This is a song I’ve been wanting to write for a while now. I think the desire started about the time I realized the Trump campaign, with its hatefulness toward immigrants and others, was no joke. And it’s only grown during his presidency, which has sadly, ill-advisedly, continued that tone.
While Uncle Sam points gruffly out from posters declaring “I want you!” to the fittest and finest, another American symbol, the “mighty woman with a torch,” invites the least and the last. Like my own mother, she’s confident that she can always come up with enough for anyone who shows up at her door – and that her home will be enriched by every person she welcomes into it.
Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty, provided the lyrics for my song this week, the third week of #songaweek2018. The images in the video are all public domain or creative commons licensed, with attributions noted in the video description in case you’d like to take a closer look or see more from any of the artists or photographers.
Enjoy this video. Take a look at America the beautiful.
This May my love and I will be celebrating our twentieth anniversary. I can still remember that feeling of terror mixed with hope the day before our wedding. Like running towards a cliff, knowing I’m going to have to jump. I read this week that Ray Bradbury once said, “go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.” That’s a fitting description of marriage, I think.
My song for week two of #songaweek2018 reflects on my own marriage and any long-term committed relationship. I feel I must say upfront, this is a song, using metaphor, to describe the ups and downs of love. When I say “love is prison, love is refuge, trap and sanctuary,” I am not condoning abuse, or for that matter, the expectation that my partner will provide me with refuge and sanctuary.
It’s not the people in the relationship who create prison or refuge for one another – it’s love itself. Anytime you commit yourself to another person in love, you are likely to at some time feel at least a little trapped – not by the person, but by your commitment to them. And other times – and often even at the same time – that commitment is a sweet refuge.
I sang in the stairwell for the acoustic effect. Words are below the video.
I could only stay away for a year, I guess. Writing a song a week in 2016 was one of the highlights of my writing life, and now that we’re settled in our new digs in St. Paul, I decided to join again in 2018.
So without further ado, here’s the first song. (There’s a lag because we write and record and submit our songs in the current week, and then they are released the Sunday after that week. So this was my song for the first week, and I’m finally getting around to sharing it on my blog halfway through the second week! Week two’s song is written and I plan to record it tomorrow, and will shoot to post it here earlier next week.)
Okay I guess that was some further ado. *Now* here’s the first song:
It’s cold outside under old gray skies
and the oak leaves rustle alone
but I feel like smiling
I’m walking with my baby in the snowlit morning
and the lacy flakes drifting down
and I feel like singing
So I’m gonna sing
I’m gonna sing
The wind is severe with a serious chill
And the ice is hard underfoot
but I feel like laughing
cause after forty winters I’ve learned a few things
about dressing for the occasion
and I feel like dancing
so I’m gonna dance
I’m gonna dance
the sun’s going down but it’ll come back around
the light’s fading fast but not even that can last
be still be moved be part of this great whole
in space and time we’re breathing in
why don’t we sing? why don’t we dance?
life is a fleeting thing, might as well take a chance
November 2017 has been hard on some people in my life, and many more I don’t know. My beloved Uncle Bill died, leaving my dad the only surviving member of his immediate family. A few days later my sixth grade teacher who was also my friend’s dad died. And just last night I heard the news that another friend lost her mother. All of this as the world around me died too; leaves crumbling to dust, humans gathered for prayer in churches and mosques destroyed by guns and bombs aimed by other humans.
I wrote this song in the midst of all that loss, all that death. Which is why, I’m sure, the song insisted on quoting the Song of Songs, “love is as strong as death.” I’m going to keep believing that, and aiming to live like it’s true.
Night falls in the city
All the little creatures scurry home to bed
I’m out on the sidewalk
Rehearsing all my hopes in humankindness
Cold November comes again
I hold my candle in the wind and feel everything breathe
Trees lean over houses
Stripped and swaying in diminishing dreams
I’m barely believing
Keeping life like mindless habit
Old November sighs and moans
I drone a lullaby for wonder joy and innocence
Take heart, my soul, my mind
Take courage armed with love
For love is as strong as death, (as death) as death
I set out to comment on this post by Thom Ingram, and realized instead that his writing had inspired more than just a comment. I’m not going to rehash his post; just read it for yourself because it’s a beautiful mindful struggle with the meaning of life.
I haven’t studied – or even read – multiple spiritual texts as Thom has – but I have this sense that in addition to the commonalities across texts that he mentions, there is also a shared thread of being fully present in the here and now; of living compassionately and empathetically towards myself and all others. And I think that is actually based on – and counterweight to – the commonalities he does bring up – that there is more than we know or sense, that we are more than we know or sense, that so much of what we think we are apprehending is not by a long shot the last word or the ultimate reality.
For me the idea of presence and humble empathy is often embodied in the squirrels I see out my window, just a representative for me of all the small and mindless little creatures living out their seemingly ultimately pointless little animal lives. I imagine what life is like in a squirrel’s mind. I empathize with this tiny furry rodent feeling warm sunlight and wintry winds on its body, its heart racing as it scurries illogically across the street in the paths of roaring automobiles, its simpleminded squirrelly chuckling laughter from a branch high in my backyard tree directed at my outraged terrier below. I think of it feeling hunger, cold, pain, and also delight, contentment, even rodent-level joy.
In the cosmic scheme of things, I am that squirrel. Except that my kind have tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and there can be no unknowing, no returning to the simple thoughtless life of the squirrel. I – and you – live in a cosmos that is beyond even our most-exalted-of-all-species intellectual capacities, but we have this extra level of knowledge that as far as we know, no other animal possesses: we know we’re going to die, that no matter what, every one of us is housed in a body that is falling apart, destined for the dirt. And beyond that, our knowledge fails us**. It appears to be the last word on the reality of the human body, as far as we’ve been able to ascertain through the senses and mental capacities of these bodies.
So we turn to imagination, art, faith, drugs, anything mind-altering, to see if somehow we can transcend the painful reality of the knowledge we can’t unknow, this knowledge of the ultimate decay of all things. And sometimes we can, and do. But that transcendence never gives our intellect the words and ideas it needs to feel satiated.
Thom says in his post, “I want to be in this world. In the here and now. I want to be centered on this place. But it’s all an illusion.”
And that’s where I turn to my powers of squirrel empathy for a little help. Whether it is all an illusion or not, this is the world where I have found myself. It is the reality I know, and you are here too. You are, right? Because maybe if everything is an illusion, then all the people around me are an illusion too, and it doesn’t matter how I treat them or what becomes of them.
I wonder, is this why the Genesis account of the tree of knowledge treats the tree and its fruit as so dangerous? If I understand that the world I think I know to be real is merely a virtual reality created by my senses and fed into my mind, why not seek to rise above it all? Why not make myself a god, the god of my own life, the god of this reality? Why shouldn’t I pilfer the planet and its people for the things I want, since it’s all a sham and even that is ultimately all falling apart anyway?
But back to the squirrel. The humble life of the squirrel. Breathe in, breathe out. Sunshine. Wind. Fear, laughter, hunger, and joy. And then, the human, who asks why? Always why, always, but why, what for, where is all this going, what’s it all about?
I don’t think asking why is ever a problem on its own. Instead, I find it concerning when we stop asking why because we think we know it all and we’ve come up short, disappointed and disillusioned with all we know, and throw up our hands and sigh, who cares, it doesn’t matter anyway.
It’s a hard fight some days, and others it feels small, pointless and never-ending – but I keep trying to faithfully live like a humble squirrel and an inquisitive human. I don’t think the fruit of the tree of knowledge is only bitter poison. Maybe if you squeeze out the sweetest part of it, let it ferment and share it with your friends, it can bring you some joy too.
**Of course humans are intellectually much smarter than squirrels, making discovery upon discovery, building wizard-level technological masterpieces – but that to me is just a way more powerful version of the squirrel brain. I’m referring here to consciousness, a sense of me and my place in the world, and its most painful realization of death and decay, that we haven’t knowingly encountered in any other species.
Bonus material – here’s a song I wrote last year and the origin of this post’s title:
Julia Bloom 