Something Wild.

There was this one night at a Billy Strings show.

The one where the floor was sticky with beer and the lights were low and everything inside the venue hummed like a living wire you are close enough to see vibrate. 

I stood near the back at first. People around me were talking about work, about weather, about who had driven in from how many states away or how many shows they’d been too. Practical things. Normal things. The kind of things that make a person feel appropriately tethered to the world. Small talk.

A voice announces over the crowd…

Fuzzy Rainbows.. 15 min

Fuzzy Rainbows.. 10 min

Fuzzy Rainbows.. 5 min

And then the first notes hit. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a ripple of strings warming up the air, fingers, and strings.Those notes launch into a song.

You felt it in your ribs before you felt it in your ears.

Most people nodded along. Some bounced up and down. A few recorded the opening on their phones — proof they were there. Documentation.

But something else happened to me.

The room shifted. The crowd around me stopped being strangers and became travelers — dust-covered, road-worn, gathering around something ancient and necessary.

I wasn’t just at a concert anymore.

I was in a story.

I could almost see it: generations of hands passing down the same chords. Women in cotton dresses spinning barefoot in fields. Men bent over fiddles on porches at dusk. Grief braided into melody. Joy rising up like steam from the ground I was standing on.

I closed my eyes and to anyone watching, I was just dancing. Maybe I was smiling- yes of course I most definitely was.. looking back maybe I was a little too lost in it. But inside, I was somewhere else entirely.

I was a little girl again, barefoot in the grass, in a chicken shed in the backyard with my sister singing as we worked to make it a home to play in.  I was a young mother humming “I’ll fly Away" as I rocked one baby after another night after night. I was knee deep in grief and giggles thinking my mom would have been there with me.. i would have made her eventually. I was every version of myself who had ever needed music to hold what couldn’t be said.

The realists around me would remember the set list. I would have to look at that list forever.

Realists would remember how tight the band sounded. How long the encore lasted. How many songs they recognized as covers or originals.

I, on the other hand would remember the way the fiddle felt like sunlight breaking through grief. I would remember the way the crowd became one breathing organism — dancing and spinning together. I would remember that for those three hours, the world made sense.

Later, driving home with the miles ticking upward like quiet witnesses, I took a call and they said, why would you drive that far to see a concert, “It’s just music.”

Just music.

But I know better.

Some people attend events.

Some people enter portals.

Some people hear notes.

Some people hear memories.

It isn’t that one group lives in reality and the other doesn’t. It’s that some people experience reality through things like music, through invisible threads connecting past to present. They aren’t escaping the world. They are expanding it. 

The world takes both. There is no hierarchy. 

Try as I might to be a realist...I will always be a dreamer, a feeler, full of emotions that bring both awkwardness and beauty.

Something Wild - 24x36 canvas original artwork -available