Last night was full of unexpected happy surprises from a distance for me while I was at work, just me and my dog, getting some alphabetizing and filing done. Anyone who's the source of said happy surprises has so much gratitude and thanks from me! It's in my heart right now with no way to share and give back joy for joy by expressing my gratitude, but still it's there! It made me very happy and it made me smile and it made my heart feel very full. Happy surprises are one of my favorite things! (Being a precog, most things in the world that will create waves or I have an emotional response are things I know in advance - so happy surprises I don't see coming and don't precog are one of the big delights in my life.) And last night were some very happy surprises for me! 

I definitely have had that last song from last night stuck in my head, especially since the sunrise and my early morning walk with the dog. (Audrey Pupburn gets her summer puppy cut today is currently at her appointment -- she's being shorn down shaved everywhere but her ears and face and tail. She has hair not fur so she has no undercoat thus I let it grow out all shaggy bear in the wintertime. But like human hair it just continuously grows if not cut so in the summer she gets too hot with all that hair plus it gets tangled around burrs/sticks. Thus why she gets shorn down to a summer puppy cut. Yesterday and today are super hot, mid 90s with heat index over 100 and sunny - at least until the summer thunderstorm expected tonight. So she has been anxious and matsu to go get her haircut since I told her yesterday, "Guess what love! You will be getting you puppy cut tomorrow!!" And then of course now it's been tomorrow since sunrise so she spent all day today like a five year old on a road trip, "Is it time yet? Is it time yet? Is it time yet?) Due to the heat, our 5:30am walk was the first walk we've been on since the derecho came through on Monday afternoon - so it's the first I've seen with my eyes the extent of the damage to the trees. I could hear their pain, but I hadn't seen it. Power went out at my place for about 2.5hrs on Monday, I was in a red circle affecting like 1,200 people which typically means trees on lines or downed lines or downed poles so they have to turn the section of the grid off until repairs are finished. Winds were even worse the further north and eastward -- on the east side there WAS a downed pole so some neighborhoods have been without any power since Monday night and aren't expected to get it back until later today since that's a time consuming job putting up new poles and then replacing the lines. 

Anyway, back to what I was saying before. The song in my head all this morning and whenever I don't have music on this afternoon is the one that goes, "I'll be the one to see you, be broken in my eyes, it's cracks that let the light shine through. We cannot waste the light." I don't know the name of the song, it's the first time I've heard it. But for better or worse I have a good head for lyrics and I'll remember any words anyone sets to a melody that I hear. Typically, after a first listen I'll know the melodic lines and the chorus and any lyrics that were repeated, after a second listen I'll know the more complicated instrumentation as well as 75-90% of the words (dependent on how clearly they're enunciated), and after the third listen the song will be indelibly imprinted in the jukebox inside my brain to be called up whenever I hear it with my ears or hear a similar melody/chord progression/rhythm or whenever someone says a word/phrase that's in the lyrics or whenever my brain decides it's subconscious earworm time and that's the song to do it with. 

Anyway.  if you ever want me to remember something forever, put the words to music. I can't promise I'll always fully understand what you're trying to say the way you meant it, but I'll remember every damn word of it if you put it to a melody and sing it to me. So today it's mainly been the repeating phrase "we cannot waste the light" but sometimes other parts as well. Even the part at the end which didn't sound like it was part of the actual song but  to me sounded like he was extemporaneous singing the things he needed to communicate because while in the flow of the music he could get them out when he didn't know how to say them for the overthinking. Which maybe wasn't what happened, but it's how the end of it sounded to me. But because it was words barely grafted onto the melody and mixed with the repetition from the chorus, even that part is in my brain still and I can replay it. 

It's one of the hacks into how my brain works that I'll remember anything set to music that I hear. My theory why is that for every mammal, the more senses that are engaged in memory formation, the stronger more permanent a memory is because it fires more neurons. With my color-timbre synesthesia, words set to music engage the auditory, visual, and language parts of my brain. Every time. So for my brain, songs stick in my memory as important because they're always activating multiple parts of my sensory inputs to process. 

And. Also. I do remember them with the timbre colors of how I've heard them. So like, I now have distinctly in the part of my brain that remembers songs I've heard his version of Lullabye (which is what he was playing when I happened to see he was live) as a separate thing in my brain from the Billy Joel version of it. Even though the words are the same, their voices have different timbres and thus are different colors so the notes are all as different as if different instruments had transposed it. My brain does allow me to play with melodies/lyrics as a direct transposition substituting one set of colors for another, so any voice I know well in my memory I can hear in my head how it would sound covering someone else's song and I can switch around a part of a composition to hear say a guitar part on piano or a woodwinds section transposed to strings - it's just like painting to do that. But, like his version of the song is distinct in my memory from the Billy Joel version because Billy Joel has a green colored voice that gets more golden in his higher end whereas Eric's voice is a silvery-blue-white moonlight/stars color with the slightest hint of gold iridescence in it, like when the moon is high in the sky not colored by the atmosphere when it's near the horizon to make it yellowish or reddish, I mean that pure bright high in the sky moonlight/starlight color; and whenever he hits a note a little flat his voice gets a bit grey-bluish like the nimbus around the moon. But it doesn't bother me with his voice when he hits notes slightly flat because the color of that works with the timbre of his voice the way the moon's light is still beautiful when it has a nimbus or a thin cloud in front of it diffraction the light. Not everyone's voice is pleasant to me both true and when slightly flat, his is one of the few exceptions because of the color of his voice to my synesthesia.  (In general with my color-timbre synesthesia, a bit flat off true gets pigeon toned greyish purple and going sharp off true gets blaze-orangey-brownish mixed into their pure timbre color. Which is why some people or instruments flat or sharp is more painful to me than others. It depends on how the muddiness of the grey or orange color blends with their natural timbre color on true notes.... Like when anyone has strong blue/green/purple colors in their voice, the orange brown of them hitting sharp is awful. But also if anyone has pinks or reds or oranges or yellows or even greens in their voice, the grey-purple of being flat is awful. Banjos don't bother me because they spangle in cyans and silvers so the flatness on them just dampens the metalic on the jewel tone. But a guitar string tuned flat is grey-purpling on emerald greens if metal strings or on golden honey tones if nylon strings and just a little flat on a guitar string is a lot worse than the significantly flat on a banjo that's there even when it's tuned properly...) But anyway, Eric and Billy Joel have different colored timbres of voices even when in the same part of the range. So it's like the same pattern of light and shadow moving but one is painted emerald jungle green tinged gold at the edges which is not at all the same as the same light-shadow pattern when it's the colors of the moon when it's high in the sky. Which is probably confusing to anyone without synesthesia, but for me it's just my normal experience with music as best I can put it in words.

So anyway, all morning it's been like hearing him repeating that chorus to me. And between that and what he had to say about listening even when disagreeing and how to love even when you don't agree with something a person says/does, it all felt very apropos to soothing much of my doubts and overthinking and bringing back to the idea that, "mistakes and misunderstandings happen, but it's in staying and working on understanding that the dissonance can find the resolution it seeks." I liked that metaphor of his, how dissonant notes seek resolution. It's all been sort of percolating through my brain, finding the ways things fit and showing me a new perspective. (I have a good memory for things I see and hear, especially the more it's of interest to me. It's the only reason I got As in all my classes -- Lord knows I never learned to study and any time I tried I'd just get bored and distractible.) All to the soundtrack of various iterations of "we cannot waste the light."

Not related to any of that but another one of the things that I saw last night that made my heart happy was that there's a synagogue in Boynton Beach (south Florida) taking up the legal case that the Florida abortion bans violate Jewish religious beliefs and religious freedom to set a legal precedence of government in the way of abortion as the woman's life choices is a long established religious rights issue. I don't know how or why that happened, but it makes me so happy that they stepped up to the plate on it EVEN KNOWING that anti-semites and anti-abortion people are willing to take a gun or a bomb or violence to impose their white supremacist will and this puts Jews in the cross hairs of the vitriolic hate. But it made me feel so happy and proud when I read their reason they gave and that someone stepped up to make this very real argument about actual Judeo values. 

Anyway. I have no idea how it happened or who made it happen, who put the legwork to the path I saw opened up -- but I'm so grateful and proud and just conscience at peace over that fact that somehow it was brought forward to a synagogue's rabbi/congregation and they chose to move forward with doing the right thing not the easy thing to avoid harassment. Because when the right thing is the hard thing and you know it will increase racist persecution but you choose to do it anyway, there's something very beautiful in that courage. And I loved the way it was explained the reasoning for why Jewish faith is pro-choice, out of reverence for all life.

 I intend to keep an eye on it as the case moves forward. But the fact someone stood up and said, "this is religious discrimination and I won't be silent about it" made me so happy! So happy!!!

O! Just got the text that Audrey is 5mins to ready for pickup!!!! 😍. Will share before/after puppy cut pictures in another post after I get back. If I remember. But I'll try to remember. Sorry in advance if I don't though.