Noah.

When I close my eyes, the music comes alive, dancing through the air and into my ears with a life-filled rawness that draws my heart out. His realness caresses the hurts and the emotions, exposing them and allowing them to breathe, to be acknowledged as real. Maybe this is the beginning of how they may heal.

This man’s soul speak speaks to the shy soul of even the strongest man. He lays himself bare, both the joys and the fears he faces and allows those words to slide out and into a song. They glide so smoothly, so softly, so movingly that I can’t help but feel. I can’t help but look out and see that we are all human. We are all hurting. That we are all living a life that can’t be called completely care-free or always happy.

The tone of his voice, the emotions that saturate his words, along with the rawness that drips from his lips as this powerful melody flows, it covers me and unlocks a part of me I hadn’t even seen before, setting free the bird that had forgotten to soar due to clipped wings.

He speaks not of make-believe or fantasy, but his stories are real, joyful, painful even, revealing the depths of his soul. And this revealing elicits a response from even the most unresponsive. There’s no escaping the music. There’s no avoiding the confrontation you must face, and facing yourself is the scariest thing.

I hear his emotions, I hear him tell the story as if we were there, I hear him reliving those moments, both good and bad, and the heaviness that at times results.