Memoir: The Awakening

So, call me cliche, but the song I chose for my spiritual awakening is a really popular song these days and each time I hear it, I remember waking up and realizing that I didn’t have to “savior” the world; I was already being Saviored by the Savior Himself.

It was a fantastic moment. I shared it with Anne Lamott. Actually I was reading her book, Traveling Mercies, and in shock because I’d never heard this part before. I was told everyone who didn’t believe just like me was wrong and then Annie wrote of her and a friend out walking in the mud:

We moved as quickly as possible through the bog to drier ground on the other side. Then we stared down at our muddy shoes and we started to laugh. It’s just mud, we realized. It washes off. . . So we tromped on until the path came smack-dab up to a stumpy wet slope, with ratty little shrubs growing out of it. The path picked up at the top. There was nothing to do but to scale it, and I use “scale” loosely here, since the slope was only about three feet tall.

“Let me help you there, little lady,”I said. “I’ll go up first and then give you a hand.” So I planted a foot on the muddy dune, grasped a root, and would have pulled myself up the hill nicely if the root had held. But it didn’t. It pulled up out of the slope, and I slid down on my butt to the wet ground. Both of us started to laugh. Then I got up and tried again, like Sir Edmund Hillary’s dauntless fiancee, and this time I made it up. Planting one foot firmly on the driest ground I could find, I reached back down for Neshama’s hand.

“Is this a good idea?” she asked. “Are you braced?”

“Yes,”I insisted, and pulled her toward me, and she lifted up off the ground and moved upward a couple of feet, until I started sliding back down toward her and we both landed noisily on our butts in the mud.

I looked at her. She was wearing a blue linen dress and ballet slippers because she was going to work from here, and she was utterly covered with silt. I started to laugh. It was odd to be so old and to have gotten so muddy, to have such dirty drawers and no angry parents around, and no more face to save. . . .

When Neshama and I finally got up to go, I was still sad, but better. This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we’re most sure that love can’t conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredeth winds. It struck me that I have spent so much time trying to pump my way into feeling the solace I used to feel in my parents’ arms. But pumping always fails you in the end. The truth is that your spirits don’t rise until you get way down. Maybe it’s because this–the mud, the bottom–is where it all rises from. Maybe without it, whatever rises would fly off or evaporate before you could even be with it for a moment. But when someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again. At the marsh, all that mud and one old friend worked like a tenderizing mallet. Where before there had been tough fibers, hardness, and held breath, now there were mud, dirt, water, air, mess–and I felt soft and clean.

The song I chose is “Fireflies” by Owl City from their 2009 Ocean Eyes album.

You would not believe your eyes
If ten million fireflies
Lit up the world as I fell asleep

‘Cause they’d fill the open air
And leave teardrops everywhere
You’d think me rude
But I would just stand and stare

I’d like to make myself believe
That planet Earth turns slowly
It’s hard to say that I’d rather stay
Awake when I’m asleep
‘Cause everything is never as it seems

‘Cause I’d get a thousand hugs
From ten thousand lightning bugs
As they tried to teach me how to dance

A foxtrot above my head
A sock hop beneath my bed
A disco ball is just hanging by a thread

I’d like to make myself believe
That planet Earth turns slowly
It’s hard to say that I’d rather stay
Awake when I’m asleep
‘Cause everything is never as it seems
When I fall asleep

Leave my door open just a crack
(Please take me away from here)
‘Cause I feel like such an insomniac
(Please take me away from here)
Why do I tire of counting sheep
(Please take me away from here)
When I’m far too tired to fall asleep

To ten million fireflies
I’m weird ’cause I hate goodbyes
I got misty eyes as they said farewell

But I’ll know where several are
If my dreams get real bizarre
‘Cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar

I’d like to make myself believe
That planet Earth turns slowly
It’s hard to say that I’d rather stay
Awake when I’m asleep
‘Cause everything is never as it seems
When I fall asleep

Listen to the song:

Tagged as: brilliant, finding common ground, memoir, music