spoken word of life

A 17-year-old college freshman me walked 30 minutes through Missouri's only monsoon to the first real open mic night of my life. (Because I'd already walked 30 minutes, so pressing on or going home was going to leave me similarly wet.) A girl I didn't know, but who spoke the same body language as a good friend of mine back home, bought me a cup of coffee and I sat down at a table of three more people I didn't know just in time for a crash course in spoken word.

What I heard in that tiny little café in a midwestern town that no one can name, startled me. It was the power of music in the potency of words. I love music, and I've always loved music, because it expresses the inexpressible. What it does not do is express the expressable.

Sometimes - many times - that which can be best communicated through word is exactly what a soul needs to hear or a heart needs to utter. Sometimes it is those things that are looked over or looked down on because a lecture is not artistic. A discussion or debate does not touch our emotions, but there are things that the artist needs to understand that emotion cannot.

At a basic level, spoken word is performance poetry. Some people read poetry into a microphone. Some people read poetry emotionally into a microphone. The good ones, I soon discovered, wrote poetry that would only be wholly understood when breathed into a microphone. It is music that is spoken.

I started to get into it, writing a little and listening a lot. Shortely thereafter I met Jesus. He can be rather disarming. Everything I was working on suddenly became wrong, and the opportunities to participate suddenly disappeared.

Inspiration has been resurrected. I recently discovered Bradley Hathaway and Amena Brown.