I Have This To Say About That

Take fifteen minutes. No really. Put your phone on silent. Or better yet, put your phone on silent and stick it under the bath towels in your closet. If it’s evening, consider pouring yourself a wee dram of very good whiskey. Not a Manhattan. A wee dram. If you have good earphones, put them on. Go into a room where you can be alone. Shut the door. Pull up this video. Put it on full screen. Keep your eyes open.

Why all the fuss? Because you will be taken not out of this world, but into this world—the world of beauty that will make you weep, beauty that humans are capable of making. Humans. You will see and hear humans full of joy who have worked their fingers to the bone and their vocal chords to horseness to make something extraordinary. A deluge of love and longing and celebration and prayer and collective calling that left me in tears, my face in my hands, crying in gratitude to have been able to hear just fifteen minutes. Via YouTube. I might not have survived experiencing the live performance.

This song, titled “Waloyo Yamoni,” which translated means, “We Overcome the Wind,” took years to bring to a boil in the heart and mind and hand and piano and timpani and voice of composer Christopher Tin, the final song in his song cycle with the glorious title “The Drop that Contained the Sea.”

This choral and orchestral music is not exact. It is not the same every time. It was not entered into ChatGPT and produced in less than three seconds—nor will anything like it ever be. Ever. What is brought to this performance is not just the score, but the hearts, the yearning, the thrill, the heartbreak, the failures, the talent, the uncountable hours of every performer on that stage as they deepened what they brought to their song. In doing so, each one of them has brought each one of us their humanity. And that matters. It’s the difference.

Creating beauty is what each of us is capable of. We are capable of exposing ourselves to beauty like this every day—in what we read, where we let our eyes linger, what we listen to. We can pick up a green Prismacolor pencil, sharpen it, and make a line and then another. We can keep doing this until we get past our fear and shame and discomfort to find that something true will come out of that pencil if we unbar the windows to our hearts and let our minds go out to pasture for the afternoon.

Beauty matters. Creating matters. I mean it matters like clean water matters. It is essential to our survival. It keeps our hearts soft and open. It focuses our minds on the truth. It makes us cry—for reasons much different and more noble than why the news makes us cry.

Go back to “Waloyo Yamoni” and listen again. And again. Let it change you.