On my previous blogs, I have often posted about music and even reviewed albums (primarily albums from my collection). When I began ClimbingSky here in June 2024, I considered subtitling it, “Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead Matter.”

Officially, this month, I will be doing just that. I will simply begin including music as a regular part of ClimbingSky.

While I feel very at home and comfortable writing about Baseball, Books, and Poetry, I do not have the same level of comfort when it comes to Music. Though there is Music that I love and consider as essential to my life as Baseball, Books, and Poetry, my relationship with Music has always been complicated.

Born as I was with a hearing issue and a condition I much later learned was called Central Auditory Processing Disorder, I found out early on that what I actually hear is often quite different from what others hear. In big ways and small, it has impacted my life. I needed 8 years of speech therapy for people to fully understand me. In high school French class, I got an A on any written exam and an F in any oral one. In music sadly, it meant an inability to follow a beat, match a pitch, sing, or learn to play an instrument.

But having said that, listening to Music has always been something I find essential. Doubtless it is the lyrical, emotional, spiritual quality of Music that I resonate to. For that is what I respond to in Poetry., Both Poetry and Music help us to process and explore our feelings in a way that is both spiritual and transcendent.

So what that means is that when I review and talk about music here at ClimbingSky it will not be as a musicologist or an instrumentalist or a musically trained writer. It will simply be as a poet and a man trying his darnedest to understand how music conveys the Beauty that I so desperately need.