Every sweet song that comes on the radio is about me. Rather than walk through my neighborhood in the gathering dusk, I dance. I skip. I sing. Twice in the past week you could have driven down Marshall at around 7:40 and seen me pirouetting, for Christ's sake. I'm so frustratingly gooey and ridiculous that there are soberer, quiet moments where I think:
Oh my god. I hate myself.
I can't help it. I haven't felt like this in ages.
***
I wake up sometime in the middle of the night. I'm cuddled up on the couch, wrapped in a cottony, fluffy blanket. There's a woodstove at my feet and the sound of rain on the roof. The entire room is lit by twinkly white lights and candles. I am warm. I am happy. I am loved.
I've woken up to the sound of a cello, a guitar, and a three part harmony on one of my favorite songs. I sing along (quietly enough that I don't disturb the delicate balance of the other voices) and smile to myself.
Wagon Wheel was my introduction to bluegrass. It's the song that inevitably is played whenever my musical friends get together. It's a song I can remember hearing for the first time with the kind of crystalline clarity that makes me suspect it's actually a false memory. It's a song that I have to hear to the end whenever it's started. It's the song I sing in the shower and we sang on my 25th birthday sitting on the floor of my shitty, mouse-infested graduate school apartment.
Yikes. I suddenly realize how gross that floor was and by extension, how gross sitting on it was.
When I was attending a Benedictine college I heard a lot of chatter about the values of hospitality and community. I did not realize how deeply those values would impact my life until full of risotto and wine and conversation, I would stay up late having marathon conversations about God and Love and Truth and Children. Conversations where things that had influenced my life abstractly as a theologian (Faith, Love, Charity) were brought to bear on the life I was living and the decisions I was making about community, kindness, and sustainability.
Somehow everything was always proceeded or followed by music. Huge, angry intellectual sparring matches devolved into harmonies and melodies. Hurt feelings were soothed away by familiar choruses and even if we didn't all believe in an afterlife, we sure as hell loved to sing about it.
And always (usually at my request) came Wagon Wheel. It's been such a part of my life that I can remember each of the specific instances in which we sang it as a group and why those days were important and what they meant in my developing adulthood. I smile when I think about the future times we'll sing it and wonder what those occasions will mean and how they will shape me the way all those past late nights have. I can't help but feel like the song has wormed its way into my DNA. That, should I ever actually have kids, loving it will be passed down through the generations until a 100 years from now some descendant of mine will be around a campfire asking "Hey, does anyone know that old song . . ."
***
The past ten years of my adult life have been a series of experiments on how to (and please forgive the douchiness of what I'm about to say) live authentically. I've learned how community grows organically and what I can do to help that community thrive (Pro tip: live nearby). I've failed in building that community and authenticity in some places (the North Country) but have laid down deep roots in others (who knew that Stearns, Hennepin, and Ramsey counties could all occupy the same space in my heart? Jesus, who knew that I would fall in love with Stearns County?). Growing up has been a process of deciding that I want to live a life where community, charity, patience, and kindness are not just things I think about on holidays or when someone shows me some small example of them, but are things that I want to influence my daily life and work.
And before I sound too ohmygodi'mtotallyselfactualized here, I need to say that these things are really difficult for me. They're well, virtues I guess, that I don't have. At all. Anyone who has had the misfortune to drive with me through a traffic jam or catch me when I'm late can attest to how quickly I lose my cool. I'm not particularly good at being attentive to the present, when I'm tired or hungry I have a razor-sharp tongue, and nine times out of ten I would love to tell community to just sod off already.
***
I am completely, annoyingly, breath-stoppingly in love.
I'm so in love that it makes me giddy.
Have I mentioned that I'm so in love that it makes me completely fucking annoying?
God help the entire world when I actually fall in love with someone rather than something.
For the time being, I'm somewhat chagrined to admit that what I'm in love with is the life that I am slowly, agonizingly building for myself. A life where special occasions are where frustration and kindness, community and solitude, silence and harmonies all co-exist.
So rock me, momma like a wagon wheel.
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