To Live Is To Fly

Did you ever come to a point in your life, a seminal moment maybe, where paths seem to lead off in every direction? Leaving you standing alone in the crossroads wondering which path is the one to take.

Standing in the middle of nowhere, wishing someone or something would just push you in a direction. It seems huge, the choice of direction.  The bigger question is, "How do you know when you get there?"  And yet, "When do you get there?"  It seems to me that the road ahead is endless, crossroads upon crossroads.  The directionally-challenged, like myself, remaining in a constant state of quandary.  After these years, it seems to me that all that matters in the end is the journey.  Turn around, take a look back down the road.  It's the trip. That's what you take with you.

"Days, up and down they come
like rain on a conga drum.
Forget most, remember some
but don't turn none away.
Everything is not enough
and nothin' is to much to bear.
Where you been is good and gone,
all you keep is the getting there.
To live is to fly
Low and high,
so shake the dust off of your wings
and the sleep out of your eyes."

The approach of my birthday always takes me back down the road.  This year, I keep going back to a time when I survived a meager existence full of emotional turmoil, physical and mental exhaustion, endings, beginnings and simplicity.  Sitting on the porch of my doublewide in the middle of nowhere with my Red Ryder BB Gun taking aim at the hundreds of summer-blooming orange daylillies.  Working in a factory as a production artist by day, doing design work and folk art by night.  Wedging my car between the pines after the call from the Repo-man.  Spending weekends being eyes for my sightless mother.  Snagging rare precious moments sneaking across the pasture, eating wild strawberries and floating in some stranger's pond.  I had practically nothing and virtually everything, with a thousand roads leading in a thousand directions.  I picked one, and here I am. Living a very different existence in so many ways.  Good ways.  Still, the crossroads appear.  I still have no idea which way to go, but have a peace within that each path will make a great story.

It's no secret that I have always found my solace in music, one way or the other.  The "Trailer Days" as I call them,  were no different.  For many reasons that are strange and wonderful, Townes Van Zandt was my saviour.  Don't feel left out for not knowing who he was.  He lived in the background, most likely due to his drinking and drug habits, making him no less in my eyes.  A lyrical genius, who probably found himself in the same tough crossroads as we all do - he just decided to check out in the only way he knew how. 

“Townes Van Zandt is the best damned songwriter in the world—and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”  -Steve Earle

"Artists as diverse as Mudhoney with Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Norah Jones, Son Volt, Doc and Merle Watson, Evan Dando, Nana Mouskouri (in French, no less), Dashboard Confessional, Counting Crows, Glenn Yarbrough with the Jimmy Bowen Orchestra, Bob Dylan, Peter Rowan and Tony Rice, Cowboy Junkies and Robert Plant & Alison Krauss have all embraced his singular sense of how a lean lyric stretches over the essence of melody, the naked intensity of emotions distilled to their purest forms."  -American Songwriter

Townes is one of the musicians and lyricists that make my skin turn to gooseflesh.  His songs have been covered by a long list of musicians including Willie Nelson (Pancho & Lefty), Robert Plant & Alison Krauss (Nothin'), John Prine, Norah Jones, Lyle Lovett, Emmylou Harris, Be Good Tanyas, Nancy Griffith, Steve Earle and of course Cowboy Junkies.  I was lucky enough to see him perform with the Cowboy Junkies just before his death on New Year's Day, 1997. 

So, here I am.  Years past.  Turning around and looking down the road and finding the same person that was there nearly twenty years ago.  The road, it's been a good one.  Memories of the choices along the way hardly remain.  The journey, well, it's one hell of a story.
melodia