Photo by Javier Rodríguez on Flickr's creative commons.
Work might be saving my life right now.
On one side of the weekend, the happier side, I sigh and let go and sink backwards into a soft chair. But then I don't get up, not really. The loneliness and the depression are always waiting to welcome me back.
O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Mumford & Sons in concert at the Gentlemen of the Road stopover in Salida, Colorado, on August 22, 2015.
I’m not much of a concert person, even less a music festival person.
The soundtracks and stages of my youth were limited, and it was a long time before I fell head-over-heels in love with music. But fall I did, and for no one more deeply than Mumford & Sons.
Start a conversation about their craft and technique, and I wouldn’t be able to do much more than agree with every good word. But bring up their lyrics and ponder what their music means to people? I would be so full of thoughts. It comes down to their incredible ability to express the deep longings of the human soul, I would say, and for that reason they have sunk into my whole being and I have carried their music with me for years.
Their new album came out a few months ago, and I made it my (somewhat belated) mission over the first few weeks of August to learn and fall in love with it. Even with the banjo gone, it wasn’t difficult to make room for these new offerings.
But when I saw the band in concert two weeks ago, it was what was in long-term memory that made the deepest impression.
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Photo from Nathan Siemers on Flickr.
The same song echoes in a new room. The acoustics are different, the walls are a brighter blue, and though there are familiar faces in the lopsided pictures hanging between windows and corners, the faces belonging to those who are tangibly here are new additions.
I can breathe easier here. The windows aren't stuck and I don't feel claustrophobic. With all these changes, it's easy to think that the music filling my ears is different too. And in some ways, it is. A couple new stringed instruments are in the group, adding a richness that wasn't there before, and the new vocalist is bringing something to my words that wasn't there before.
There's more experimentation, more stamina, more fullness, but the longer I listen, the more the novelty fades and I understand what a new environment can and cannot do.
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{Photo credit: CJS*64}
Last night, I went to the cinema with my dad and sister to see the 50th-anniversary episode of the British television show Doctor Who.
I’d only seen about a dozen episodes in total, and was going mostly for my sister, who wore her Doctor Who T-shirt and carried her sonic screwdriver and cheered at all the right times.
Even as the homages and references and plot points jumped over my head and skated every which way around me, I couldn’t help but feel the momentousness of it all.
We all have stories and characters we love. We move in close to them, pressing in as we would around a fire, hands and faces turned toward the warmth.
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