How can I keep from singing?

I have to ask this question because I don’t know if I’m normal.

Am I the only person who can literally feel music in my bloodstream? I mean, does anyone else actually start to quiver in their stomach, and feel tingles shoot up and down their arms, and course up the spine to the top of their head?

Lately, I have been bathed and draped in music, from the top of my head to the tips of my fingers. I swim in sound. Sometimes at night in my apartment, I have had to push back the furniture in my living room and dance. I am so moved – physically moved – by music, that I’m flushed simply from listening.

It has been awhile since I have sung, or have wanted to sing, as much as I have in the past few weeks in Klaipeda. There doesn’t seem to be any other way to let out all the different sensations running through me. I walk around town with my hands open and lifted a little out from my sides - conducting, praising. My feet want to propel me up into the air.

Some days I am singing those wrenching Jennifer Knapp songs about surrender and holiness and brokenness and faith. Other days I am drenched in Bach cantatas, and pulsing with counterpoint. Some days, I am flush with praise songs or with the words of old hymns. Or Handel’s Messiah: “Lift up your heads, o ye Gates, be ye lifted up ye everlasting Doors;” “Blessing and glory and honor and power be unto Him!”

I think I will fly apart, by pieces. How can I keep from singing? Saturday night on the bus home from our staff excursion to Kaunas, another teacher and I sang hymns together for almost an hour, taking turns choosing which to sing and then singing as many verses as we could remember. I had no idea how deeply imbedded those songs are in me. They are still there, those words and melodies from years and years ago. And now I will remember that singing, late at night in the bus, driving into the foggy dark, for years to come.

I know I sound like an emotional basket case, for better or worse, but really I just think I am giving myself permission to live – to be alive at the level that I always desire to be, where everything touches and intersects everything else. Where there is no separation between my skin and the world outside. Poets try to live like this, and usually kill themselves trying. And in the effort to let so much in, there is always the possibility of pain.

So be it.