Everything I Tell You is Hearsay

Words & Music By Billy Joel

In every heart there is a room
A sanctuary safe and strong
To heal the wounds from lovers past
Until a new one comes along

I spoke to you in cautious tones
You answered me with no pretense
And still I feel I said too much
My silence is my self defense

And every time I’ve held a rose
It seems I only felt the thorns
And so it goes, and so it goes
And so will you soon I suppose

But if my silence made you leave
Then that would be my worst mistake
So I will share this room with you
And you can have this heart to break

And this is why my eyes are closed
It’s just as well for all I’ve seen
And so it goes, and so it goes
And you’re the only one who knows

So I would choose to be with you
That’s if the choice were mine to make
But you can make decisions too
And you can have this heart to break

And so it goes, and so it goes
And you’re the only one who knows

“Lean into the sharp points.” Buddhist Wisdom~

I don’t tend to avoid things just because they are unpleasant. I recognize that usually, difficulties have something to teach me. That to test the boundaries of my capacity to cope, tolerate, and accept most often results in growth that contributes to me becoming and happier, wiser, and more fully realized person

This can mean that I spend a fair amount of time confronting truths that are not always easy to process. I know myself pretty well, but there is always more to discover, and occasionally I find something out that shocks me, or makes me feel like I don’t know myself as well as I like to think.

By attending to these discoveries I am able to expand my awareness. I can understand not only what prods me in those tender places, but also why it is that they do. To avoid this experience would only serve to leave me vulnerable to the same injury going forward. By finding those places I have hidden, I can open myself to new possibilities with less fear. It is by no means easy to do this, but it is always rewarding to understand myself better. And even though the pain of leaning into the sharp points can be mighty indeed, it helps me to know they are there, to take more tender care of myself while I muster the strength to bear more than I ever knew I could.

It happened today.It derailed some of my plans and kept me from my little theme on the blog I’ve been running with the last few days. I’m in no imminent danger, just a fairly annoying amount of pain.

Here’s hoping some answers present themselves soon…

My current musical obsession. I need a capo.

By Ray Lamontage

Are you still in love with me, like the way you used to be
Or is it changing?
Does it deepen over time, like the river that is winding
Through the canyon?

Are you still in love with her, Do you remember how you were
Before the sorrow?
Are you closer for the tears, or has the weight of all the years
Left you hollow?

Are we strangers now?
Like the Ziegfeld Gal and the Vaudeville show?

Are we strangers now?
Like Rock and Roll and the Radio?
Like Rock and Roll and the Radio…

I can see you lyin’ there, tying ribbons in your hair
And pullin’ faces.
I can feel your hand in mine, though we’re living separate lives
In separate places.

Are we strangers now?
Like the Ziegfeld Gal and the Vaudeville show?

Are we strangers now?
Like Rock and Roll and the Radio?
Like Rock and Roll and the Radio…

All these white lies,
Hanging like flies on the wall.

Hard-wired, road-tired,
Counting curtain calls and waiting,
Waiting for the axe to fall.

Are you still in love with me, like the way you use to be
Or is it changing?
Does it deepen over time, like the river that is winding
Through the canyon?

Are we strangers now?
Like the Ziegfeld Gal and the Vaudeville show?

Are we strangers now?
Like Rock and Roll and the Radio?
Like Rock and Roll and the Radio…

“The Victory of Mercy, The Mercy of Victory” The Witches Tarot Ellen Cannon Reed

Transition is difficult, under the best of circumstances. Even the most desirable change that leads to the best possible results can be painful, frightening, and trying. Telling yourself that the process is necessary doesn’t always make it any easier.

In the symbolism of the tarot, death virtually never signifies an actual physical passing. Instead it is meant to exemplify the need for one of these transitions to occur. Usually the message of this archetype is that change is coming, and to fight it will only make the process more difficult and traumatic. It is meant to try and gentle the experience, but we are so often deeply committed to our patterns, even if they are awful and ugly, that we will resist to the end of our strength, and in defiance of our own best interests.

And so the mercy we must show, is often toward ourselves. The kindness to allow the change to happen, and thus to grow and move toward what serves us and away from what does not. The victory is in the reward for doing so; growth, progress, and hopefully greater wisdom to take with us going forward.

“A breeze can lift waters from a gorge; rising as mist, it blows away” ~The I-Ching

“And if there come the singers and the dancers and the flute players, buy of their gifts also. For they too are the gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and food for your soul.” ~The Prophet Kahlil Gibran

For in the everyday commerce of our lives, let us not forget the pleasures that sustain us. Not so much an admonition, this is instead the reminder that sweetness and indulgence too have their place in a well-ordered soul. The aesetics took their task too far; by denying all pleasure they forget we are enabled us feel joy and ecstacy in that we may have a hint of the divine. We must conduct our business, indeed, but so too must we nurture the vessel by which the work is done.

This is not a blanket endorsement for debachery, but instead the reminder that the simplest pleasures are worth your most precious commodity, be that time or effort, or indeed coin. That to engage in the material support of your own pleasure is the most satisfying use of the sweat of your brow. To truly earn your delights a great gift.

I like my hands. I think they’re quite nice. I’ve always been a bit vain about them, and oddly they are the part of me that look most like my mother; I totally got her hands. They’re relatively small for an average sized woman, but my fingers are unusually long. I also grow very nice fingernails, when I leave them be to grow. It’s a weird thing to be vain about, but I can rise above and be vain about most anything, it turns out.

I do not, on the other hand, much like my guitar playing. It is in no way my strong suit, musically. I came to it late, am self taught and rather lazy about practicing, but care a great deal about sounding good when I do bother to play. Usually because I am trying to impress a boy.

But to do the latter well, I must relinquish the former. I picked up Livingston tonight and looked sadly at the state of my fingernails (perfect) and knew that in very short order indeed they would be made sacrifice to the strings. I even tried playing without trimming them, but was forced at last (since the child absconded with my clippers) to bite them all off in order to play with any degree of satisfaction.

On the bright side I’m not nearly as rusty as I expected to be…

Fall asleep on the couch when you are strung out on cough syrup while watching a show about elephants in your half doze and then hope the next show is Nova where they talk about geothermal phenomenon, specifically sulfur springs, and then next some Jane Austen meanwhile kinda waking up four or five or seven or nine times.

It works.

There are those songs, you know.

Those songs which contain words and phrases that spell out the aching particulars of however you experience life and beauty and pain and truth.

We all have this soundtrack.; the songs that bring us immediately to a place or time or feeling. Without preamble or fanfare, we are fully and utterly lost to that moment, that emotion. And sometimes, they make no sense or they make a sense that only your insides can interpret. They are often profoundly unglamorous and leave us raw and exposed, but in the best possible way.

And today with my speakers up louder than I can usually have them at work, I heard again the line from a song that most says LOVE to me while I listen. It is contained in a song about stumbling upon love while not yet free to have it. It is not a scenario I have ever found myself in, yet it cries out with the most beautiful poignancy what I most feel… and want to feel from someone else, about love.

There have been others: they tell a story about the way my concept of love has changed

Ghost by The Indigo Girls “Of all my demon spirits I need you the most”

I always felt like this song was about being in love with the idea of someone, rather than their actual person. About idealizing someone past the point of all reason so that you could have no real hope of loving them in actuality. This is something I know well how to do. This was my idea of love when I was a sophomore in high school. It still tugs at me though…

Do What You Have to Do by Sarah McLachlan “And I have the sense to recognize that I don’t know how to let you go”

Some part of me is convinced that love has to hurt. That it isn’t real if you don’t ache for the lack of the other. Probably too large a part of me indeed. The quality of love I most readily recognize is the sort that causes me to lose myself so completely in the feeling that I become someone else as a result. the person I was before ceases to exist and so, in a very real sense I struggle with the notion of losing anyone I come to truly love, for it would result in becoming Not Me, at least Not the Me I’d been ever since falling in love had made me Someone New. Plus also, I just don’t like to let go.

Steam Engine by My Morning Jacket “Your skin looks good in moonlight, goddamn those shaky knees”

This song was just eerily appropriate for the love I was falling in at the time I first heard the song. I had never had someone so enamored of me as was the boy who was the object of my affection at the time. I had never had anyone speak with such fervor about how beautiful he thought I was; about the effect I had on him with the mere fact of my presence. This was the lesson of being adored as an aspect of love. It was a good lesson.

Crash by Dave Matthews Band “Hike up your skirt a little more, and show your world to me”

Far from being smutty, I find this line to be singularly romantic. It acknowledges the fundamental vulnerabilty inherent in revealing oneself this way. The faith, entire and unblemished, that accompanies such a gesture. It is an intoxicating moment, to feel that trust for someone else, and to feel it expressed toward you as well.

And now…

Challengers by The New Pornographers “Whatever the mess you are, you’re mine”

This, oh this, is what I have come to believe is really what love is about. Not that we do not see, or that we are made perfect by our love, but rather that we are seen, and known, and absolved, and loved nevertheless. I think I like this notion best. It feels truer, and wiser and more likely, when compared to the illusions and self-sacrifice of the past.

And I wonder, as I always do, about the quality of love that others feel. How it is sounded out across their lives. What resonates inside of them and carries them forward on waves of song…