It's a smile, it's a kiss, it's a sip of wine. Sweet summertime.

Perfect song on the radio
Sing along 'cause it's one we know
It's a smile, it's a kiss
It's a sip of wine, it's summertime
Sweet summertime

We were wide-open that day, in the car, singing a country song, among the farms, up and down the rolling hills of the great, free, wonderful wide open.

The wind whipped through the wide-open windows. All twenty-four speakers, windows and sunroof - wide open.

"Perrfecttt songgg on the radiOOOO..."

That was then.

When the warm July air wrapped around us; infused with the smells of tall sweetgrass and wildflowers and pollen, like aromatherapy for our souls. That funky lady selling at the market would have been so jealous.

Her hand hung in the humid air, out the window; fingers floating above the rows and rows of hay and alfalfa. Waving at the memories of Sunday mornings, farmers markets, carnivals, cabins, ice-filled coolers.

These were days of pontoon boats and orange life vests and tackle boxes.

Summer days, like that one, offered a glimpse of the precious purity of life - so sweet, yet so indescribable.

At some point, she had kicked off her sandals and put her feet on the dashboard, with painted pink nails (and a little summer-chipped), her homage to Kenny's summer ballad - and a distracted-driving hazard of cut-off jeans; golden skin and long legs. Oh, for some yoo-hoo bottles and sips of wine.

An endless repetition of cornstalks blurred past us like mile markers. As summer always did, it burned through the afternoon with its own priorities. It was bursting and ripe and determined to show us its entire wardrobe of wonder.

In return, all it asked for was admiration and awe. That and bare skin and sweat; bikinis and flip-flops and belly buttons. Tattoos - show 'em if you got 'em.

Summer is powerful magic. It can make us believe almost anything. In ice cold water, in naps, in freedom. In the carelessness of wasted afternoons. In the belief that rusted tractors were just about the best landscaping, ever, possibly excepting weathered barns and faded ads for pipe tobacco.

It is a time when citronella and dill weed and ripe tomatoes are intoxicating. When we - all of a sudden - remember how awesome ice-cold popsicles can be.

When it's hot, eat a root beer popsicle
Shut off the AC and roll the windows down
Let that summer sun shine
Don't take for granted the love this life gives you

Along the country roads, the cicadas had started their afternoon song, high up in the towering roadside oaks. The leafy kings of summer rustled their leaves as we drove past, and the cicada sounds chased us, slowing receding until we reached the next imposing look-at-me, show-off oak giant.

Beyond each crested hill, there was another country postcard, another summer painting, each splashed with the same green pigments.

"Remember when I told you about the girl I dated at sixteen?" I asked her, across the seats. I had agreed to be silent of past girlfriends, but this one seemed distant enough.

"Well, my favorite memory from that summer we dated is from a hot afternoon, falling asleep on the floor in front of a box fan," I explained. "It's still such a vivid memory."

Memories of relationships fade, but we somehow remember certain summer afternoons.

We have a kind of bargain with summer. It's a three-month one-night-stand. Summer is ours to consume - to get drunk, to get sunburned, to sail, to watch baseball, to love, to bare everything. In exchange, we give in to a relationship that we know won't last.

And I think it gets high on our love for it.

With summer, life is ripe, like fresh cantelope. Life is succulent and rich, like the blue of blueberries that pop purple on the summer runways of open-air country tables.

And you know what? Summer can make love seem so easy. Carefree highway. Ventura highway. Barcelona. Love thrives in sundresses and Coppertone and sun-kissed skin.

And damn, it makes the world seem pretty cool.

Like it did just then, with her feet on the dashboard. Her hair swirling in the open window, blown about by summer wind.

Swirling with bleached highlights, her hair was a whipping, wonderful maelstrom of mirrors that captured every nuance, every wonderful fractal of that July moment in time.

Ah, summer memories. Love may fade, but it's the summers that refuse to let go.

"It's a smile, it's a kiss, it's a sip of wine. It's summertime."      

Sweet summertime.

Gus - the real MacDonald

I was softly singing "Old McDonald had a Farm" today to my grandson, and I thought about this story.

About Gus. And about my childhood.

@@@@

The man and his wife sat at a wooden table in their kitchen, looking out toward the road, past the white face cows and lean brown horses.  Their 1000 acre farm was just off highway 4, near Salem Heights and Laporte.

Ocassionally, tractor trailers thundered by, rattling the mailbox at the end of the gravel driveway.  Under the mailbox was a white plastic newspaper holder, printed with the words, "Herald Argus."

The white farm house was streaked with Indiana soil, eroded by Indiana wind.  A white oak tree planted near the house generations ago sheltered it from the sun, spreading its limbs across the yard and up over the roof, fanning lobed leaves and creating dappled shadows on the small patch of grass just outside the window.

"Gus," the farmer's wife asked, "you expecting someone?"  She pointed down the drive as a station wagon slowly pulled in.

"Nope.  Probably just turning around."

They didn't.  Their Plymouth kept coming up the driveway and stopped near the house, under the tree.  As the two inside watched, the visitors began unloading from the car.  They excitedly hurried toward the cows, who gazed at them curiously from behind the barbed wire.

Gus pushed his chair back and made his way out the metal screen door of the kitchen, which squeaked and slammed shut behind him.  He squinted out into the sunshine, his face taunt and bronzed, lined from country sun and winter winds.  He saw a young man headed toward the door, wearing a white short sleeve shirt and knit pants.  His hair was cropped short and he had a pipe in his hand.  It was my father.

"Hi there," Gus said.  "Can I help you?"

"Yes," said the man, introducing himself.  "You see, we're out here for the weekend at our cottage.  But my wife wanted the kids to see a real farm.  Well, we were driving by yours and thought maybe we'd ask if we could see it."  My father must have been confident Gus couldn't say no.

"I'm Gus," said the farmer, looking at the gathering of children near the heifers.  "I guess it would be okay if they looked around some, but they need to be careful near them cows."

When we met Gus, he was as pure and undistilled as any farmer ever was.  His dusty jeans were the real thing, unlike the dark blue ones my mother bought for us at Sears.  His shirt was denim.  And his cap was John Deere, back when John Deere wasn't cool.

That was the first of many trips to Gus's farm.

Back then, Gus was larger than life.  His world, up close, was much bigger than what we had imagined.   Frightening at first but, when we got used to it, exciting.  And everywhere on his farm, the air smelled of manure, made in the pens and moved out to the fields.

It was work on Gus's farm that was often threatened as the fate to be earned for various misdeeds.  "You'll spend the summer working on Gus's farm, is that what you want?"  If it was that bad, we'd wonder, why did we always stop there on vacation?

We must have outgrown the farm experience, because ours visits stopped at some point.  For years, on any country road, we would look for the familiar farm and argue over real versus imagined sightings.  All it took was a white frame house and an oak tree, and it was Gus's place.

Perhaps fate steered our station wagon into that driveway on highway 4.  But my parents pulled into it, drawn by the future.  It's as if they knew Gus would be there - and that he would become part of our family's story, whether he was ready or not.

Those trips gave us the chance to get right up to the fence, close enough to the horses and cows to smell their breath and look into their eyes.  To be unafraid and amazed.

****

I wish I could take Rhys to meet Gus - the real MacDonald.

Living Life Alive

There was a time when I lived on an isolated tip of a tropical peninsula.

It was a place where the days were bleached in a searing sun. Where the afternoons were ritually ripped apart by monstrous thunderstorms.

It was serene and peaceful. Where the nights could be spent listening to the waves crash across the dark dunes; where baby turtles scurried across the cooling sand.

Back in those days, I drove a yellow convertible; frequently along the coastal highways. And across the numerous bridges the locals called causeways.

On the causeways, pirated Spanish Mane winds would whip the little car back and forth with salty air that smelled of endless summers and vacations.

The turquoise waters there were as beautiful as to be surreal. And on the warm, sugary sand, the spectators and dreamers would gather. The sand was a place that offered an opportunity to live life most uniquely and startlingly alive.

But the sand was an illusion - it was an almost infinite collection of single pieces of the finest silica - fragments of seashells deposited over the eons. Things once alive in their beauty were now given to be among the collected and carpeted; forever witness to the ultramarine sky and turquoise waters.

I was reminded of that when I saw the poppies.

It had been a picture of the Royals - Kate, William and Harry - walking through a crimson sea of poppies in London. It was a stunning comparison.

The origin of the poppy symbolism comes from words penned in May, 1915.

Army surgeon John McRae was in France, near the Ypres-Yser canal. And he wrote moving words that would bequeath generations with a poetic grief that would forever remind us all of life's value.

Of the joy of living life. Of the gift of being alive.

Hiding near the river, he watched, up close, as a fellow soldier lost his life. After he escaped death himself, he wrote a heartfelt poem about what he had witnessed - about wasted lives and the profound sorrow he felt for them.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

And that simple poetic treatise is why, at the Tower of London, individual poppies commemorated the nearly 900,000 servicemen who lost their lives; who lost their living.

McRae's simple words will forever describe the precious nature of life - and loss. That the suffering the loss of so many souls is a greater loss than any land, any ideal. That such a great sacrifice should never be asked.

Each flower offers itself to beauty of the whole - a royal carpet upon which Kate, William and Harry would slowly stroll, in amazement of the coral glory.

Back in my little corner of paradise, I was reminded that living alive was a gift that wasn't always granted to everyone.

I was alive and living. Breathing, writing, feeling. The Caribbean winds blowing my hair around on the causeways.

Walking in the soft, sugary sand and gazing at impossible turquoise beauty.

Strawberry Wine

"The fields have grown over now
Years since they've seen a plow
There's nothing time hasn't touched
Is it really her or the loss of my innocence
I've been missing so much?
Yeah

Strawberry wine and seventeen
The hot July moon saw everything
My first taste of love, oh bittersweet
The green on the vine
Like strawberry wine"

Amazon music was playing that song while I studied.

I looked up, away from the adenosine and enzymes and all things forgotten years ago. Listened to the minor notes of the break. Of the fields grown over. Of nothing that time hadn't touched.

Our study was about an enzyme blocker; a new drug that would support one of the most expensive and curative cancer treatments ever designed. A tiny molecule. A co-drug that would protect a patient's body from it's own version of biochemical suicide - while the other drug worked its magic.

It made me think of my sister, wondering if this would have saved her, six short years ago. I thought of her in hospice; hopeless. It helped me remember that this wasn't about a twisted, helical puzzle of molecules and pathways and cell biochemistry. It was about life.

Like the special one that we lost.

Life, a collection of untold moments of fullness.

Like that July moon in 1976. The October leaves in 1995, dressed for Halloween. Sledding that winter. The bright yellow-greens of Spring in the courtyard at Sacred Heart.


Memories that taste like the August blueberries we picked and the Michigan Cherries she loved. The smell of her chocolate chip cookies.

Memories of the sounds of her kitchen, when so many gathered around her counter, on chairs, on couches, and crowded into the laughter of generations; in the cacophony of barking dogs and crying babies.

And so, when the new cancer frontier begins to seem like just so much heartless chemistry, I think of her - and the way she fought to keep making memories. That it's not just chemistry.

And yet too often, much like six years ago, we know fights will be lost.

Even in that, I think there's a bittersweet comfort.

I hope she was thinking about when her life was green on the vine. That she was remembering summer cherries and July moons and her first date. The she could feel that small hand in hers on halloween, walking among the leaves.

And I wonder, in the end, if the best measure of comfort has nothing to do with chemistry.

It's the comfort of a life lived, green on the vine. Of summers and kisses and Octobers and tiny hands held. Of crazy kitchens and an adoring family.

Of bliss.

It's God's own sweet, sweet, medicine.

Strawberry Wine.

Rudyard's Path Forward

Race and racism. Greed and poverty. Cancel culture. Covid. 

We have become a nation divided. It cannot be understated. It has become who we are.  

This reality is numbed and hidden by the bread and circuses of technology. Implanted values. Implanted entitlements. 

So go on, blame and hate and riot. Then be ready to step into the abyss - a new kind of national treasure, a Grand Caynon, filled with a volcanic effluent. A lava-like mix of secrets and lies garnished with massive debt and the occasional secret genetic mutation. 

To consider whether we are past the point of no return is existentially frightening. 

A mighty river of divisiveness winds through the nation's soul; polluting, eroding, destroying, and eroding the fragile protections once constructed with ink and quill in Philadelphia. 

People like Martin, John, Robert, Malcom, Rosa, Abraham - they all worked to stem the current - before it could collapse the concrete philosophy of righteousness built by previous generations.  

This, from a nation that had an addiction to the printed dailies since the 18th century. That huddled behind radios and televisions to be comforted and connected to each other - from World War II through Vietnam and Watergate and the Iran Hostage Crisis. Especially through the darkest days of November, 1963, when our country's future would change forever.

And now this. Divisiveness. Distrust. Agendas.

The fabric of American values and political ideals was woven in the illumination of colonial candles. A cloth of specialness, enduring and exceeding all expectations.

Change, for the purposes of social justice, is a worthy pursuit. Some may say it's the purpose of the soul to seek justice and pursue a path toward social change. It's worthy of your full thought, your complete self. Your soul.

If there is an obvious truth behind what we pursue, why do we disagree? Perhaps the balance of this nation's values and beliefs are so perfectly and oppositely weighted that they cannot be reconciled. 

Maybe we need a national therapy session. I believe that someone needs to tell ALL of us how to shake our heads, squint our eyes and stay focused on justice and truth. Not by memes or populist imagery.

Or, perhaps more simply, we could read the inspiring words penned by the 1907 Nobel Laureate, Rudyard Kipling.

They're found in his poem "If", written in 1895.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

.... Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

then you'll be a man, my son.

It's a path forward, a gift, from 1895.

Second Chances and High School Dances

My sister and I were recalling the funny and politically incorrect movies we saw in high school – of headgear and pimples and double entendres and gawky teen actresses.

She teased me. "I know you liked Molly. You always had a big crush on her.”

“Me?  No I didn’t,” I denied. “But I bet she's even more beautiful now,” I offered, thinking that I might have a chance with the more mature and possibly washed-up version.

“Well, not really, she’s like, over fifty. I just saw her in a movie where she played the mother. I don’t think you’d be all that interested.”

In high school, I probably would have been interested.  Looking back, they were days spent in a sort of fog - one of self interest and experimentation.  What I remember seeps back in sensory waves – musty locker rooms and dance floors; classrooms and cafeterias, China Grove and the Doobie Brothers.  Pintos, Mavericks and Plymouths.

We didn’t think about the economy and Watergate and what was happening overseas. We were sealed in a blissful cocoon.  But we did think about girls.  A lot.  We were a thirsty bunch of Y-chromosomes, and girls were fountains of cold water in our testosterone desert. They stirred the fog and dizzied our senses.

Looking back, we didn’t choose them for their interests or intelligence – we liked them for their hair, their friends, our convenience.  Because of that, our relationships were destined to be fleeting.  Most of us can remember few moments today from those dates and dances and back seats.

I'm grateful now that we were able to experiment. We made simple choices because we were not complex individuals - after all, we liked Ford Pintos.   But we fantasized that those relationships were more profound than they really were; that all the drama and melodrama were the real thing.  They weren't, but it was a good dry run.

What mattered to us then were our friends, our image of ourselves, and our need for validation. Our role-playing dramas helped us grow. When they ended, we were stronger, like newly pruned trees waiting to grow stronger and taller next season.

We weren't looking very deeply, even though we convinced ourselves with certainty that we were.  If we knew someone who wanted to go Yale or Stanford, it didn't impress us much.  If they weren’t beautiful, accessible, or part of our group, they were probably bookworms.  And they were invisible.

We couldn’t see that someone’s values were perhaps richer, their visions perhaps deeper. Our brains weren’t growing in the right ways. We thought about Friday night.

But, had we not experimented, had our relationships not been simple and shallow and doomed, we might have chosen a life partner who didn’t have the vision or depth or connection important to us now - now that our brains have made the connections they lacked decades ago.

Yet not everyone has benefited from lessons learned in the fog of youth. Sometimes, the metamorphosis occurs later in life, beyond marriage, beyond children. Couples find themselves wondering about the depth of their love; the fulfillment of their life's promise.  And perhaps the person wearing the gold band sitting in the kitchen may not be the soulmate they need.

That person may be the one who went to Stanford.

So, after my sister and I reminisced about Sixteen Candles and The Breakfeast Club, I dreamt - of Molly Ringwold.  Embarrassing but true.

In my dream, she told me she was available - but I told her I wasn’t interested.

Anymore.

******

Midwinter's Jicker

It was the Midwinter Jicker,
in Spades then in Jacks
Carelessly careening
with us in its path

Brick ice cold buildings,
Victorian floorboards
Its tenants and walkers,
they all had been forewarned

Generations they gathered,
forted in an oasis
the big city shoulders
the young Archimedes

Our spiritual yogis,
Believers and psalmists
Dreamers and healers,
oldest and youngest

But the Jicker, it rolled on, depressing, tormenting,
Then it blew the lights out in a great soul undressing

Love, Frozen in Varykino

“They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the “blaze of passion” often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did.” 

― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Credits and citations
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, 1957, Pantheon Books

Love. Countless writers across the millennia have sought to pen some truth upon this thing around which most lives pivot. The indescribable truth that will effect lives even yet to be lived.

All the poetry ever penned, all the stories every spoken, all the guesses ever given, are not adequate at defining its nature. They cannot describe it.

Boris Pasternak, of Dr. Zhivago fame, took his turn.

This is what Pasternak said about it, in a literary description of the love between the Zhivago characters Yuri and Lara. They were having an affair, with Lara in an unhappy marriage and Yuri with an expectant wife. He writes:

“They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.  To them - and this made them unusual - the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation, of even greater understanding of life and of themselves.” 

Pasternak's works, in the style of the Epic Russian tradition, helped him win the Nobel Prize in 1958, which the Russian authorities forced him to decline. His parents were talented artists. His father was a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy’s works and his mother a concert pianist.

In the epic Nobel Laureate prose, he said it well - it's like a revelation. "Of even greater understanding of life and of themselves."

The moments of revelation, and the feelings, are like those of a lucid dream. Real and not real. The sense of being part of a thing greater than who we are - out there in the everything of the universe.

It's the thing for which many are willing to sacrifice everything. Even if its means stepping outside everything they are to find it. Escaping the known; fleeing to find it - no matter the ending.

In Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Yuri, on his way to see Lara, is conscripted by the Red Army. With woolen coats, they both flee to Varykino, to the Ice Palace. To a place of final refuge from those who would seek to end their love.

The Ice Palace is breathtaking. It's cast in cold blue hues and surrounded by desolation. It has a bitter, stark, and singular type of beauty. Stunningly dream-like.

Perhaps lucid.

Ironically, its grandeur is barely visible beneath the many layers of ice. Dangerous-looking icicles scythe from the curved ceiling, hanging over their heads like the army that seeks them.


Pasternak's story, a complex, fictional masterpiece is, in the end, a story of a thing that never changes. The thing that, over time and eternity, will always endure.

It will endure even throughout war and revolution, like the winter of the Russian revolt.

Even in the coldest and most desolate of places in the world, like Varykino. There, in the frozen Northern Passages, it can found - beneath the layer upon layer of ice.

In the ice-entombed palace, Yuri and Lara show the world, through Pasternak's eyes, the precious, rare and universal moments that are worth the peril and escape.

There, they find their moments: "...moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness... moments of revelation, of even greater understanding of life and of themselves.”

It never changes. And it never will. Nor will the attempts to describe it.

No doubt another Nobel Prize awaits the attempt.

Mr. Freeze takes Chicago

With Mr. Freeze freezing buildings,
he wrapped us in ice
And all over Chi-Gotham
he fired his North Pole device,
At the crusaders he let loose;
a great jet of water

At Batman and Robin,
an icicle slaughter

It’s less than 15,
out at O’Hare
Said Skilling on GN,
in his long underwear
Hey Florida, Australia –
how can you play tennis?
When here in Chicago

We’re a North Pole apprentice…

I wrote this, during the last polar vortex. And guess who liked it?

The word, the poet, and the tattoo

If I was a sculptor, but, but then again, no
Or a woman who makes potions on a traveling show
I know it's not much, but it's the best I can do
My gift is my song, and this one's for you

Elton John's "Your Song" explains a lot.

To express our deepest feelings, and do it well, it always comes back to understanding who we are.

Our gifts of expression.

Like sculpting a statue, mixing a gypsy potion, or writing a love song.

But before we can master it the way Elton did - or the way Michelangelo did - we need to tap into who we are.

We need to find the piano. The chisels and brushes and pigments. The words.

Without the tools we've each been gifted, we're just amateurs. Accidentally meaningful expressions, off-key melodies, meaningless words, or chipped blocks of marble.

Call it what you will... The soul. The potential that lies within us. The who we are that emerges during our best, brightest, moments. Cosmic gifts. Our superpowers.

They're revealed in the flash of lightening when we discover our goodness.

But the discovery is akin to safe-cracking.

The soul tells us, "You want the code? Come find it." Until we do, it stays locked.

It's sneaky. It offers options. Hallways filled with doors. Pick one.

Ask any writer. Any artist. Any poet or performer. Their best works of creativity and expression cannot happen without tapping into that special part of the mind. Often, they describe it as a connection to a higher level of consciousness.

From an UltraCulture article, we learn that "Throughout history, shamans, yogis, psychonauts and magicians have sought to map the levels of consciousness that it’s possible for human beings to access. This is where we’ve inherited incredible models like the chakras and the Sephira of the Tree of Life..."

Timothy Leary also believed in it. Inspired by the Hindu chakra system, he created a map of "Eight Circuits" of consciousness. And he postulates that some can only be accessed with substances that help us unlock doors on the highest circuits. Scientific neural research have recently proved Leary to be exactly right.

The highest circuits are mastered by shamans and monks. And perhaps people like Tesla, Da Vinci, Einstein, van Gogh, Mozart. Mathematicians Carl Gauss and Alan Turing.

When the writer feels connected to his inner self, his deepest emotions, the words flow from soul to page. The 13th century Persian poet, Rumi, is a good example. His words of love are simple, true, and philosophical.

Not every poet needs affirmation. Not every artist or writer needs critical acclaim. Their works are usually the expression of their cosmic selves. Their expressions of goodness attract like-minded souls.



Some express themselves in simple ways. Like a tattoo - perhaps a heart, an infinity symbol, or a lion. Or a personal symbol of memory or inspiration. And that's beautiful too.

We are all imperfect. But within ourselves, if we look hard enough, we can unlock doors behind which are amazing gifts. Gifts of the soul.

Once found, our expression is the word, the poem, the tattoo, the sculpture. The love.

Or the song.

Your Song.

Citations:
Your Song
Released 26 October 1970
Recorded January 1970
Studio Trident Studios
(London, England)
Length 4:03
Label UniDJM
Songwriter(s)
Elton JohnBernie Taupin
Producer(s) Gus Dudgeon

Somewhere only we know

And if you have a minute, why don't we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could be the end of everything
So…

Credit citation - Artist: Keane
Album: Hopes and Fears
Released: 2004
Songwriter(s): Tim Rice-Oxley, Tom Chaplin, Richard Hughes
Recorded: Late 2003

These lyrics are from Tom Chaplin and Tim Rice-Oxley from the English group, Keane. They were a group of friends having attended prep school together in East Sussex, England. They had pulled their little band together after scattering for college.

Before they were Keane, they were "The Lotus Eaters." They traveled the small circuit roads, playing in pubs, trying to get noticed, trying to survive. Even copying their self-made recordings on blank CD's, to be sold after their gigs.

At one point, Chris Martin, in the early days of Coldplay, asked Tim Rice-Oxley to join his band as the keyboard/pianist. He declined, saying that Keane was just starting to come together.

Years later,  Keane was struggling to record just a few singles, with no label. While Coldplay was early into becoming a legend.

Discouraged and with little financial support, they kept playing pubs and small gigs. Finally, they stopped performing and recording altogether in 2002.

Then, at some point later in 2002, they gathered to play a gig in London. It was attended, by chance, by the same man who discovered Coldplay. He offered to produce and release the first commercial single by the band, "Everything is Changing."

And it was. And it did.

Hopes and Fears, was released on in 2004. It debuted at number one in the UK went on to become the second best-selling British album of the year. This from a group that started by singing Beatles covers in their early days.

The group's name, "Keane," is a shortened version of Cherry Keane, a friend of Tom Chaplin's mother, and a woman who often cared for Tom and Tim Rice-Oxley when they were young. Chaplin remembers her telling them not to give up. When she died of cancer, she left money to the family, which ultimately helped the group persevere through their darker days.

They didn't give up.

And thus we have this track. These words: "Somewhere only we know." This song, like most of their early work, was largely about heartbreak and loss. Though many consider it a pop track to be buried in the boneyards of the commercially overplayed, it's philosophically worthy.

Strip away the hook, listen to the words. And you'll find something.

We are who we've been. Who we've become. And we will become what we live. 

I believe that our souls yearn for special moments in time. Our lives are circuits of time when things happen. Unfolding sets of experiences.

Most things that unfold may seem mundane or even routine. But some transcend into the extraordinary. For they are the times when we've made a conscious connection to another soul.

It's a connection that two people share during a moment in time. In a place, yes. But in that moment, the atmosphere blurs. We know where we are, but the world becomes a small bubble of two souls. A sphere of consonance, of harmony. A place where a soul becomes married to its purpose.

It's a place, a moment in time, that only two people can know. Can understand.

And the thing is, these places are sacred. They should be remembered and cherished.

For they are the things that shape who we are. Who we will become. And what we will take with us into the great everything that is beyond.

And that's why this simple track is so worthy. Why I love it.

No matter what happens, two souls will always have a place - or places - that only they know.

And if you have a minute, why don't we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could be the end of everything
So…

Let's go. Somewhere only we know.

Paul McCartney's silly love song

And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to 
the love
you make

When asked about the line Paul McCartney wrote in the very last verse - of the very last song - the four Beatles would ever record together, John Lennon said:

"That's Paul again ... He had a line in it, 'And in the end, the love you get is equal to the love you give,' which is a very cosmic, philosophical line. Which again proves that if he wants to, he can think."

Lennon got the actual lyrics wrong.  But the essence of it - he understood perfectly... The love you get is equal to the love you give.

Perhaps McCartney was being cosmic - connecting to another writer across time and space. Another "thinking" man, using quill and parchment and not piano and left-hand guitar.

He was Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, about the same thing. But in far greater depth. In his theological treatise, "Summa Theologiae," Thomas tells us about the need for poverty - that it would cause a kind of humble awareness of the world around us. That it would result in an existential goodness. That we'd become part of something greater than ourselves.

Aquinas believed that if we would only strip away the things that clouded our lives, that suppressed our souls, that altered and influenced our reality, we'd discover goodness - and the truly supernatural in ourselves. And that it was an even greater perfection in the eyes of God that we shared that goodness with others.

That we are called to cause goodness in others.

Aquinas writes, "…Now it is a greater perfection for a thing to be good in itself and also the cause of goodness in others, than only to be good in itself."  Summa Theologiae, I.103.6

Reflecting on how Aquinas's teachings changed her life, Maria Grizetti writes: "...it may follow from this also that one of the purposes of religion is instruction; instruction not simply on truths of belief and faith, but instruction relating to the human, the real, the natural in us, and leading us to discover the supernatural about us." http://bit.ly/1Tux0ML

In the West, many religions and Orders practice Aquinas's teachings today. In the East, we see the essence of the same concepts in practice, espoused by monks and priests from Malaysia to India to the mountains of Tibet.

And, while Aquinas's teachings were intended to be practiced in a very literal sense, they are difficult to follow today - living in a modern technological world. Despite that, their precepts illuminate the path to a profound insight: that within each of us is the supernatural soul - a soul that has a purpose.

Those that cannot part the clouds; cannot see to the core of their being; they will only receive the goodness that they can manage to share with others.

Those who have found this goodness, this supernatural self, have warm reflections on their life, "I'm blessed by the love of my children. By my friends. My family." They are content.

In my own life, each day I feel closer to that goodness. More surrounded by love.

But I'm also increasingly saddened by the pain I see among those who have failed to follow Aquinas's 13th century theological map to happiness; his profound insight into the potential of goodness.

Yes, it's the same insight that Paul McCartney shared in that final verse. A punctuation to their final
song; their final act.

Just like a final punctuation in life.

Oh Paul, you and your silly love songs. Who said the world has had enough of them?

And in the end

The love you take

Is equal to 

the love

You make

Citations:

"The End"
Song by the Beatles
from the album Abbey Road
Released 26 September 1969
Recorded 23 July–18 August 1969
Label Apple
Songwriter(s) Lennon–McCartney

Producer(s) George Martin

Off the chain, into Parts Unknown

"Dad, I love Bourdain. He's his own man, and his show is about way more than food."

Matt and I were watching Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" from our place on the peaceful peninsula just off the beach in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was the time in our lives when we could hear the waves crashing into the surf just past our balcony.

Despite the tranquility of our little stretch of paradise, it was Bourdain that brought us to places where we felt alive. Places like Barcelona, Paris, New York City, Montreal, and even Montana's wide open and breathtaking cowboy frontier.

There, in Montana, he spoke about the breathtaking beauty in art, forged from the hardships of the frontier and the vast solace of wide open space. He spoke of life - perhaps more than in any other episode.

In a moving CNN essay piece, he then wrote about it. From Parts Unknown Montana he penned, "We show you a lot of beautiful spaces and very nice people in this episode, but its beating heart, and the principal reason I've always come to Montana, is Jim Harrison -- poet, author and great American and a hero of mine and millions of others around the world.


Shortly after the filming of this episode, Jim passed away, only a few months after the death of his beloved wife of many years, Linda.

It is very likely that this is the last footage taken of him.

To the very end, he ate like a champion, smoked like a chimney, lusted (at least in his heart) after nearly every woman he saw, drank wine in quantities that would be considered injudicious in a man half his age, and most importantly, got up and wrote each and every day -- brilliant, incisive, thrilling sentences and verses that will live forever."

Yes, Matt, the man was was about so much more than food. You could feel something different in that episode, a transformative shift in the man. Bourdain was emotionally stirred by his time with Jim Harrison. In the picture above, you can see him, staring off into the big-sky distance, thinking about life and art and his place in the everything of it.

Bourdain, oddly, would also write, how he spent time with Joe Rogan on that trip, who flipped him on his back (while wrestling) and he found himself wrestled into looking at the wide Montana sky.

I wonder if this man's soul was destined for so much more than celebrity television. He'd often seem as if he longed to transpose his lives for theirs; to experience what it was like to live through them. At times, he seemed almost embarrassed that he was intruding on their nostalgic perfection.

I think it was especially true there, in Montana. When he seemed existentially thoughtful and poetic. Sad, even. Wistful.

In his writings about the episode, Bourdain finished with this:

"There were none like him while he lived. There will be none like him now that he's gone.
He was a hero to me, an inspiration, a man I was honored and grateful to have known and spent time with. And I am proud that we were able to capture his voice, his words, for you.

I leave you with a poem Jim wrote. We use it in the episode, but I want to reprint it here. It seems kind of perfect now that Jim's finally slipped his chain."

BARKING
The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn't die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there's no chain.

Bourdain, however, did die young. Perhaps his was a soul that longed to be off the short chain.

The one Harrison wrote about.

Off the chain, into Parts Unknown.

Hiding Love Songs

I wrote once, about secrets. Ones that we keep close, hidden in our souls. And looking back, I had known, then, only the barest of their truths.

In The Power of Secrets I said that a woman sharing her secrets is "an irresistible gesture of kindness, tenderness and a shared longing."

I've come to believe that, understand that, more than ever. They're the greatest of gifts.

For our secrets are the essence of who we are - underneath. Private thoughts that swim among our dreams and hopes and regrets. They're bereft of value, though, if surmised or stolen by another.

Some secrets are what we fear. Desperation, abandonment, loneliness - and loss.

Our wishes and fears. Silly and stupid and revealing. What we hope we can become. What we thought we'd be.

And the deep, powerful, secrets of our life's longing for love. The love for which our souls endlessly search.

And that's why they're so important - when revealed. Not as confessions, but as tokens of trust. For without the secrets of the soul, our human expressions, no matter how sincere, are mere notes and chords.

What we hide - what we secretly feel and dream - can create beautiful harmonies when shared.

When these layered harmonies emerge, they do so in the most unlikely places. They're whispered in the night. Choked through tears. Shivered in the pending loneliness of goodbyes.

In a tender moment at the end of the recent "A Star is Born" movie, Ally finds Jack's handwritten love song, hidden in the pages of a book.

She leans over and asks him, "Were you hiding this?"

They were his feelings for her, written as lyrics, a torn sheet hidden within the book's pages.

He plays it for her, the way he hears it in his mind. The simple song gives the movie layers of meaning and harmony. Jack's secrets, shared.

And that scene, the ending scene with Bradley and Gaga, it reminded me of her. So I penned a a gift of lyrics for her, which I thought worthy of sharing here.

Because I've learned a lot since that first post on secrets - so long ago.

I know how special it is that someone can recognize this concept as I do. Someone who even keeps a mental spiral-bound notebook of the lyrics and stanzas that are the melodies of her soul. She remembers every word. Not everyone can.

And of these works, few will be told. To her, they're expensive treasures.

Sharing secrets - trusting someone we love with our deepest feelings - can create beautiful music.

And it's a secret way to build a beautiful love.