8/25/2023 0 Comments Hiss golden messenger wife![]() Inventory, my leave-taking and return over back roads so blue they look black until the dawn. ![]() Heart LikeĪ Levee is my taking stock of my universe, my span, my It’s hard to even begin to conceive of how to measure our boundaries. An impermanent, permeable thing, lovely for its changeabil- ity, blameless for its fallibility. The heart is a beautiful vessel, prone to failure and breathtaking acts of grace. I reckoned with things that I couldn’t see, but I could feel and in so feeling begin to under- stand as real to me and those whom I love. I wrote about our responsibilities to our brothers and sisters-of blood and the road-and how easy it can be to abdicate those responsibilities at the slightest threat of bad weather. Through the spring and summer, while traveling and when I was off the road and at home in Durham, I wrote about love-the teaching kind and the destroying kind- and about movement, and being moved, really and truly moved. But in that snowy ho- tel room I found the refrain that became my compass: I was a dreamer, babe, when I set out on the road but did I say I could find my way home? And then-driven by monthly bills and pure fear- I left for another tour, carrying a load of guilt that I could just barely lift. How could I forget? Though maybe my lapse was reasonable: I had just quit my job, the most recent and last, in a series of dead-end gigs stretching back 20 years, with the vow that my children would understand their father as a man in love with his world and the inventor of his own days. Forgetting, momentarily, that for me, each exists only with the other. At that time I was feeling-more acutely than I had ever felt before-wrenched apartīy my responsibilities to my family and to my music. The writing of the songs that became Heart Like a Levee started in a hotel room in Washington, DC, in January of 2015 during a powerful storm that dark- ened the East Coast.
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