Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Where Is My Wild Rose?


These are not my words but when I read them I feel like they could be.  They are by Andrew McMahon.


Sometimes I wonder how my wife reconciles loving this wandering mess that is me. The unspoken fear of so many artists is the discovery of true love. Not the kind of love that burns hard and fast, but the kind that smolders with no end and wouldn't let you go if you tried. I can't speak for all writers, but I know I speak for many when I say that it is a secret fear amongst us that with this smoldering comes the death of an atomic dream. New love is easy art. In the stirring of discovery poetry grows from seed to sunlight in short blistering days. In the light of the unknown the mystery of another makes anything seem possible. In love we are reborn in a frenzied blaze of hyper existence. In the dissolution of love we are blown to pieces. Some pieces we collect in the fallout of moving on and others we leave behind; thumb tacks on the great maps of our personal histories, showing us all the places that we have been.

Last Friday, in search of something I began to drive. The preceding Wednesday, my band and I flew the old metal bird from Los Angeles to Richmond in the spirit of rallying behind a fallen friend. I have known illness, as most of us have, and sitting in a hospital room with a sick man's family is to know love. Not blistering love but real love. We spent two nights playing music and drinking, visiting on porches and watching nights turn to mornings, always reminded by the wages life can take from us in the moments we don't expect. In those days we couldn't stand to be alone, as if we were clinging to each other and the blessing of these long nights that we sadly could not share with our imprisoned friend. In the heat of a Virginia morning, on the heels of these sleepless visits, I rented a car and began my travel; one that would eventually lead me to this hotel room in the California/Nevada mountains from where I am now writing you.

What I ended up finding was a vision of America that I always knew existed, but never truly opened my eyes to. We live in a time so confused by the messages fed to us by our television sets and computer screens, that we so often lose sight of what is real. We live in a nation divided by our allegiances to politicians who often care nothing for us as individuals unless we've lined their pockets and bought the advertisements that lead to their election. Still though, for all our differences, we are simply people and the thread running through all of us is so very much the same. Where we are raised and what we see as children inform our futures in ways that leave some of us so lucky and others so wounded. The things we are told and the things we see as we're pulled from the ground like flowers, broken and beautiful, are so often are the things we become. Still what most of us seem to be searching for is love; this complex connection to another strange traveler. A wind that wakes us in the gloaming as the sun fades behind the hills and reminds us that some nights aren't meant to be slept through. To know another is to know a universe of others, and as I smolder here alone the words could not leave my fingertips fast enough. Sometimes a soul must wander to truly know it is home.