Best of 2008 - #5

I began to appreciate poetry a great deal more in this past year. I began to see how it can communicate life most effectively. We may hope or believe that our days work themselves out like prose – winding beautifully and sensibly to some conclusion each day. But in my experience the most we walk away with are fragments of memories, bit-piece conversations, a smell here, a scene there. Nothing comes together. Not perfectly. But, poetically – perhaps – there is order and significance. And good poetry can unleash memories from the tangle of moments.

Number five on my list of top 10 songs is poetry that makes “sense” of my world. I probably listened to “Find The River” any number of nights. The silent lights of cars would be cascading around our bedroom, and I would be trying to let go of the day. I would need something serene, and I would need perspective.

Michael Stipe begins to sing a song of personal struggle in a world of beautiful complexity, of agonizing relentlessness. The song itself – haunted by water – is an ebb and flow, a rising and falling tide. And the struggle comes from knowing he’s got to “leave to find my way,” that he must try to escape. Impossible. The tide is coming in, he is straining against the oars. “Nothing is going my way,” he laments over and over.

But, there is hope. The undercurrent of this song is the rising tide of receiving. “No need to leave the water knows.” So by the end of the song when Michael Stipe says one more time, “nothing is going my way,” he is no longer defeated in saying it. He is aware of a larger course in life, and he concludes, “all of this is coming your way.”

In 2008, I began to stop pushing against forces I could not control. And, I found in the surrender new opportunities.