Note: Our friend Tyler–who blogs at Full of Running and curates music at Vinyl Me, Please–brings words to places where most minds fear to tread: the profound ways we’re affected by music, and the insight we gain only through painful experience.
We asked if he’d write about a time when the two things came together. This is what he sent us.
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There’s something about “Woods” by Bon Iver, and the way it begins, that I’ll never be able to pronounce. Something that will never leave me unshaken on my train rides home. Something that unlocks me, and lets itself in.
Things like this have a way though, don’t they, of stepping in softly, and bewildering.
Of turning us into unkept stumblers drunk with everything we can’t explain, while the lump in our throat grows from what we may never know how to hold on to or let go of.
Of finding us up late in the alleyways and overhangs, praying that our days be measured out with more than the space they take up.
Can you believe the way the evening can blush us quiet?
Or the sound made by the skirts of summer rains, as they pass?
Or the way the first rustle of love can tremble us back into hoping that we were meant to be more, even, than what we forgot we were?
I swear.
The God-knows-what of it washes over us like a revelation and puts our learning hands to the face of the One whose name we can not say and whose language we do not speak.
And that silence, so selfless, that settles over us when we learn for the first time that we are free.
When I was young I knew everything, and I was always ready to prove it. I suppose we all did. I guess at the time, I thought that knowing something meant something, as if we were going to be asked about it. As if there were a test, or a jury, or a congregation to answer to about our views on topics or how close we are to the right side of things.
But that isn’t what happened.
Instead, there were open roads and trees for miles, and learning the difficulty of finding our own voices when no one cared either way.
And there was the time spent answering our own questions, and sneaking cigarettes while wondering what it was like to find love, and then finding it, and then losing it and hurting each other in the way only young people can.
It wasn’t that we all were a mess then and aren’t now. It’s that we know now we always will be.
I also remember learning that the severity of our mercies can be almost unbearable, and that sometimes everything we thought meant being alive can end up on its head, struck in the street with us beside it, on our knees, trying to piece it back together, weeping while no help comes or goes.
And we are left with a walk home, not knowing where that is.
Hearts broken into continents and adrift while our lives stretch out into conversations in parking lots.
Friends who couldn’t handle any more of anything.
A growing sense that our only escapes are the moments of forgetfulness when the music swells over us, and we sink further into our own uncertainties.
It was a few days after her life had been cut off mid-sentence by a truck, and we were driving while Thom Yorke sang “True Love Waits” through your lingering speakers, and everything was shellshocked-awkward and new. Not many words then.
Not much of anything, other than the unholy holiness that settles over us after losing a loved one.
And our sacraments were stealing horses, and scrambling for answers before she became an artifact that others would stumble across in articles like this, and hang on their walls with their explanations and favorite pictures of places she would never go.
We tried what we could to slow it all down, but everyone we knew was choking up their black smoke, and processioning so relentlessly under banners and slogans we couldn’t understand.
So instead, we stood as quietly as we could.
We were young, after all, and those moments while they lowered her home were the first whispers of our woods.
The first gentle emptying of our northern hemisphere.
Those were our branches heavy after the storm and dripping, their heads in their hands, while the mist began to ghost us.
Later, when we were able to talk about it on the porches around town, we learned that we are not ruins.
Rather, we are the patient resurrections.
The good winter has uncovered our roots and limbs and let us stand again taller than before, and stronger.
It soaks in slowly that our lives are pathless woods, where we have all lost ourselves for a time.
That we have all been on our backs under the punctured dark, wondering if we’ll ever be what we intended, before homes burned down and cars upended and letters were left unwritten, before we forgot our names or how to speak ourselves.
That we are all beginning again.
It may be that we give pieces of ourselves to the people we love, and they take them with them when they leave, for their own remembering, for their own retelling.
It’s true that in the midst of a world where we are all going to be interrupted before we’re finished, our only honesty is that we long for the things that move us, baffle us, have us tearing up from wanting on the ride home.
That unravel us, leave us vulnerable to all of it, all over again.
That this unspeakable, unchainable wonder is our firmament, our cathedral, and we are its confessors.
We are the conflicted, the flowers crushed beneath the feet of the saints we may someday meet, and our brokenness is our crown of glory.
And each morning is an invitation, a note posted on our door that we are loved and ought not give up on everything we used to hope for, back whenever we did, because what we were then is what we are now, except our hearts wake up to a wilder sun and step out into it, our hands trembling.
❋ ❋ ❋
