I am the resurrection...

It started and ended with the same line; I am the resurrection and I am the light.

At the closing a club packed tight with sweaty bodies bounced as one and sang the bassline as Tim Burgess grinned at us from behind the decks and played the Stone Roses out to his band's aftershow in Edinburgh. I grinned and welled up with the pure emotion that only comes from a collective sharing of song, the release of music.

At that moment, whether everyone else knew it or not, that heaving, grinning mass was surrounded by love.

But where did it start? With the same song played out to a blissed out baggy crowd in Heaton Park as finally, finally, the Stone Roses gave me the performance I have longed for since I first turned them up loud in the bedroom of my teens. Maybe. 

There was certainly love that night. There was the music, sure, but bigger than that there was the solidarity and friends and strangers finally getting what they wanted from this band. Hearing the soundtrack of their lives all around them. Finding a link to a time and feeling long since past. 

It wasn't the start though. I thought it would be but in fact it was just an all too brief moment in time. A reminder of what it feels like to *feel* and surrender to sound. 

My summer started two weeks before that though; with death.

My mum was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour in February 2010. There was no lead up to it, no suspicion there might be something wrong. One day she was fine, the next she was living on borrowed time. 

That time was finally up, all too soon, on 18 June. The start of my summer. Those words, spoken against a rumble of thunder and a torrential storm, at my mother's funeral.

Those words spoken then, they meant very little to me other than it was time to do something that frightened me, still frightens me now; say goodbye. Those words then were the instruction to do something I knew would hurt me forever. They were no comfort. They made my heart ache and my world tilt, suspend me sickningly, facing a hole in my life where my mother had always been.

When I heard them again, at the end of the summer, that rush of nausea screamed through me leaving only the gaping loss inside of me. But I felt that bass echo in the cavern of the grief, I felt my blood pump with the beat. I looked around and felt the love, the solidarity, the strength, the life...

Back at the start of summer, on a day drained of all colour and washed in nothing but tears those words, read by a man I didn't know from a book I don't believe in, meant little. The meaning was put onto them weeks later at a distance, in song, mainly by strangers.

I am the resurrection and I am the light.

The season changes. Life goes on.