Light, Laughter, and Living in Real Time

I had some thoughts while I was flying home yesterday from a great trip, so I spent some time typing them out. I want them to live somewhere more solid than my notes app, so here they are.

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I’m on a flight home from Buffalo, NY right now and was just jolted from my daydreaming by the thought “Pay attention to what you just lived.”

For six days I traveled through the northeast to perform twice with Millennial Choir and Orchestra. Tanner Weigel, Mitch Gibson and Peter Burgoyne were here with me.

We started in Boston, and it was beautiful (and hot). We sang in Symphony Hall, which was pretty neat. But before the performance we had a few days of sightseeing and so much laughter. I appreciate these men for their non-judgement and immense emotional understanding and support. While we each approach our lives in slightly different ways, there is camaraderie and love and care as I share my heart with them, the good and the bad alike. I can be my whole self with them, and that’s a gift.

What good guys that I'm grateful to know.

Peter and I continued on to Buffalo together, where we saw Niagara Falls (amazing!) and drove along Lake Ontario to our accommodations in Rochester. It was a stunning route I’d been annoyed about at first for being longer than necessary, yet one that was fully worth it; I’m thrilled I trusted Peter’s judgement taking it. 

Upstate New York, especially that first leg from Buffalo to Rochester, really put me in my feels in a way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Part of it was the sheer beauty of huge trees, pastoral fields, and that low golden hour light that casts everything in a special glow. Maybe golden hour always looks like that there, but it felt like a special day that I only get to glimpse periodically, like when you see something happening in real time that you know would be part of a montage in a movie to show either the important backstory or the happily-ever-after epilogue. Calling it a “core memory” usually makes me gag because social media has rendered all language misused and essentially meaningless, but I think that drive might be one if it feels montage-worthy like this.

Driving through such beautiful scenery made me think of Kentucky, which was fun. That place will always have a piece of my heart. I’m grateful for all it gave me and how it changed who I am. The trek along the lake also made me yearn for a different life than the one I have now, most notably one that includes domestic elements of partnership, a family, and responsibilities to a place that is Ours, not just Mine. While some of that dreaming has a little bit of a pang associated with it, it was more of an aspiration and a joy, a glimpse at what the beautiful elements of a life like that can look like. I’m not sure I have to move to Rochester or Buffalo to end up accomplishing those things, but I’ll leave those places open on my list of future options just in case. The late golden hour of summer might just be worth the piles of snow.

Peter and I then spent a day in and around Palmyra, NY for the second performance. MCO is a complicated thing to me: it’s at once spiritually affirming and deeply satisfying to sing beautiful music, yet also very frustrating and testing. But as I consider standing so near where the First Vision occurred and singing about God’s and Jesus’s appearance to man in this dispensation, I’m struck by the significance of what a once-in-a-lifetime thing that was. Were we hot and sweaty and plagued by allergens? Yes. Will I ever have the opportunity to testify through song after a brief downpour just a stone’s throw from where Joseph’s work as a prophet of God began? Probably not. 

What a thought that I did something so uniquely singular that I’ll likely never do anything quite like it again. That makes me feel like I’m living the way I want to live — grasping the things that can help make some meaning and add contour and texture to who I am and what I’ve lived while I push those pencils at work between trips/experiences.

The laughter with the guys that I mentioned as a highlight at the start of this whole thing? I feel like I laughed a lot this trip, which seems silly to note since laughter is pretty commonplace in my life, but it was in a way that feels sort of elevated from the ordinary, like my whole heart was lighter than normal. Shenanigans, innuendos, inside jokes, bad wordplay, good wordplay, making jokes with other MCO folks as we melted under the summer sun — each a specific and lovely thing I feel privileged to have experienced this week. Maybe it was because I was connecting more authentically with others? Or I had cast off the burdens of daily life? Both? I’ll be chasing the recipe for as long as I live, I think. In the meantime, what a delight to have felt it and seen it as it was happening.

I’m just sort of floored as I think about this whole thing and how the people, the places, and the music combined for something this wonderful. So cue the movie montage, one with friends in a beautiful place, mouths wide in laughter and bathed in that low evening summer sun.