There was once a man who sang the blues. He’d lived hard years dirty bars, long highways, lovers left, debts never loosened their grip. Night after night, he sang on about pain and longing. One morning, stumbling home from a gig, he paused on his porch. The air was cool, the sun peaking in on the horizon. For the first time in a long while, he really listened to the world. Birds calling, wind rattled through weeds, the hum of trucks on the highway. It came to him: everything was a kind of instrument, each voice the same life force flowing through one planet in a universe otherwise of infinite death. The sparrow’s chirp, the oak tree’s sway, even his own wheezing asthmatic breath, all of it was the Earth singing itself. And the blues was then different. Not only sorrow. It was the sound of life insisting to be heard, bending and moaning, finding a path through hardship. The bent note on his guitar string, no different than a bent dandelion stem fighting through concrete. That night, he sang the blues like a messenger. The ground rumbling was his voice. A river’s whitecaps the slide of his guitar. He realized the blues was the planet’s language and never belonged to him. Anyone willing to open their mouth and let it pass was channelling it. From that day, the blues was no longer a weight, it lifted him. He knew he wasn’t singing his pain alone. He was joining the chorus of everything alive.