Learning to sing my story - Christine Cleave

I need a stroll around the garden to wake me up in the morning and a few days ago there was a treat in store - a small robin singing its heart out on the summit of a neighbouring tree. The musical twirls and flourishes stopped me dead in my tracks, as I wondered what the bird was saying - “This is my territory”?  Or was he broadcasting his search for a mate: “Come to my tree, lovely lady robins, and see what a very fine fellow I am!”

Apparently, early humans sang before they learned to speak. I imagine a skin-clad man loudly carolling (but not verbalizing) the message, ‘I’m off to the forest to hunt deer.’ This might be accompanied by chest-pummelling and gestures in the correct direction. Maybe Stone Age man and the robin have something in common?  

There are still tribes living in the Amazon basin that communicate in song. . . However, I must not let myself get diverted from the main purpose, which is to share my writing journey,

I love singing in a choir and an evening rehearsal often leaves me feeling emotionally replete, with earworms singing me to sleep. Making music gives me a way to share how I feel about life. Using the medium of words to communicate my affective responses seems, by contrast, clumsier and it’s taken me a long time to get this far.

For it’s now twelve years since I began to journal, with the (pretentious?) words, ‘I want to commit my thoughts to paper. To, as it were, catch their fading imprints on the wet sand before the tide comes in and gently smooths them into faint, shimmering undulations’. In addition to processing my own life on paper, I made notes from theological books and recorded insights gleaned in meditation. Sometimes my thoughts propelled my pen in unforeseen directions.

I wrote with no destination in mind, as if I were a squirrel leaping along a continuously forking branch which got progressively thinner, eventually ending in a fan of tiny twigs. I found it hard to explore a cluster of ideas without going off track. Although reading round the subject of the spiritual life helped to deepen my understanding, it was hard to manage all these new ideas in my memory.

But I persisted in writing and re-writing - until something miraculous happened. Ideas began to organise themselves into clumps, and then (wonder of wonders!) the clumps began themselves to clump. I became like a squirrel who could make choices about where to leap, instead of circling aimlessly. I started to see, not only writing tasks but my daily life in greater perspective. It still felt like climbing a huge mountain, but I was being rewarded with fresh vistas of the valleys below. I was gradually acquiring a more coherent picture of my subject matter, able to dig deeper and to broaden my understanding.

I’m unable to pinpoint exactly how this occurred, for the mysterious joining up of my thoughts happened below the level of my consciousness. These days, ideas that surface seem almost to be asking for space on the page and I’m becoming more confident about sharing them with others.

Time to leap back, squirrel-like, to the moment when I was taken out of myself by the trilling of a robin. Just as the bird gave itself up to its song, I’m able to lose myself in the craft of writing. The primary impact of a book is how it makes the reader feel. As the text flows more freely onto the page, I’m learning to sing with my whole self.

Christine Cleave is a retired physics teacher, who is busy making the transition from science nerd to would-be author. She enjoys singing in a chamber choir, painting and giving spiritual direction.