Back to Massachusetts
There is a beautiful song by the early Bee Gees with this title. And I find myself humming it a good bit now that it seems to be a theme song for me. As I downshift into the slow lane for a moment, I confess I have a blessed, green yard here back in Massachusetts. (That is something I couldn’t enjoy in New York City.) I have relatively quiet days and turkeys on my lawn. My partner and I fill feeders with sunflower seed at “the giving tree” and watch species after species thrive from our quiet, humane support of the local ecosystem. (This is so much better than T.V., which I haven’t watched in months? years?) We silently stare out the living room window in right-brain, dream-stupor and feel a sense of Thoreau-bliss-connection to the Universe. I’m getting closer to my creativity this way, you see. One must be a dreamer to find one’s inner truths.
On inner truth: I combed through old journals yesterday, as I struggled to find any entries I had on Carter (I will perform at his wake…chalk this up as a new performance experience…one I know will become all the more common). I wanted to feel my younger self, my life impressions of Carter all those years. I could see how repressed and volcanic I was in my early 20’s when I was impatiently craving for my career to start; as I waitressed, sang functions and weddings. Tough stuff. Reading the diaries I watched an arc of my life unfold. There were so few entries in the grueling touring years, when I awoke in a new city nearly every day. But a sense of peace settled into the prose as I went about my life. Turbulence arose again during the unhappy years of my brief marriage. But yet, the voice in the text was grounded, asking the right questions, fueled by a deeper sense of self-love than she of my 20’s. What I could see, before my eyes in my scratchy penmanship, was that indeed, life does get better with age. There is a knowing, a falling away of bullshit when the inner voice of self-confident street-smarts speaks up as soul armor. There is a tiger defending one’s young. There is a purpose in small things, like waking up at 6:30am to make the coffee and get the day going. There is meaning in the perfunctory details that sometimes otherwise depress. These details are the fuel to an engine of a life. A life which (God willing) may elevate other life. And if I find any point at all to living, it is just that.
Or as Henry David Thoreau says, “Be not simply good - be good for something.”
