Dominion
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There are very few places in this world I feel more at home than when I am singing and playing music on a stage. I wasn’t always that way. I used to be far too terrified to sing, even for close friends or family. I was paralyzed, not with mere stage fright, but really, with a fear of even being HEARD singing.
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Six years ago, a pair of 21-year old musicians moved in next door to the Treehouse. They stayed about a year. They heard me practicing behind my closed door, and worked hard to convince me to jam with them. Months later, insisting the boys accompany me on stage, I decided it was time to perform at an open mike night.
We called ourselves the Porcupine Rebels.
My legs shook. Every part of me was vibrating with fear, but my legs – I was pretty sure everyone could see them shake. Still, something happened to me, when I strapped on my guitar and stepped up there. Without hesitation, I put my lips to the mike and began to sing. And I knew in that instant that I was not only a songwriter, I was also a performer. These were MY songs, and that’s what I was there to do – bring them to the audience with every part of Me that went into them. After all, nobody would ever hear them if I didn’t sing them. So I did. I shook and I sang and I meant it.
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I immediately understood, that very first time. The stage was my Dominion, my Domain, my Domicile. Yeah, I was scared, and I think it was three or four nights of open mikes before my legs stopped shaking. But after that first time, it didn’t MATTER if my legs shook. I was on a mission to sing like I meant it. And after that, any time I could open up my mouth and sing into a microphone, the stage became the most comfortable place in the world to be. It was a place I felt at home.
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“Home” is not so much a place as it is a place inside of us. The Treehouse is my home, and I love it, just as I love that feeling of being at home on stage. But “home,” that safe, inner sanctuary from the world, comes from who we really are within ourselves, whatever that is: the soul, the brain, the consciousness.
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This is a glass transformer insulator. It lives in the Treehouse. The word on it reads: DOMINION. I keep it because it reminds me of so much.
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I like the word “Dominion.” It is weighty. It implies a kind of ownership. Finding that feeling of home inside, of Dominion, really comes from owning our own lives. It means letting go of our fears and being who we are inside, right here, right now, right where we are. It means living the lives we are living, in whatever space we in, whether it is the room we claim as our own or the place in front of the microphone.
We all have the power of Dominion; we only have to claim it for ourselves.
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Dodie Goldney
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