There was so much going on, and so much to take in as a child in that room. The smell of drying hide, the music in the background, and the soft voice of the lady that I could barely hear. But what I still remember the most was the drum that I received and the red, black, and white hummingbird that embellished it. The handle was rough, and my wrist would hurt if I held onto it and played for too long. I still played to my heart's content. As I got older the hummingbird drum retired to the wall of my room, but there was still the connection. I still remember how I felt playing the drum and how I felt with the drum in my hands.
My first day at work came with a lot of criticism: I talked too fast, my cadence was off, my research could be better. Embarrassment gets to a point where it becomes paralyzing, especially to the voice. After what felt like thousands of blunders and tongue twisters, I finished the recording and got up from the mic. My boss looked at me and said, “Good job, I’ll see you Wednesday.” After all the critics, the takes, and the mess ups, he didn’t seem to bat an eye. I had been so confident in my embarrassment that I ignored he had been focused on his own work as well. He may have heard my messy takes, but to him it was insignificant.
As many do, I had always hated my voice when I heard it in recordings, ever since I was a kid. Everything always sounded different in my head. What I wanted to say and what came out, what I wanted to express and how others interpreted my expressionism. When I would interview artists, they all always had some way to deal with people's skewed interpretations of their expression; some concluded that they don’t care what others think of their art, some made leaps to have themselves understood. Some took the interview time to explain each stroke of their painting and others sliced my questions in half. They still all shared the battle. Expressing themselves in a way that others can understand.
I’ve always liked flowers, but not as much as my sister. I remember her talking about them when I was younger, explaining the process of how they grow, the magic they perform daily, their artistic nature. If she were to talk with a hummingbird, they would have a lot in common. The hummingbird may talk about the flowers it likes best, the ones it loves to repopulate across the grass, my sister may talk about the flowers that she likes to replant on our deck. The hummingbird may talk my sister’s ear off about the sweetness of different flowers nectars. My sister may respond how she likes the flowers for their beauty. The hummingbird would also like flowers for their beauty, but the beauty the hummingbird receives is something tangible. The beauty my sister receives from a flower is only useful to her mind and eyes. I remember an artist ironically commenting on her painting saying, “a picture paints a thousand words, right!” Looking back on my feeling of me in the room as a child, the idealistic view I had of the hummingbird that lay on the drum, the view the neighbors had of me as I play the drum to my heart's content, I see that the clique phrase is not praising pictures or paintings but emphasizing the humans struggle to communicate effectively through our words. The reason why Dostoevsky felt the need to make every sentence he wrote be a compound one describing the floors of the old lady’s house. The reason why even after fights and debates, there is still always more to be said.
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