Getting to the Heart of Sappy

Years ago I wrote a song called "Scared Sentimental" in defense of my own songs from my own criticism. I would pour heartfelt words into a simple melody and come up with something that wasn't nearly as edgy as the songstresses of the day like Sinnead O'Conner, PJ Harvey or even Melissa Etheridge. In the moment of writing the songs they would have an almost unbearable intensity, but a few days, weeks or even months down the road I would need a new frontier, the words that flowed so completely from heart now feeling and sounding trite, cliche' and to my great distress...sappy.

And so my relationships with my songs can be uneasy. They come to me, we fall in love, I try to capture them so I can share them and then I move on like a fickle lover to the next melody and repeat the pattern...each time a little more in love than the last. Every once in a while, I'll come back to an old one and play it again and remember how I felt when I first found it lingering on the strings of my guitar, and this time the lyric or melody reveals a little more than I noticed the first time we met and I fall in love again... until another melody comes along. When other people like my songs I feel cruel, I say or think "Oh they're really not that great! I wish I could write songs like..." and then the songs feel rejected and I feel a little wounded too.

It was Max van Manen who said something about the difference between trees and people being the roots and the feet. The minute people try to plant themselves somewhere they see where else they still need to go while trees remain rooted where they are existing by reaching high and pushing their roots deep into the earth around them. So maybe the songs are like trees, complete with leaves, roots and sap. I move through life leaving a trail of (sap)lings behind me so I can always find my way back to the moment when I fell in love with...I've been lucky to be in love with so much.

When I think of my songs as saplings, suddenly something else is revealed...the sap! So what then is a "sappy song" when we know that the sap is the lifeblood of the tree? It protects the wounds, it transports nutrients and in the case of maple syrup...produces something so sweet that our plain every day wheat based staple pancakes are fit for royalty. Perhaps there is something very sweet about writing a sappy song.

So don't let a moment skirt around and pass by you
That you don't share a smile with the one who is beside you
Oh mother, father, sister, brother, my friend, my lover...I'm here!
I've been scared sentimental by visions of hallways
Where love waits beyond all the unopened doorways
And I wait, afraid to knock in case they all disappear.

-from Scared Sentimental by Susan Picard

More Letting Go

Letting go is this wonderful concept…not so easily achieved. Not too long ago my daughter came home with a science project to design and build a musical instrument. The object of the exercise was to create an instrument that varied in pitch and volume. They had drawn up the plans at school and were to complete the building phase at home. This was not the first musical instrument my daughter has ever created and so she approached the project with a considerable amount of confidence. Her plans for a set of shakers were very well drawn, and when she sat down to work, she didn’t actually want any help from her mother.

When it became clear to me that she didn’t understand the difference between pitch and volume I felt compelled to become involved. Things went downhill from there. Both my husband and I tried to introduce ways in how to change the pitch between her two shakers, but could not find a way to get her to understand that it was okay to change her project when it wasn’t meeting the outcome. We tried to show her the difference. She climbed into bed crying. When I asked her what was wrong I was told that I wasn’t listening. She had made a plan and she just wanted to follow it. We let her finish the project on her own and she got 100%. I shook the shakers for quite some time, listening for a change in pitch between the two. Did the short shake, did the long shake, discovered a definitely change in tone and volume, but not pitch. One shaker had a little more rice in it, did that change the pitch ever so slightly? Perhaps…maybe…yes.

The challenge to “own” our learning isn’t a simple one, especially in a world of conflicting “right ways” of doing things. I try to move fluently back and forth between what is “essential learning” and the ambiguity of discovering meaning. There is a boy who wants to share his ideas and they flow all over the page willy nilly, so I try to find ways to guide the flow. “Why do I need to put in periods?” he asks me as we edit his work together. “Because I need a chance to breathe,” I tell him. “If there are no periods, I don’t have a chance to breath, take a rest, absorb the meaning.” “But this is a river!” he tells me, “I don’t want you to breathe.” We negotiate his river together and I try to instruct him when we need to breathe, he tries to tell me where we need to go. We end up laughing.