Cold Answers
I spent some time with this beauty today.
I often wonder, and I’m certain many who read my words here wonder, how it is that someone has been such a profoundly healing and changing presence in my life, from such a distance.
One of the answers can be found in this record.
The most profound gift this man brought to my life was kindness.
His words and music singlehandedly shifted my conversaton with myself - and thus my entire experience of this world - to one of kindness.
I’ll never forget one day after this shift occurred, he actually sent me the words “To thine own self be ... Kind.”
I come back to those words so often.
The songs at the heart of this record stop me in my tracks every time I hear them.
They speak to the pain of grieving the death of a relationship ... With a kindness and love for the other I never saw in the living and breathing ones that surrounded me.
There was such viciousness in the relationships I witnessed.
Such demeaning of the other.
The other, that you supposedly “love.“
Those relationships taught me that love was a lie.
I’m so grateful for the tiny part of my 18-year-old heart that knew that what I understood to be “love“ was actually the cycle of abuse.
That tiny flame burning inside me kept me out of what I know to my core would’ve been lethal relationships.
While I grieve being 45 years old and not yet having any concept of what it is to be loved by a man, I cannot be anything but grateful that my heart knew any relationship I chose prior to these past five years would have destroyed me.
I am not exaggerating when I say I could well have ended up dead.
I would have chosen abuse, and I would have stayed.
As it was, several of my close friendships were abusive, and those friends' primary relationships were clearly abusive.
Even as I couldn't see it in the homes I was living in, my heart knew that I understood abuse to be love.
It also knew real love when it showed up four and a half years ago.
This record is miraculous to me.
I had never imagined that this level of kindness was possible, and I had certainly never imagined love continuing to live and breathe when a relationship shifted from a marriage to something else.
When my dad died when I was 20, my mom told me that she didn’t feel a single thing.
This was after years of telling me that I had taken my dad's love away from her, and that his failing to put their marriage ahead of me was what broke up our family.
That’s the kind of example I had of what love is.
That it was a competition, it could be taken from us, it was filled with both viciousness and emptiness, and most shatteringly, that my being loved destroyed things.
My understanding of love was built on horrific lies.
This record, one of the most beautiful works of art I've ever experienced, showed me something completely different.
Its last song, Long Way Home From Here, is my very favorite one to sing.
It's also where this blog gets its name.
That song was the first place I was able to glimpse the beauty that lives and breathes inside me.
The day it came out, I was watching a back and white video of him singing it in an abandoned train car.
The words resonated with a depth of truth I could physically feel, and I was stunned at the exquisite beauty I was seeing and hearing.
I just stared mouth agape, and tears streamed down my face.
I was struck with a deep knowing, something I'd only experienced twice before: The moment I first saw my Storybook Cottage and knew I was home - regardless of the fact that it was totally not on the market and belonged to someone else - and the moment real love showed up. Coincidentally, awakened by someone totally not on the market, and belonging to someone else. Yet here I am, living in the Storybook Cottage ...
As I watched that video, I knew to my core that the beauty I was seeing was the inside of my own heart.
I was watching as if from the outside, and I kept hearing myself whisper "I had no idea it was so beautiful."
It was a changing moment.
Later that day, when the voices came in and said that the whole thing was stupid and didn't even make any sense - he's the most beautiful creature I've ever seen, so of COURSE the beauty I was seeing and feeling was ALL him - I remembered something.
He had sent me one of his rare emails just a couple of weeks before, in which he'd happened to offer this:
"Sometimes songs are simply mirrors."
He gave me this CD.
I was at a show, and was going to buy it as he and I were chatting at the merch table.
“Take it!” he said with a smile, breathing that same powerful kindness.
I did, with deep gratitude.
An acquaintance standing with us made a snarky comment clearly indicating that she disapproved of my accepting his gift.
The lines between friends, fans, and fellow artists of every kind are very blurry in Nashville, so you can easily go broke giving away your work! At that point, though, I had bought his entire catalog at least three times and had made countless other purchases, so I don’t believe this CD was going to make a dent in my giant portion of his bottom line.
Her comment went straight to my heart, though, because what it truly said to me was what so many voices in my life had said before.
That I was unworthy of his gift.
That he was wrong for offering it, and I was wrong for accepting it.
I still feel that wound ... That it’s somehow wrong that I have this $10 piece of cardboard and plastic because I didn’t earn the right to have it.
I learned in no uncertain terms growing up that gifts had to be earned, and paid back in equal measure.
“Love” was nothing but an endless series of transactions.
Even sitting here today - having paid nearly $400 for his latest record thanks to the wonders of PledgeMusic - I still feel out of balance for this $10 CD.
That I owe him something.
For a gift.