Wearing Out My Voice for Love

I almost missed the song.

That is the part I keep thinking about.

It would have been so easy to let the thought pass through me and keep sitting there. To say, “That’s interesting,” and do nothing. To feel the little tug and ignore it.

But today, I heard the whisper and got up.

The strange thing is, it started with the World Cup.

I am not a sports person. Usually, sports make my eyes cross. But for whatever reason, this year I have actually been watching. Today, while the U.S. and Australia played, I felt something I have not felt in a long time: patriotism without the cringe.

For a moment, red, white, and blue did not feel like a warning label. They did not feel like a weaponized symbol or a line drawn between people. They felt like something people were gathered around. Something to cheer for. Something that, for just a second, made unity feel possible again.

And maybe that is why my dad’s song found me right then.

My father, Doug Midgley, died when I was ten. Before he died, while he was sick with cancer, he gathered and copyrighted an anthology of his songs. I do not always know when each one was written. What I know is that the anthology is his life’s work. A whole body of thought and feeling and music, left behind like a map I keep unfolding in new ways as I get older.

Some of his songs I have heard on old recordings. Some arrived later in a shoebox full of cassette tapes. Some came to me only as lyrics on a page, living more like poems, waiting for me to become old enough to understand what they were trying to say.

Today, one of them called louder than usual.

It is called “Let The Weapons Turn to Trust.”

I have loved that title for a long time, but today it hit me differently. Maybe because the world feels so loud right now. Maybe because fear is everywhere. Maybe because force keeps calling itself protection while everybody pays. Maybe because I had just remembered, through something as simple as a game, that a shared feeling of “us” is still possible.

My dad’s song was already asking the question I often find myself asking: how many lives have weapons already claimed?

Not just in war. In homes. In schools. In streets. In arguments that turn into violence. In fear that turns into policy. In truth sharpened until it cuts. In power that forgets people are not abstractions.

My dad’s original song moved through different kinds of violence: intimate violence, public violence, political violence, and even the question of whether answering violence with more state-sanctioned killing actually heals anything. He was not writing a simple protest slogan. He was looking at a pattern: weapons and punishment keep pretending to solve what they also deepen.

The more I sat with it, the more I realized I was not just responding to one lyric. I was standing downwind in time from concerns my family had already taken seriously.

My dad’s song was one of them.

Another was Dark Circle, the award-winning documentary my aunt Victoria Wiley was part of making. That film looked at the nuclear age and the human and environmental consequences that do not stay neatly contained. It followed the shadow of nuclear production and nuclear power through real places, real bodies, and real communities.

That matters to me because Dark Circle is not only about weapons or technology. It is about aftermath. Fallout. Contamination. The lie that damage can be kept somewhere else.

My dad had a line about the wind blowing to even the score.

Today, I understood that differently.

What we detonate does not stay detached from us. What we bury comes back through the air, the water, the body, the memory. The circle closes whether we admit we are standing inside it or not.

And here we are, decades later.

The concerns were legitimate then. They are legitimate now. Only now, the danger is not just the physical ramification of what humans have built. It is also the divisiveness around how we talk about it. The way fear can become a faith. The way truth can become a weapon. The way loving your country can start to feel complicated when the symbols of belonging keep getting dragged into opposition.

That is what made the World Cup moment matter to me.

It was not the subject of the song. It was the crack of light that let the song in. For a little while, patriotism did not feel like dominance or denial or a fight. It felt like people cheering together. It felt like a reminder that maybe love of country does not have to mean pretending everything is fine. Maybe it can mean wanting us to become worthy of each other.

And then my grandmother’s voice showed up too.

She used to say, “Better to wear out than rust out.”

I have always loved that. It has always felt like body wisdom to me. Keep moving. Keep living. Use what you have while you have it.

But today, inside this song, it became something else:

Let the weapons do the rusting.

Let the people practice trust.

I am not an activist. I am not here pretending I know how to save the world. I still struggle to speak up in ordinary rooms, even when I know I should. I am not standing at the front of anything.

But I will sing.

The waters keep on rising, and I keep singing on the deck. Not because I know the answer. Because I do not want to forget what love sounds like.

That is what felt true today. My job is not to become larger than I am. My job is to bring care and attention to what is actually in my hands, so what I touch can resonate instead of detonate.

Today, what was in my hands was my father’s unfinished song.

So I wrote toward it. With him. For him. From here. From now.

And it felt like happy grief.

That is the best way I know how to say it. Grief is not always only the moment of losing someone. Sometimes grief becomes a way love keeps tugging on the line. You cannot see what is on the other side, but you feel the pull in your heart and know something is there.

Today, the tug felt like music.

It felt like hugging my dad through a song. It felt like collaborating with my pops again. It felt magical and heavy and fun and sacred all at once.

And I almost missed it.

That part keeps humbling me. I could have had the thought and let it float away. Instead, I got up. I opened the anthology. I opened myself. And the song started pouring through.

Maybe some songs are inventions.

This one felt like inheritance becoming action.

The outro now ends:

“Let the weapons do the rusting

Let our voices wear out for love

I still believe in us

I still believe in us

Let the people practice trusting

Let the weapons turn to trust”

That last turn is the whole prayer.

People do the aiming. People do the shooting. People do the ruining. So people are also where the trusting has to begin.

I do not know exactly what this song will become yet. I only know that today it wanted to be made, and I am so glad I got up when it called.

So here I am.

Wearing out my voice for love.