Prologue (7-9): Play Me Some Soul Music

One thing that marks ongoing life, a life being lived, is sound: clatter, the whirring buzz of the dishwasher, pounding feet on pavement, air passing over and under the wings of an aircraft, children's laughter, a teapot whistling. Life is full of sound, and sometimes those sounds reach deep into the soul. Fondly, I recall the six-year-old feeling of comfort and safety in Saturday morning sounds, moving life--a hairdryer and the soft buzz of conversation.

November brought me a soul-awakening experience with sound--sounds sung to me, sounds of fireworks exploding, and sounds of my own voice, combined with those around me, melting into unison. Work took me to Orlando in early November, and the conference I attended took me to Epcot. There, amidst crowds of strangers, I tossed a coin (thunk) in Italy's Trevi Fountain, and made my way to the Stage of America, where, by happenstance, my friend and I discovered Richard Marx performing within five minutes of our arrival. Somewhat skeptical of a grand performance, we sat in the back benches so as to leave quietly. We stayed for the whole performance.

Marx's arrival on stage wasn't just about throwing out a few songs. It was about presence, performance, sharing, and yes, even love. As performer and audience exchanged words, a reciprocal relationship developed that transcended usual societal barriers. He wanted to hear us sing to him, again and again. That's what has stuck with me all these weeks. Audience became performers and performer, audience. Everything felt so human and so connected in that stadium on that night--Marx and my friend, Mandy, and that child on the second row, brought together by music.

In Annie's experience with music, she sees her father "snapping his fingers [...] and shaking his head, to the record--'Li'l Liza Jane'--the sound that was beating, big and jivey, all over the house" (9). In the book, Dillard particularly observes her father snapping the fingers of both hands, as if one just wouldn't be enough to play the pulse of life or match the feeling of the music. The beat of music, big and jivey, can ring through our lives, inspire us, move us from pits of despair, engage us in action, or make us feel unbelievably comfortable in our own skin for what becomes breathtaking moments. Lately, I use it in prolific fashion for all these outcomes. I listen over and over to The Bravery and Keane. I take the kids and we dance, spinning through the house as I'm weaving soulful stories from the tunes and melodies of other artists.

As Annie's father lets the music move through him, he stands "in the wind between the buckeye trees [...] looking up at what must have been a small patch of wild sky" (7). Similarly, I give up sleep to go out on windy, cold mornings and run through the black and empty streets. I pass a largely waving tree with a split branch. Life is busy, crazy.... but with the music in my ears and my feet on the pavement, worries slip away, movement and life are concentrated in one, and I'm shooting forward; I'm moving to the beat; I'm slipping away from the task-driven concrete; something is piercing my soul. The sun rises over the horizon, every truth melds into one and hits me inside. I understand where I've been, where I am, where I'm going. I reach inside my jacket pocket to my iPod and replay the song.



Next time--Prologue (9-11): Road Trip

Prologue (3-5): Imprinting the Land

In Annie Dillard's Prologue to An American Childhood, she writes about what the land is and what it once was, tracing its genealogy back through the ages, where only woodpeckers and the occasional "gang of empty-headed turkeys" came through the quiet forests of Pennsylvania (4). She seems to take meaning for her own life from the land she inhabits, writing that "when [all] else has gone from [her] brain," including the faces of her family, "what will be left [...] is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that" (3). How does land touch us so--make us feel grounded, concrete, real? How is it, when we touch the earth, it reaches down inside us, grabbing onto some oft forgotten core? And how is it that despite all the changes the land sees, it still remains the same underneath the frantic rat race of life?

Dillard's passage inspired me to revisit the land with my own brood. Maybe something would leave an imprint. At the suggestion of Sydney's physical therapist, the uphill hike around Cress Creek gave direction to desire.

When we arrive, I close my eyes, blinking at the bright sun that glints against interpretive signs along the trail--signs imprinted with discoveries about the faulted land near my native Rexburg. Cress Creek tells the story of the land along the South Fork of the Snake River in Eastern Idaho. Cottonwood trees, some housing eagles' nests, surround the Snake, their leaves shaking with bright yellows and oranges in the late fall wind. Cattails rest in the low marsh. Along the trail, we learn that Indians used the land for food, trappers for pelts, and later settlers for homes and farmland that now expands across areas neighboring the Cottonwoods. At each subsequent age, the land has served a new need, but part of it always remains unchanged.

An old stagecoach trail intersects the same vision as distant, dormant volcanoes, volcanoes that once rained ash across the landscape. That same ash now composes a large portion of the rock along Cress Creek. Tuff, with its various fragments of fused detritus, tells a story entirely its own. Earlier than the Indians but sometime after volcanic eruptions, the creek comes running down the mountain. Sagebrush, Bitterbrush, Utah and Rocky Mountain Junipers arise from a seemingly dead environment to feed deer and other mountain animals. Watercress grows in the creek water, warmed by geothermal heat, and moose arrive to feed.

In the present, my kids run from post to post, searching for tracks, doo-doo, what Liam calls, "Blue's Clues" --anything that might denote an animal roamed across the same dirt. They identify some excrement along the trail as coyote scat, and I don't have the heart to tell them that it most likely came from a species of domestic dog: "Watch out; I think I just heard a coyote in the brush!" They scream and scatter.

My kids would have given their snacks, shoes, siblings to have glimpsed live animal inhabitants, an eagle, rabbit, lizard--anything. Wrong day? Wrong time? Should we have hiked with those trappers of old in order to make that stable and unchanging connection we're so eager to feel with the land? Like my children, I too long to visit some earlier time and place, be transported to experience June rhododendrons in early settled Pennsylvania, where Annie writes, "tall men and women lay exhausted in their cabins, sleeping in the sweetness, worn out from planting corn" (5). I have planted corn; I have slept, exhausted in my bed--but I would give something spectacular to smell those June flowers. We look to the land for comfort, but sometimes what we're searching for isn't there. The eagle passed at a different time of day. The flowers on Cress Creek faded in late summer. If the routines of my life don't organically intersect with settlers, summer, sweetness, I can close my eyes, wait nine months, two years, a half an hour--and suddenly the world is a new place with new possibilities. This is my latest discovery.

Wait for it. We close our eyes, and the world turns around again.

I've seen it happen over and over lately. Each day brings brilliant new surprises. Everything on the land changes for Dillard, from one space of time to the next. Yet across all those passages of time, there are connections, just as Dillard connects the spaces of time during her childhood into one vivid and amazing tapestry, a tapestry as brilliant as each of our own lives. One minute I'm tickling my kids before bed, the next I'm researching scholarly articles, shaking off single guys at LDS dances, responding to student grievances, planting corn. If only I could take a step back and view the marvelous pattern of it all--the landscape not of Cress Creek in the 1800s, 1925, or Pennsylvania in the 50's, but the landscape of my own life. It is the landscape, the topology, that gives meaning and purpose, guidance and direction to our lives. The tapestry, the topology, the hill's curves and juts, the winding river, the cattails in the low marsh, the "land as it lay this way and that."

Next week--Prologue (7-9): Play Me Some Soul Music