The Seven Songs
Guardians of the Forgotten Hues of Feeling

When I began writing Blush Born, I did not want Jethran to find fallen gods in the forest who gave him magical lessons to make everything automatically right. Real healing is not an overnight thing. It did not work that way for me, and I did not want it to work that way for him. Instead, I built the Seven Songs from the DNA of my own life. I used the people who shaped me and forged them into the personification of the emotional lessons I had to learn.

Oddly, when I wrote my memoir none of these people were in it. Because I wrote it focused on myself and my journey. However, when writing the Shards of Color Trilogy, when I translated the different chapters of my memoir, Shards of Hope, it made the most sense to transmute the lessons into embodied archetypes. It is the grueling psychological work required to survive, cast as the restorative keepers of the secret hues of emotion.

Through this process I learned where I received the principles and understandings that I have about the world and about my emotions. I found the points of inspiration that had been with me all along. It's what's been beautiful about writing this fantasy story because when I wrote the true story of my life I found parts of fragments. Well… I found the shards. Whenever I started placing those broken pieces back together, that's when I found the whole picture. In doing so, I found myself more easily on the pages of this fairy tale than I did in the pages of my own story.

I use a specific set of emotions and concepts to define Jethran's growth throughout the story. Each of these emotions is also tied to specific elements. Because I wanted the story to be unique, I created a world with things that are completely different from what we have in the real world. There is a list of seven colors, seven emotions, and seven elements which all correspond with and complement each other. As you'll see below, they align with the physics of Evenhere, but not even here.

This is the color indigo. It aligns with the emotion of Embrace and the element of Flame.

While fire in this world is actually blue, the elemental flames are purple. Additionally, anything that is red in the real world has been inverted to purple in this world, including blood, apples, poppies, to name a few.

When I was a kid, I thought my meemaw was unstoppable. Thanks to Sheldon Cooper, most of the world is now familiar with what a meemaw is. However, if you are not, it's what we in the South call our grandmothers. Well, mine had a strength and a way about herself that commanded every room. She could create anything. I remember her teaching me how to take a simple ribbon and turn it into an opulent bow that I still know how to make today. She had cake recipes that won blue ribbons and Best in show at the Mid-South Fair in Memphis, which was a big deal. People would buy her cakes at the holidays, and her church would sell her specific spaghetti gravy for fundraisers twice a year. She used to share stories with us about her entire life. Some of them were fantastic and some were tragic.

Her father died when she was three years old, her mother took her younger brother and her younger sister who was only a few months old at the time and moved in with their aunt. Then the aunt's husband died. Now these two young women in their twenties, in the 1930's, were on their own with six children between them and no men, no education, no money, and no homes. They moved into an abandoned train car where they lived for nearly a year. As the story goes, they would bring men back to this train car to entertain them for money in order to feed their children. One day one of them brought back a man and his brother. When those two men saw these women living in this way with these children, they married them and they took on raising their children and supporting them. My meemaw's brother always said that those men saved their lives and that they were grateful for them. They may have. Meemaw did not see it that way. She was hurting over the loss of her dad and she hated the man who married her mother. She was only allowed to go to school until the age of 3 years old and then she had to begin working in the fields picking cotton to help support their family. She had to raise her little brother and sister on her own, while her mother raised the new children that came from this new husband. When she was told that her stepfather wanted to adopt her, her sister and her brother, she refused stating that he would never be her father. While I'm not sure if she was aware of this or not, I discovered after she passed away that legally he did adopt her. I do know that she always believed that her father's name was William because everyone called him Bud, and because her brother was called Buddy Junior, even though his name was William. So she thought that meant that her brother was named after her father. I also discovered after she passed away that her father's name was actually Henry. I know that she never knew that.

As an adult, I look back on her stories and her life, and I see a woman who overcame unbelievable hardships. I see a woman who went through an onslaught of adversity all before the age of five and never healed from it.

For that reason, I based the character of Crezwil on her, because her last name was Criswell. This character is about recognizing your wounds, appreciating them, and loving the person beneath them so that you can finally address and heal them. Because she never got to do that. I wrote the emotion that this character represents to be the emotion of Embrace because when I think about her, the first thing I think about is the embrace that she lived as and represented in my life.

Of course, embracing our wounds and allowing ourselves to heal from them through acceptance is easier said than done. It takes Jethran three books and twenty years before he finally applies this lesson fully. I wanted to convey that healing is not a straight line. Crezwil represents Radical Acceptance. This is often one of the first things we are taught when we start seeking out ways to heal. For many people, it is also just the slow, decades-long process of looking at a scar and finally seeing a foundation instead of a failure. Seeing it as the story of the day we refused to die.

This is the color Cobalt. It aligns with the emotion of Stillness and the element of Void. Anything that is orange in the real world is blue in this world like pumpkins, tangerines, and lilies.

This Song is based on my other grandmother, Mary Alice, though her family called her Muralis.

This is a woman who utilized Cognitive Avoidance as a way of life. She came from the school of thought that believed if you do not talk about it, it does not exist. I learned recently, while back home visiting my family as my father was in hospice, that this is the foundational pillar upon which my family has been built. My father sat upon his deathbed and proclaimed that he wasn't dying. When doctors told him these diagnoses, which he referred to as bad stories, he just refused to accept it.

He said that as long as you just accept that everything is fine and believe everything will work out, it will. He passed away roughly thirty days after he said that.

It's important to me personally that I state that I have no idea who that man was. Because my father who raised me had no concept of looking at the positive side of things, because when he looked at me he could only focus on the negatives. I'm proud of him for finally growing to a point of only seeing the good in things, for the last month that he was on Earth.

While it may seem as if it could be an unhealthy thought to disconnect from reality for a while to silence everything, I realized that at times we do have to dissociate from the pain and the suffering that is happening to us so that we can simply survive it. I also know that it can become a trap. It can leave us in a position where we aren't prepared for things if we ignore them for too long. It can also leave our families surprised and shocked when they realize that we were sicker than they thought we were or that money was not just tight, but gone and we can't afford anything.

The Cobalt Mist of Muralis offers a direct conversation about Harm Reduction and the Dissociative Defense.

It is the mercy of silence when the world is too loud. This is starkly different from peace. The concepts that this represents do not offer peace. They do simply offer quiet. It is important to note that those things are not the same. Quiet is empty and devoid of sound. True peace contains multitudes and can be quite loud.

In my life, after living through such severity as childhood sexual assault, trafficking, an emotionally disconnected father, being queer in a time and place where that was a reason to fear for your life, I found that the only way to silence the gnawing pain inside me was through substance abuse. It was a coping mechanism, not that dissimilar from the coping mechanism of dissociative defense. Like any coping mechanism, it can be a trap or it can be a salvation.

The Mist is the temporary numbness that keeps Jethran from being consumed by the fires of his agony, staying alive and functional so that the deeper work of recovery can eventually begin. When he lingers in that numbness for too long, he begins to lose himself and to lose touch with where he's going, where he's been and what he's doing. He vows many times to stop and put it down and to never reach for that mist again. At one point, he tries to stop and finds himself in the middle of a literal lion's den.

Though he finds the temptation to lean on it is too great and once it's inside him, it's something that he begins to lean on and continues to lean on for the rest of his life. But he learns to control the urge and to only use it when necessary.

Aureolin is the color that aligns with the emotion of Transcendence and the element of Seed. Anything that would be green in the real world shows up as yellow in this world. This includes things like the grass, leaves, and sometimes parrots. Although parrots can be orange or yellow because in the real world sometimes they're blue or green.

This lesson is about distinguishing between the Righteous Rage against injustice that is necessary for change and the Destructive Anger that stops us from growing and destroys everything good.

I based this character on my grandfather, who was known by his friends and family as Rabbi. My meemaw called him Rabb. As his grandsons, myself and my cousin would refer to him by that name and he said that if we're going to call him that we're going to call him Mr. Rabbi. And lovingly, we did.

Mr. Rabbi, was one of the kindest and funniest men I have ever met. I never once saw him angry. He never raised his voice or his hand to us, and I imagine that he had to swallow quite a lot of anger to maintain that gentleness. I also imagine that he needed a bit of discernment as to when to apply what type of anger to any given situation and how to apply it fairly.

We are told so often that anger is bad or is considered to be a negative emotion, but as the Buddha suggested, our reaction to emotions is what is positive or negative. No emotion itself can actually be negative. Anger has its place. True strength is the ability to rise above the clouds and find a way to make that anger useful.

Righteous rage is vital in this world. It's what fuels activists and advocates to fight for the cause that they fight for. It's what wins movements against injustice. Righteous rage is what we utilize when we defend ourselves against the wrongs happening to us or in front of us. Without it injustice wins. It is a cleansing storm that cleans our streets and our air.

The destructive anger however is a torrential downpour of emotions that is misdirected and ill informed. It is the anger that is based in the reaction to a feeling instead of based in the response to an action. This type of anger is a catastrophic force that can destroy our home, our lives, and leaves nothing in its wake. If we aren't able in our lives to find the ways to distinguish between these two types of anger we will lose everything. We have to take that destructive anger and swallow it and learn to channel it in other ways focusing on where it belongs or letting it go.

This is why in the story Jethran must learn how to actually swallow the storms. It isn't for him to hold on to them and to keep that anger inside of himself, it's so that he can keep his anger focused and presented properly.

Crimson is the color that aligns with the emotion of Memory and the element of Self. Anything that would be purple in the real world is red in this world such as eggplants, violets, lavender. Which can be confusing when you're reading about the fields of crimson lavender. Which is why it's one of my favorite things to use in the story, plus lavender is one of my favorite things to use in life.

Elba is the Great Weaver. The Gray world of the city stays in power by erasing the past, but Elba teaches Jethran that self-mastery is impossible without knowing who you came from. I based this character on my meemaw as well, but I made her the Song of Memory because she died of Alzheimer's. This pillar of strength, who told us all these stories from her life, ended up in her final days not knowing who she was or where she came from. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever witnessed, watching her slowly slip away into that shell. It is still and will always be one of the most difficult things I've ever lived through.

Making her the personification of history is my way of honoring her and anyone who has been lost to that horrible fading. She hums her song. And although there are words and Jethran has heard the words of her song, when he asks her if she's humming the song because she's forgotten the words, she gets very angry at him. She has a moment where she basically puts him on blast for trying to convince her that there are words to the song. In real life, my meemaw hummed constantly. I don't know if there ever were actually ever words to the song she was humming or if it was just the song in her heart. But one day years before Alzheimer's was even a thing in our lives, I asked her if the reason why she was humming was because she forgot the words. She did not appreciate that line of questioning. Not even a little bit. When Jethran mentions Rabb, she gets excited and talks about how much she misses him. When Jethran responds to her about him, she has already forgotten who they were talking about. Some who have read this portion of the story say that this forgetfulness goes on for a bit too long. That may be true however the reason for that is that it was important to me that it mirrors the experience of Alzheimer's. Because it's frustrating and it's really annoying. That is okay to admit.

On the day of her husband's funeral, I remember her asking my uncle where we were all getting ready to go. He told her Rabbi's funeral and she said, "Well, I wish you wouldn't have told me that." And then 2 minutes later she asked him again and he told her and she said that she wishes he wouldn't have told her that. He looked at her and he said "Well, I wish that you would quit asking me." She did not stop asking him. We had to leave for the funeral early because she would stop asking once we got there.

In the story, Jethran realizes she is the person who wove the blanket his mother wrapped around him when he was a baby. My meemaw made my blanket that my mom wrapped me up in when I was a baby and I still have that blanket today. Through Elba, he sees a vision of his world's entire history and future. He sees events from the next twenty years of his life that will only make sense once he has lived them. Some of what she shows him takes twenty years of his life for him to realize. She allows his past to inform his present so that he can guide his future. In order to do this, he has to trust himself and to understand that his memories are his and his alone and truly are the only things that cannot be taken from him.

Vermilion is the color that aligns with the emotion of Acceptance and the element of Wave. Anything that would be blue in the real world is orange in this world. This includes the sky, water, and blueberries which are ironically called orangeberries.

This character is based on my other grandfather. I called him grandaddy. My cousins however started referring to him one day as HunGun. That name stuck for the rest of his life. This was a man who distinctly made his own choices in life and chose to live the exact life he wanted without apology or regret.

He was once upon a time married to my wife. He apparently married one other lady but no one knows who that was cuz it did not last very long at all. He lived in what could only be described as a shack in the boonies. It was a bunch of tin and aluminum held together in such a small trailer that I don't even think it would have been considered a single wide. There were holes in it, in the floor, holes in the ceiling, and he would just cover them up with boards. The snakes would get in his house all the time and he'd pick him up and throw them out the door quoting the Bible as he did it.

He was also one of the funniest people I've ever met in my entire life and he was arguably the most satisfied and humble person I have ever met. Both of my grandfathers were the ideal examples of what a man should be. They were kind, gentle, caring and loving. They were funny and they were firm. They weren't angry or full of something to prove. They knew who they were and they lived as who they were. When I was choosing my path and my direction in life and how I wanted to be and who I wanted to be seen as, I did my best, I wasn't always successful but I did my best to model myself after them because in my opinion they were the best examples I had of what it meant to really be a man.

Throughout our lives, we become many different versions of ourselves. Throughout this process of natural evolution, we find ourselves having these thoughts of what if and what could have been. If we are not mindful of this, we can completely unravel ourselves with those thoughts. I realized that in order to grow and heal, to become who we are meant to be, we must mourn three distinct versions of ourselves.

There is the version of ourselves who others wanted us to be, like our parents or people who had visions of who we were supposed to become for them. Then there is the version of ourselves that society expected of us. For me, that would be the straight cisgender version, the complacent and compliant version. The quiet and malleable version. And then the hardest one is the version of ourselves who we wanted to be. The version who did not live through the agony. The version who made better choices.

HunGun allows Jethran to take a journey into a mirror that shows him all of the different versions he never got to be. He sees all these different lives and is able to witness how his life would have been. He's shown these versions while they're in their good days and showing these happier versions and happier lives where things were different, what he's not shown is the misery that exists in those lives as well or the successes that he received that were built upon the harming of others. Jethran eventually chooses to mourn those alternate lives and go forward. Afterward, he is given the option to choose one of those other lives that he's always wanted and he would be able to live out that life as if nothing ever happened. He chooses to live the life that he has. In doing so, it subverts the chosen one trope, as he made an active choice to live the life that he was given. Also, he chooses the life he has because in all of the other lives that he was shown he did not see Fable in any of those lives. He chooses his life because he chooses Fable. He goes on later to actually name Fable as his Chosen Water but that aspect of the story is an entirely different essay that will be dropping soon.

Celadon is the color that aligns with the emotion of Grace and the element of Wind. Everything in the real world that would be the color yellow is green in this world. This includes things like the sun, canaries, and bananas.

Midgelle is a character who creates her own source of light. Because of that, people come from far away to ask her for her skin so that they can experience the light. She takes patches of her skin and gives them to these people. Her skin grows back in patches of different hues of green. This serves as a roadmap of her journey. Each patch of skin that grows back is brighter than it was before.

She teaches Jethran that it is not our responsibility to give from ourselves so much that we end up giving too much of what we need. She teaches him about forgiveness. Not forgiveness for the oppressor or for the abusers, but forgiveness for ourselves for the blame that we carry for the things we have survived. So often in life, we are taught that forgiveness is something required for us to grow or heal. There is a globally accepted societal gaslighting that takes place where survivors are held responsible for providing forgiveness to people who are not even seeking it. It is just another form of victimization to guilt survivors into feeling the need to forgive someone. The reality is that the amount of self-blame that takes place when a person is a victim of abuse is too often ignored. It is not our responsibility to forgive the people who have hurt us. Withholding that forgiveness isn't even a thing. It simply is denying something that somebody doesn't even want in the first place.

Kesha explores this exact emotional boundary in her song "Praying" by focusing on the reality that survivors are completely free from offering absolution. She emphasizes leaving the weight of forgiveness to a higher power. I truly and fully believe that. It seems hypocritical to expect people to forgive us for our wrongdoings while we are simultaneously denying forgiveness to others. When people say that, they're saying that we are expected to forgive abusers for acts beyond our human capacity to absolve if we expect to be forgiven for our things. What Kesha says is that you do reap what you sow in life, and I am perfectly okay withholding forgiveness and possibly being denied forgiveness as a result of that, because some acts are beyond my realm of forgiveness. It was specifically the song that I believe was the catalyst for my realization but I don't have to forgive people if they're not deserving of forgiveness whether they ask for it or not. But sometimes just like in Jethran's case with Martier, forgiveness was being sought, but it wasn't a forgiveness that deserved to be given because it wasn't even a forgiveness that understood what was done wrong.

This character is based on my friend Tammy Green Mitchell. She wrote an amazing book called Living Without Skin Everything I Didn't Know About Fierce Vulnerability available on Amazon. Her story and the things I know of her directly inspired this character. The guidance that she has given me has been immeasurable throughout the years that I've known her. So much so in fact that recently when she and I were texting, she unintentionally gave me advice that was nearly identical to the character description that I was using for Midgelle on my website which I had shared with her in the previous message and as I was reading her response she messaged me back to say that she just read my website and her character playing it against the message she had just sent me which was just a perfect moment.

The final song to discuss would be the Rainbow King. If I'm being completely honest, he is the character who was the initial inspiration for the entire premise of the book. The Rainbow King himself is meant originally to signify myself somewhat as I came out on the other side of recovery and healing. In the way that each of the seven songs represents a different emotional lesson that had to be learned, it all culminates into the Rainbow King who is representative of the integrated self and the version of Jethran who made it to the other side.

He eventually evolved into the older version of Jethran representing the hope of a fully integrated Jethran. He is now the personification of totality which is the exact magic type of Jethran's power. Jethran has this innate magic that is truly the magic of totality. This is a principle and concept taught in the psychological work of Carl Jung who actually teaches archetypal psychology. It's through his teachings that we learn to integrate all the different archetypes of the human psyche in order to reach what's known as individuation.

Jethran's journey is how he finds within himself a Living Pulse. This is the heartbeat that bridges the different cultures of magic and drives him forward.

For some of these lessons, Jethran's Journey takes twenty years to complete. While some of them he is able to apply to his life immediately. Regardless of when he does it, by embracing these songs, he stops being the flaw and becomes a connection between the ancient past and vibrant future.

It's only after he restores all of the colors to his world and returns all of the emotions to his people, that he's able to rise up and free his people from tyranny. He doesn't need a sword. He doesn't require destruction or violence. His power is found in emotional intelligence and his strength in radical vulnerability.

Jethran is unique because he is a male fantasy lead character who cries because he's sad. He screams because he's in pain. He complains because it's not fair. He continues because it's what's right.