I can hear my son’s voice echoing through the house even as he is away on a weekend trip to Alabama with his mother. I swear I hear Ellis’ voice - every now and then an imagined coo, giggle or cry - cutting through the dry air as if he were physically here, and those sounds were actually emanating from his curled, partially agape mouth. I, of course, am hearing things out of nothing, but absence, as they say, makes the heart grow fonder. I do miss the attachment of his presence. And I certainly don’t mind the echoes.

In a not-too surprising admission (at least to those who have newborns), my brain has been reduced to mush for the better part of the four months since Ellis’ birth. If you happen to frequent this website-blog, you no doubt might have noticed my woefully shy attempts at writing at anything resembling a regular pace. Not that I was ever consistent at it before, but rest assured, I am still here and accounted for. Barely. The details of the daytime have grown to be duly predictable. Thankfully, our little dude is establishing a nice little sleep pattern at night, but the daytime is a whole ‘nother deal: he is still comforted only by, and will rest only in, our arms in those hours while the sun is out for its walk across the sky. It is hard to get much of anything done, especially something so cerebral as writing words or songs or chords, with a sleeping or crying baby in your arms. It’s enough to melt one’s brain. Maybe that is a good thing. Goodbye freedom. I hear echoes then as well; those of my former self and all the self-indulgent independence I once possessed, and took for granted, here at the base of my own little wailing wall. Oobla di, oobla da life goes on.

I’ve been in the midst of some sort of career crisis for quite awhile now. Ellis’ arrival has surely exacerbated this little Heart & Brain War of mine, but hopefully for good cause, not bad. I am a stubborn man (just ask my wife), so in a very real way that same “quality” has kept me in the music biz game over the years duking it out to find work, get myself to and from itinerant jobs, do the work, and hopefully get paid for it. Repeat cycle ad nauseum. But in another way perhaps it is to my detriment that I have failed to give up the ghost on the dream (of the pipe variety?) in the nearly-blind, relentless pursuit of a gleefully successful, self-sustaining career that has yet to sustain itself. I’m a sucker for the white picket fence, you see. We singer-songwriters sometimes joke that though we smile at shows, we later cry ourselves to sleep at night. Sometimes that is mentioned in jest, others not at all. Though it sucks to have to scrape by every month, it is far, far worse to be unloved and/or homeless. Unloved and homeless, I am surely not, and for that I am grateful beyond language. I’m not telling you all this to enlist your sympathy nor am I begging for compliments or encouragement here. I write this to get these things off my chest because what I ultimately want is to hear those same reverberating echoes… of life, of God and his brilliant voice in my soul, of a hint as to what the pursuit of truth and happiness looks like from day to day, of faith in creation, of faith in humanity, and hope to sustain me from now till darkness. I am no psychologist, but I suspect that we all, in some measure, wish for these same things at some point or another. After all, life is full of faith and darkness.

Like a child’s voice echoing throughout a still house, perhaps the truth that absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder is revelatory of our ultimate desire to be sought, found and known in this post-Jacobian world where God seems just as much a mystery to us as mystery itself can be a god. We wrestle with, and yell out, words across, and at, the Great Expanse in hopes of hearing them bound back effortlessly across the stringent madness of our lives, bearing on the echoing wind something far greater than our original puny words: belief in spite of all the unbelief, hope for a better tomorrow, grace to fill, lead and change us, perseverance to put up a good fight, and wisdom to recognize reality when she is standing on the street corner wailing aloud. Welcome the echoes.