Risen From the Dead

It is a glorious pre-spring morning in Alaska. The sun is blinding streams through the picture window and the one bare foot in the light is warm, while the one in the shadow is freezing, which perfectly summarizes this in-between time of year. There is still a foot of (old) snow on the ground, but peeking up already are hints of green, the birch trees are budding, the squirrels are back and so are those little white and black birds (starlings?). Yesterday I bought a spring dress and drove with the sunroof open through the slushy streets, sliding around shadowed corners where the sun has yet to melt the ice. It's a time of contradictions.

I have this fear that on April Fool's Day, tomorrow, it will snow again and this early spring tease will be that much further set back. It's still noticeable to me after living here for two and a half years how precisely my mood is tied to the weather, or something about not noticing the light until it's gone. For half a year.

I'm reawakening from a hibernation that I didn't even realize I was in for the last few months. I went into the beginning of winter with a heartache, a loss, and my body sick from it took months to recover in the dark and cold. The light comes back and with it, hope and energy, and with hope and energy come relief, relief that things reverse. How could I forget that they do when I'm always weighing dichotomies? I remember now.

Finding The Song

The difficulty of choosing a love song - "The Song" - as in the song that will be played acoustically at your wedding by your old dear friend from high school who now has rock star status 15 years later, and it's being played while you stand there gazing into eyes and the differently-generationed guests sit there with eyes upon you, and all of you listening in this deep love vibe that mustn't crack because of the bride or groom's (mostly the bride's) offbeat music tastes. Oh...

Music is hugely important, I'd say imperative, to me. It's what moves me through moments, and past heartbreaks and into new. It is what I rely upon when all is quiet at night except for whatever is blaring in my ears when I write, tapping my feet echoey through the night alone. I think it's just that, the difficulty stem - it's so personal - and finding some song that resonates all these great big good forever love ideas and a message, something like a pledge to love forevermore summed up in 3 minutes (not even an entire soundtrack) it's quite hard but oh so lovely when it is done.

But I've been listening, going through the personal aural history that is my music library, trying to find something, for both of us. I find that I tend toward the heartbreaking songs, the schism of the self songs, the end of love songs, the me and me alone songs - those are the ones that I know the best, that I've known all these years. Finding a song that is us, that is just joy is not as easy as I'd thought it would be. Love songs are supposed to abound, right?

This difficulty in finding a joyful love song is similar to this thing where I've faltered with writing when I'm happy. I find it so much easier to write when I'm not, to take all the fuel from sad and mad and put it into words. When I'm good, stable, satisfied, I'm less likely to write, or I might write fluffily. Mary Oliver wrote about this idea, and she's a poet I admire greatly. She reflects this in "Such Singing in the Wild Branches" which is about being caught off guard by feeling joyful, and managing to record that fleeting bliss of an instant. Writers and musicians, we look to them in these significant times of our lives - the tragic and the triumphant - to have something to say for us.

So, thank heavens some of them can write, make music in those happy times:

Just in Time, by Nina Simone: this trilling chord progression of a rejoice wherein there is salvation from being lost thanks to this hero called love is a gin-drinking hip shaker. Dun dun dah!

I Melt With You, by Modern English: a fondness for 80's pop aside, the message of being better with someone else in your own world, when the all of it gets exhausting there's still this little sacred place where anything is possible because only two people get to make the call about what will come next.

Wedding Song, by Tracy Chapman: seems obvious, I know, but the message captured so succinctly about imagining someone always reaching out for you, and if it really comes true that is something worth pledging forever to. It's said so well and it's why we get married, I do believe - someone reaching out to your heart, body, mind and spirit - wanting all of that, being revealed, good and bad. It's something indeed.

I'll Be Your Mirror, by The Velvet Underground & Nico: there are all these married times when you never look at each other, because you have that one same face memorized, you don't even have to look, it's burned into your reality. Then there are these other times when you really look, faces on the pillow, crying on the couch, sudden earthquake moments when you have to look again and search for all that you've committed to memory, to heart, and you see again this face that you fell for initially and you know that them seeing you looking so loving, searching something that is already so well known, will only encourage. Being a mirror for all that goodness, bravery and want, reflecting it back, is such an essential action. You hope this means everything: to be seen.

You Can Have it All, by Yo La Tengo: giving all you have as a human, really, like a heart and a love which are huge, but sometimes seem like all we have to give, as if this isn't absolutely everything, then there's time and money, too. This song has few words except for that, and I love the refrain of this idea over and over, giving it all to someone set to such an uptempo melody - like giving all our very fragile humanity is something fantastic, something made of immense joy. Which it is.

So, I wrote to my musician friend tonight and suggested all these songs. Aside from my beloved Sigur Ros, whose lyrics he probably can't sing (unless he's learned Icelandic recently), and deeply adoring The National and Fleet Foxes, but not finding the right tune, the above mentioneds could be the finalists. I sort of went on about The Velvet Underground song to him, that is was pretty much perfect now that I listened to it again, and seeing as how I wrote the most about it in this iteration, this could very well be the one. There's always the dancing afterward, and I get to be my own DJ for that. Bring on the also rans!

Baby Mozart

Owen really rocked the piano.

He composed his own song, something about monkeys saying hello.