Then God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. God saw that the light was good.
genesis 1: 3-4
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“My precious sense of honor just a shield of rusty wire I hold against the chaos…Where would you rather be? Anywhere, but here. When will the time be right? Anytime, but now… the doubt and the fear I know would all disappear anywhere, but here.”
One could argue it’s always been a scary place… we just have 24/7 news coverage of it now. It doesn’t matter what it was like “before” because that was then, and this is now. This is our reality and it’s terrifying.
My phone alarm woke me this morning announcing that Joe Biden, 81, has COVID. I don’t need to say the potential implications of that out loud when yesterday the headline was: “The only reason I’d drop out of the [presidential] race is illness.”
Under His Eye
I hug my husband as he ties his tie. I thank him again for being nice to me. Later when all my rights are stripped away and he can subjugate me at will, I’ll be thankful he doesn’t smack me around or yell at me. He could. Plenty already do. The legal blessing for them will just be a bonus.
I used to make jokes like this as we watched the first couple of seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale. I stopped watching that show. I don’t like how it makes me feel. I like how reality feels right now even less.
Fear is the Mind Killer
I am a naturally anxious person. Fear is a constant companion.
I’ll skip the explanations and examples and just say that, for me, music and its soothing qualities are essential to my life and maintenance thereof. I rely on the music makers to give words to what I can’t or won’t. I’ve written before about my first aid box of songs. I collect songs for the bandaging of emotional and psychological wounds – mine and my friends. I hand them out to staunch the bleeding.
06/23 Parish in Austin photo by Liz Berry
As of late, a good portion of these songs belong to Dallas-based singer-songwriter (superlative human being, etc etc) Salim Nourallah.
Etched permanently on my left wrist is a lantern (the Arabic “Nour” in Salim’s surname translates quite appropriately and beautifully to “light”) and the legend: Don’t Be Afraid – the title to a talismanic song of his I’ve held on to for years. I got this not fathoming the true nature of fear and how much I was about to need it… in March of 2020.
Everything You Want
There are other songs: It’s Ok to Be Sad, Be Here Now, Hang On, Everybody Wants to be Loved, You Are Safe, Never Say Never. Under a different Salim incarnation, The Disappearing Act (who also had a brand-new release called Gun Barrel City last month), there’s a song called: Everything You Want. “Everything is laid out at your feet… it’s gonna be ok” about following your gut and remembering your moral code when liars and temptations start to close in around you.
06/23 Sons of Hermann Hall photo by Liz Berry
Some of these songs may appear at first glance to be simplistic, but they also feel like the singer leaving lessons for his children as they grow up and face the hurdles of this sometimes sad often confusing life. Lessons like “it’s ok to be sad” – permission we, as adults, rarely give ourselves.
Yesterday Salim dropped a new single and accompanying video… straight into my aforementioned kit. This song is called “Hold the Sun.”
Beatles-esque
I’ll leave the flowery describing words to those more sonically suited. I hate qualifying music that way: tonal rapture, melodious, weaving, sonorous, sparse and dreamy, floaty, swirly … or the one that must fill the singer with glee as I know how much they mean to him: Beatles-esque. I would no more try to describe music and evoked feelings than I’d try to describe love or the color blue. I don’t know what the world looks like to you (that’s probably why everything is going to hell right now: we don’t know what the world looks like to each other and no one cares enough about their fellow man to ask.)
06/23 – Parish in Austin photo by Liz Berry
Salim said in an interview accompanying the new song, “It’s ultimately a song of encouragement. We’re all riding the wave, surfing the unexpected good and bad times. Never truly knowing what’s coming next. My hope is ‘Hold the Sun’ is something to put on that offers some sort of comfort or encouragement to someone that might be having a bit of a hard time.”
Plaintive and Earnest
And this is probably why I was lucky enough to hear this song long ago. I got sidetracked trying to find the original incarnation and couldn’t – it’s somewhere in my Dropbox and was probably at least three phones ago so… years. I was upset about something – I always am. He sent it to me – presumably for the very reason in the quote, and I cried. For me, the song will always be just unpolished, plaintive, and earnest Salim, his guitar, and the uncut lyric gems that have yet to be gone over and over, smoothed and refined. When my head slipped below the water for a moment, Salim threw me a life preserver.
He always does.
“Life is tough. Sometimes the battle is too much.”
Cosmic Child
The video paired with this song is perfect. The cast of its characters evokes plastic soldiers or toys. Perhaps some cosmic child is acting out the cares of our world – a news crew captures fighting, a couple kisses through the chinks of chain-link fence, soldiers, running, protests, a flower extended into a screaming face, a family (hold the sun… hold the son? I wondered about that) disintegrates. It’s all too easy to imagine the cosmic child playing out these scenarios gets called in for lunch and the human race in this sandbox we thought was life gets discarded and forgotten.
What is Real?
It all feels inconsequential and meaningless. Just the daily slog of doomscrolling and life meted out in angry sound bites… it’s hard to hope. But this song reminds us to keep an eye on what’s real. The sun is real. Warmth, light, connection, and the promise of peace are all there. Hope is there. Love is there.
