Ice

In my therapy session today, which was my first therapy session in over a year, Sandy had me do a somatic meditation, which just means I put my hand on the part of my body feeling the pain (that place in the center of my chest, where the ribs meet and ache and want to cry but can’t and it feels so sad and so good at the same time like your best childhood stuffy) and closed my eyes and sat with that feeling. MY feeling. Until I realized it wasn’t just about what I thought it was about - this one moment, or THING or ISSUE that I had to make a DECISION about in order to SOLVE, but it was old, really old, the kind of feeling I sucked my thumb and scratched my little blanky over when I was little, and then she was there, the little girl, in my lap, like Huck when he asks if we can snuggle and the knot loosened and I welcomed it and just allowed it to hurt. And Sandy says something about “THE pain” and I realized yes, this is not mine, it is all of ours, and when I allowed that knot to expand out of my little pain it joined to the river of THE pain and I felt…. well… the feeling of abandonment went away. Well, damn. That’s what therapy is all about.

The ice lay on the power lines and branches for days and the nighttime soundtrack was pops and cracks and thuds and branches hitting the ground (all ice) or the roofs. It was brutal cold, sharp like the ice, and I listened to the looming tree lose her fight and split in my yard, barely missing the trampoline. She took the grill. Another took the gutters. Another took a bit of the fence. I got lucky.

I was in New Orleans at the Folk Alliance International Conference two weekends ago when the storm hit Nashville and I couldn't get home. I knew what was coming so I’d dripped the faucets. But nobody could predict what actually happened. An unprecedented ice storm disaster. Over 230,000 people without power. Some in my zip code STILL don’t have power. My power had gone off while I was away, but I came home on Monday to power. For two days. Then it went off again for three. I decamped to Jamey’s (Huck’s dad…my ex) and for those days we played games and watched movies and I felt grateful for the relationship that we have worked hard to create as a family, on our own terms. I had a place to go with warmth and love. Many, so many didn’t. Even back in my own house with power, alone for a few days while Huck stayed with Daddy, I felt this shivering uncomfortable THING in my chest… Abandonment? Alone? Fear?

I got sick early in January and it lingered, a flu-like virus that turned into bronchitis that never went away and I’d lost my voice at the music conference and felt exhausted and very much didn’t want to be there. Got home to the devastation but got on antibiotics. There was that.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered and the story was being twisted and there’s no amount of shouting that will make anyone in power hold those responsible for what happened. It was an overwhelming feeling of universal despair and rage. I wrote a song after Renee Good’s death. I’ll be recording and releasing that. It’s all I can do. And it’s not a protest song telling us what to do or how to feel. It’s saying, “How can I even respond to this…how do I sell this world to my child with THIS going on.” It’s what I do. Turn my lack of power into music. But my reach is small. It won’t change anything. I did it for myself. But then Alex Pretti was murdered… And I was at a conference of musicians who write protest songs and we all felt numb and many gathered in the lobby of the hotel to sing a song together and I stood to the side (I didn’t know the song) and felt useless. Or just didn’t feel like singing. Here we were in a 5 star hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans, spending thousands of dollars to do business and make connections in a genre of music that really is fiscally unsustainable for 99.9% of the artists there. Singing a song. My friend Tom Paxton would kick my ass for leaning against a wall not joining in. I wasn’t feeling very Joan Baez at that moment.

Then I come home to the ice storm. Ice. ICE. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence. Talk about being nose to nose with one’s powerlessness. It’s been a month of that: powerlessness. So I sat with it yesterday and meditated for the first time in awhile. From my meditation, I picked up my pen and my journal and I wrote what was there. It was fractured. Metaphors. Language that fit into poetry without form. I allowed it to not make any sense. And rather than spend any more time on it, I let it be and thought I’d get back to it.

I wrote a song yesterday with my dear friend John Dennis, a GREAT folk songwriter in the poetic wordsmith tradition. I’m so grateful to have met him. He’s not known. Those who know him revere his writing. He’s humble and quiet and kind and then throws down these songs that slay. He’s a true artist. I almost cancelled our hang. I was tired. I wanted to stay in bed. I was depressed but couldn’t cry. I couldn’t unravel the exact THING I was messed up about. So we just talked. I just needed to talk and to say that I didn’t know a lot. A lot. A lot. And he didn’t know and said it a lot a lot a lot. And it was good to just connect. And we were fine to leave it there. But I asked him, ‘Do you have anything?” (because John always brings a part of something). And he had a verse and a chorus and it was stark and beautiful. And so we leaned into it.

Turns out, my disjointed metaphors of unknowingness fit with his. My phrases I thought I’d save for a poem about the ice storm fit his music that landed with “I know you’re cold, and damnit I am too" that he had written that was the chorus. And they fit perfectly. So we wrote this song and did a little I Phone video of it.

This is what I do. This is what we do. And sometimes, I’m just too disconnected to join in the group protest song in a hotel room where a music conference is happening, no matter the good intentions of the group and the sad beauty of that moment. And sometimes all this disturbance brings me back to the scared and lonely little girl that feels abandoned and hurt in a corner sucking her thumb and scratching her blanket. My son is 7 and every day a few times he’ll just want to snuggle. We lay there quiet, he- curled up into the c curve of my body, and we connect. I love that he knows he needs this. I need this. And I needed to snuggle with my despair. And I needed my friend John to give voice to his. And we needed to write this song.

This, to me, is why art. If you’re asking.

Seven Days in January
John Dennis/Amy Speace

There’s shadowy scrapers where power lines stood
And the neighborhood’s covered with ice
Abandon your papers cause I’ve got some wood
It’s the only way we can survive

With God as your witness, you glassy eyed boy
Come out of that masochist mind
You’re caught in the distance tween nature and noise
In a world it’d kill to be kind

I know that you’re cold
and damnit I am too
It’s hard to be bold
But somebody has to

We all end up alone
Though nobody plans to
It’s hard to be bold
But somebody has to

A fat bellied robin on half-fallen limb
Red feathers against a slate sky
Little head bobbing through cracks in the skin
Picking for traces of life
We’ve still got a chance in the night

I know that you’re cold
and damnit I am too
It’s hard to be bold
But somebody has to