tongue. It’s an astoundingly beautiful song which I can’t wait to record and perform some day.
I also spent a chunk of time practising singing microtones in the lowest part of my register for some Gubaidulina. As someone who has had perfect pitch since the age of 7, this was quite an extraordinary experience of stepping into the no man’s land between notes, slipping in the mud and having to think really carefully about where to plant my feet again afterwards without falling over.
I think when I started on this journey of challenging myself to explore new repertoire, I was waiting for something that felt momentous to happen. After the stress of getting my funding application in to the Arts Council, the three month wait to hear whether I would be given funding, and the huge build up of expectations through my procrastination, the reality of today felt a but underwhelming. But then, at some point during the afternoon, I realised that, in fact, this is it; I am doing it already. I have taken the first step; the journey has started.
