In the Cleveland airport, there are many tributes and displays for the rock and roll hall of fame. I reflect on an inductee who’d passed yesterday, Leonard Cohen, as I dig my iPod out of my bag to listen to his songs, now unexpectedly amplifying and deepening the spirituality of the moment. I am not a religious person, but on this Sunday morning, it seems more like the the church I carry with me wherever I go.

The flight is languorous in the early morning light as songs waft through my headphones in his poet’s voice, and the emotion of the last few days reaches a head as the clouds drift indifferently by. Fittingly, I’m leaving a conference on music therapy; fading to black, I’m disconnected from the plane lost in my own therapeutic dimension of song and voice. Alone, but connected to a humanity past, present, and future, for those who care to follow.

The sun is high when I reach my driveway, unloading my bags with a sense of catharsis. This is what art and song do, they find us, they reach us, they change us- and they better us. Hallelujah.