The Ship
All this morning we’ve had rain showers; pouring rain which breaks for 1/2 an hour, then starts up again, then gives a welcome reprieval pause. Then it starts up again, thunder rumbling in the distance as if from the belly of the earth. I feel the weather reflecting a dredging up and outpouring of old stored emotions in me as well...
There’s been an unexpected upwelling and outpouring of raindrops from my depths, as from the Neptunian depths of collective humanity. I don’t experience this often, but when I do, it’s like a storm breaking in on my insides. I give myself up to it rarely, and only if it’s in conjunction with a day I don’t have to be in public. Except for the rodeo tonight (ha), I have that indoor kind of day today.
I’m going through it. Reflecting back on my life and all the places I’ve lived and visited… Of my mother…of missing New England…
I had a dream where I was telling Noah Kahan about my connection to Cornish, New Hampshire. I was telling him (half apologetically for taking his time), about how hearing “Stick Season” in Spring 2024 changed my life. How I heard it on the radio at night, driving home from work on 422 in Pennsylvania. How it was the match and the spark that would eventually burn down the forest of my previous life, letting it burn up the Old to make way for the New Growth which was to come.
I told him how his songs, “Paul Revere” and “The View Between Villages” were further catalysts igniting my deeply nostalgic longing for New Hampshire and Vermont. I remember now how Stick Season’s music video had places that I actually recognized. I remember how I couldn’t believe a place I valued beyond anything could be sung about and hailed by a popular musician. I remember later learning that he hailed from the region my mom and maternal grandmother hailed from, and where my parents and I would drive up to every summer. How this was where the first stirrings of a love for literature were coaxed into being by summer reading lists checked off, sitting under trees in the back fields at “the farm”…
I remember how his songs first made me realize my need to leave Pottstown, and the desire to be reunited with my mom by seeking to live where she was born and is buried…
….
I am terrified of weather ‘cause I see you when it rains
…
I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks
…
I’ll dream each night of some version of you
That I might not have, but I did not lose
Now you’re tire tracks and one pair of shoes
And I’m split in half, but that’ll have to do
-From “Stick Season”
In his essay, Experience, Emerson writes about his experience grappling with the grief for the loss of his son, which echoes my own mood. “There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that there at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth.” Emerson, however, finds grief to be shallow, and a form of playing on the surface of emotions merely. He acknowledges, however, that “An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists.”
There is a potential with the downpour of rain for us to drown in emotional pools of water, making puddles into seas.
I’m reminded of later, having moved to New Hampshire, being led to hearing Noah Kahan’s song, “Tidal”:
You knew me in my spiral
Happiness tidal, it comes and it goes
And I sank into the water
How I drifted farther away from the coast
Sometimes, I get this feeling
I was breathing someone else’s air
2,000 miles away from home
Under that sky, I tried to make my peace with fear
So I guess I’ll build a boat and live alone
Lord, I’ll be the lost one (oh, oh)
Oh, I’ll teach myself to swim and live in my head
And make sense of all my thoughts
And if I never reach the land or live again
Lord, I’ll be just fine (oh, oh)
Yeah, I’ll drift until I’m dead, and until then
I’ll be the lost one, I’ll be the lost one
I fell into a pattern
Where nothing would matter if I didn’t care
To be so close to a coastline
To know that in my life, I’ll never be there
…
And it wears me out
All the demons underneath the tide
But I sink like stone
Below the weight of all these dreams of mine
And I wish you well
You can’t save someone too far to find
But it’s wearing me out
And it’s stormy in the sea tonight, in the sea tonight
…
Emerson again describes it well visually speaking:
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue….Nature and books belong to the eyes that seem them. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism.…”
I remember wanting to look beyond his lyrics to “Cynic”…How that wasn’t who I want to be…
I cried at the rain, but there’s no way that I’m depressed
Oh, if I think too hard
I’m scared I might lose it
…
Give me the open mind that I had before
There’s something missing darling, oh
I’m living with it
…
There will always be rain showers which may unearth parts of the garden where you thought you buried well your old griefs. Those griefs may rise to the surface. They may flood up to your door, leaving you sopping up with a towel what you thought you could keep out.
But then, you left the door open, for you knew not what. You knew deep down you would welcome the cleansing air that would waft through that space in your heart. You knew the lyrics and melody that would dredge up—then rock—your worries to sleep.
The grey sky will give you pause about tomorrow’s possibility for sun. But the sun will rise again…
Though you think you may sink…
“the ship can be saved yet….”
Absolutely beautiful post!
New England misses you, too.
Beautiful