Despite our differences
Well, tomorrow night is the Indigo Girls concert with A & H; I am looking forward to it.
Been listening to their new album, Despite our Differences, and marveling over how I've grown up with them and how they are still relevant to me...that somehow my life runs parallel to their lives.
Some scattered things I've been thinking:
I continue to have, use, eat, and buy more than I need. I live in overwhelming abundance and find myself unhappy for it.
Amy Ray writes:
While I've spent most of my life longing to live in the city, wishing to escape rural landscapes, when given the chance, I bought a house in a subdivision in the suburbs. Again, I find myself unhappy about my choices. Maybe most unhappy because it was my choice. The suburbs are destructive to both the land and the cultural harmonies that we need to be building instead of running away from each other.
Again, Ray writes:
So, from my abundant suburban hell, I think about myself listening to Indigo Girls for the first time 17 years ago in the car of a guy I no longer remember with two other women who sang along (words by Emily Sailers):
still powerful to me now
-- and there are so many songs with so many memories. This post could go on forever. Instead, I'll end it here:
Been listening to their new album, Despite our Differences, and marveling over how I've grown up with them and how they are still relevant to me...that somehow my life runs parallel to their lives.
Some scattered things I've been thinking:
I continue to have, use, eat, and buy more than I need. I live in overwhelming abundance and find myself unhappy for it.
Amy Ray writes:
How much do we really need?
a question, if you have to ask
just means what it means-
the question that says everything.
---"Money Made You Mean"
While I've spent most of my life longing to live in the city, wishing to escape rural landscapes, when given the chance, I bought a house in a subdivision in the suburbs. Again, I find myself unhappy about my choices. Maybe most unhappy because it was my choice. The suburbs are destructive to both the land and the cultural harmonies that we need to be building instead of running away from each other.
Again, Ray writes:
It's been you and me on this fronteir
trying not to be suburban pioneers.
Fighting off the pavers
and the associations,
and the covenants against the trailers.
...
Once you told me what,
what I'll miss the most
is just being the only ones-
with our dirt road and our dead ends.
-----"Dirt and Dead Ends"
So, from my abundant suburban hell, I think about myself listening to Indigo Girls for the first time 17 years ago in the car of a guy I no longer remember with two other women who sang along (words by Emily Sailers):
My place is of the sun
and this place is of the dark
and I do not feel the romance
I do not catch the spark.
I don't know when I noticed life was life at my expense
the words of my heart lined up like prisoners on a fence.
The dreams came in like needy children, tugging at my sleeve,
I said I have no way of feeding you, so leave.
---"Prince of Darkness" 1989
still powerful to me now
-- and there are so many songs with so many memories. This post could go on forever. Instead, I'll end it here:
Clearing webs from the hovel
a blistered hand on the handle of a shovel
I've been digging too deep, I always do.
------"Hammer and a Nail" Emily Sailers, 1990
posted by perrykat at
3:34 PM
1 Comments:
Yes, yes, yes.
Last night I stumbled across some notes I took in graduate school when I was considering dropping out of mechanical engineering to pursue political science. So much of the same thing, living only once, the importance of having your dreams be the fabric of your daily life.
I finally chose to live in the city rather than the suburbs, and that choice feels right. The right part of the city is rural, in that it has small places that you can walk to, it has the concept of a neighborhood.
But the job, and being far away from family and friends, makes me mindful of the quote:
"The cost of a thing is the amount of what may be called Life that must be given in exchange for it."
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