Amazing Grace

Everyone has heard Amazing Grace. Except very few of you really have. Have you sat on rain dampened bleachers with the sun setting behind your back and low dark clouds rolling in at your face? Have you looked down at nearly two hundred pipers, and another hundred drummers standing utterly still below you as the wind lifts and ripples a rainbow of tartan.

Hundreds of people sit huddled around you, all silent, all waiting. The wind comes up behind, running shivering fingers up your spine as the first notes rise over the field. A lone piper breaks the hush. Close your eyes let the gentle prayer of those notes settle into your ears. And wait. There, at the end of the first verse it begins. Low in your bones a rumble like thunder on the horizon. The drums, bass and tenor, deep as the foundations of the earth. And then it hits you, a wall of sound. Two hundred pipes crying in unison. You do not hear the music now, you feel it. You taste it. You breath it. It fills your lungs, your ears, your chest. It drowns out thought. There is only the music. Only the unison prayer of a thousand souls.

You cannot describe that moment, you cannot record it. Listen and know you hear only a shadow...