When I was 17, I left home after the first day of school and rode with a friend in his red ’72 Volkswagen bus to Burlington, Vermont.Most of my days were spent hanging out in a park downtown. Every day around sunset I became filled with a sharp emptiness, a rawness. I could feel a hole in my heart that resonated outward so that everything I saw and heard was filled with this void.
One day, as I was sitting on the concrete, I heard a young man in torn-up jeans with long, stringy dreads sing a song, and it changed my life. “One bright morning when my work is over, I’m gonna fly away home. Fly away home to Zion, fly away home.”
Those lyrics rang in my head and soon became the anthem to my journey. I didn’t know why, but I connected with those words on a deep level. As I was hitchhiking around the country with my djembe drum, I was often overtaken by a certain loneliness. I stopped wherever I was and started to play a heartbeat on the drum and proceeded to belt those lyrics from the place inside me that was hurting.
About five years later, as I was becoming religious, I was reading Tehillim. Sure enough, those words were written by King David, the heart of the Jewish people, who often speaks about having a broken heart and connecting to Hashem from that place where you can feel the intensity and rawness of being.
Matisyahu is a highly spiritual reggae singer with a message of unity and hope that resonates with millions of people around the world. www.matisyahuworld.com.
