Long ago in a different time and different place I made a promise that I would move heaven and earth.
That younger man meant all he said and though he may not have understood the full impact of his promise, well he stood by and upheld it.
Danced in the fire, climbed every mountain and swam through every sea because once he grasped the staff and made the vow it was what was required.
But required makes it sound like he didn’t want it and that is not true because he both wanted and chose to do so.
“I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah”
Leonard Cohen
The Conversations We Need To Have
If we are very lucky we find the people who help us understand, recognize and realize that life is meant to be lived and not passed through.
Sometimes we have that one kiss or one conversation that wakes us from a living slumber and stirs our awareness.
It is a rare and precious thing that awareness.
Johnny and June knew it well when they sang about that ring of fire. They understood sometimes the flames can warm your soul and sometimes they can burn your heart.
But you can’t ever tell for certain how it will go or why, at least not from the outside.
Because it is one of those moments you have to experience and unless you walk the line you will never know.
And if you don’t have the guts to walk naked through the valley with that other person you cannot and will not have the conversations we need to have to know.
You won’t be certain if you see a hand reaching for yours or if it is just a figment of your imagination.
That is how you find out if the universe conspired to connect you with another.
And it is how you have the hard conversations where you share the hard stuff you fear to write or say out loud.
Tangled Up In Blue
Got Dylan flowing through my headphones, singing a song he wrote decades before his Nobel Prize was awarded.
I thought you’d never say hello, she said
You look like the silent type
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And everyone of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul
From me to you
Tangled up in blue
There is magic in the music, not just because you can find the story of our lives as they are or were but because they portend how they’ll be.
Might not be this one song or the next but somewhere between the chorus and the scraping sound the pen makes upon the paper as lyrics are written down.
Life is a never ending journey filled with more twists and turns than most of us ever could have imagined.
A day ago if you had played Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door you would have seen my head bobbing along and watched me lay my guns upon the ground.
Might have seen me slumped against the wall and not been able to tell what had gotten the best of me, but would have been certain something had.
And yet not so many hours later that particular storm has passed and somewhere during the calm I rediscovered my fight and some energy to go along with it.
But these are things that are only glossed over and barely mentioned with most because they’re tied into the conversations we must have.
And if they never materialize, well the silence will be deafening and the echoes will remain myths of imagination.
They’ll live in a library of unanswered questions that are locked inside books whose keys cannot be found.
Dylan wrote about this too, singing of other halves and missing pieces that aren’t locked in trying to recreate the past but live in the present and the future.
The Color Of The Dress
Doesn’t matter whether it is a red dress or a blue.
All that matters is the conversation and the great dance. Circle right, circle left or circle each other.
At some point in time or another we are all scared and lonely riders trying to figure out what is wild and what is real.
