After nine years bringing up our kids in Saint Paul Minnesota, Nathan and I have moved back to Loveland Colorado, this time as empty-nesters in a downtown fourth-floor one-bedroom apartment looking out at the mountains. (Here’s an old blog post – and another song – about the first time we moved here: https://juliabloom.org/2013/07/26/this-town/) I set up a studio nook in the corner of our bedroom and this video is the first thing I’ve created here.

I wrote this song in August in Saint Paul, when we were living in the waiting room of will we or won’t we make this move. So many good things and people were right there and then in my present life, but my mind kept trying to fly away west into the new life it was imagining. Yet my old soul knows that the good life is always the one I’m in the middle of, not the one I’m dreaming of; and that all in good time, one way or another, my right-now-here-today life will change and then my mind will find itself yearning back into memories of the very time and place it now wishes to leave.

I could stay in Minnesota
go see the mountains now and then
let the decades come and go till
I'm finally moving on again

If I go back to Colorado
I won't be any happier
if I keep living for tomorrow
wishing my life away right here

It's a fine new day
for getting out of my head
I'm going to find a way
to live before I'm dead

We're all pilgrims on a journey
chasing or running from our ghosts
hungry dreams and gnawing worries
stubbornly stationed at their posts

Nobody has it all together
nobody gets everything right
nobody gets to live forever
but everybody gets a life