The First Wild Notes

When you find a flute in a closet after 17 years and it's a thread back to what's real.

When I raise it to my mouth, the tone comes out pure and smooth and silver. The keys are strange yet familiar to touch. It’s still there—somehow. Body, fingers, lips, lungs; the air vibrating with something that was once wholly me. The first thing that taught me how to command a room, how to speak in a way that people would listen.

The only time I remember playing flute in the last 17 years was when I was living in the Marin Headlands outside of San Francisco. I was caught in a love tangle and I needed to get quiet enough to hear myself, so I packed a tupperware of old ziti and a bottle of water and a hammock and my flute into a backpack and hiked into the hills alone. When darkness fell, I played for the coyotes and the moon and the ocean. I played for my own ears, my own heart. It was so wild.

We are waking up. There is a wildness in me and in you that is coming back on line. The billionaires in their plastic space suits appear hollow. We are hungry for what’s real.

Tonight, the flute finds its way out of the closet and into my hands. Cold metal, hot breath. It’s wrenching me back through time, but time is a circle, and there is enough of it, just for right now. One moment I am in an online writing class and the next I am weeping in my apartment, surrounded by tax documents and water glasses and dirty piles of clothes on the floor.

I light a candle. I push off my plans. I feel what I’ve been trying both to feel and not feel this whole time, the silencing and deportations, the noise and violent lies, the endless reminders that something corrosive is coming for the neighbors and trees and waters I love. There are so many people who know more than me, who have takes on what it all means and what we need to do, and so the only thing I ever find myself saying these days comes out like a prayer, even though I don’t pray much anymore: I am with you. I am with you. I am with you.

I want this, tonight, for us. Something we don’t have to go out and find; something we already have in our closets, in our bodies, that will call us back. A way to sing our own names.

Here it is, raw and un-retouched and probably flat. The first wild notes.