October, Track 7: All My Days

A quick explanation:

The idea here is to make a compilation album charting the course of a particular month—October, in this case. Part of the idea is having a good arc to it—this is why it’s an album and not a playlist; there’s a Side A and a Side B—and part of it is trying to capture the different emotions of a month in music. The biggest part, though, is that songs are a good jumping off place for writing about things that aren’t songs, at least for me. Consider this the on-site creative writing gym for The Barking Crow.

This month’s tracklist is as follows, and if you use Spotify, you can listen to it in playlist form here.

Side A

1. “Highwayman” – The Highwaymen
2. “My Oh My” – Macklemore, Ryan Lewis
3. “Human” – The Killers
4. “Spaceman” – The Killers
5. “Cover Me Up” – Jason Isbell

Side B

6. “Don’t Change Your Plans” – Ben Folds Five
7. “All My Days” – Alexi Murdoch
8. “A Dustland Fairytale” – The Killers
9. “Friday I’m in Love” – Phoebe Bridgers
10. “I Can’t Stay” – The Killers

Track 7:

***

There’s a good scene in the first book of Kings in which Elijah, having drawn Jezebel’s wrath by murdering the prophets of Baal, has fled that wrath, fed by an angel, all the way to Mount Horeb, where he waits for the world of the Lord. It’s the “still, small voice” scene. A classic.

It’s a good parable—God not speaking in the wind or the fire or the earthquake, God speaking in the whisper. The “still, small voice” gets a lot of attention, in my experience, in church discourse. And deservedly so. Not given as much attention is what the still, small voice says.

What are you doing here, Elijah?

It was an overcast day, two Halloweens ago. I was north of Duluth. A business trip had taken me to this lighthouse on Superior’s north shore, having taken Interstate 35 upwards on the map from Austin until I found the road’s end, then having gone a little further. Around that great lake’s western tip. To this place, on the shore, down some creaky wooden steps to these rocks, where the water lapped gently but firmly and left itself in pools in the crevices.

The year had been a race, and a steadily accelerating one. I’d moved to Austin in January. February was marked by an exhausted, personal gloom, one that left stepping out my apartment’s door sometimes impossibly difficult. In March, I got sick for a couple weeks, and while I recovered in the later spring, summer whipped me around to where I looked up in September staring down the weight of crunch time for both the businesses I run, a weight piled upon by a mild but real threat of financial insolvency. I needed to make it to year’s end. I needed to max out my pace.

So, max out my pace I did, and for those four months, my foot stayed firmly upon the gas pedal (sometimes literally—I spent the last weeks of baseball’s regular season listening to the Cubs collapse over the radio as I drove rideshare). It was a frenzied, anxious time, brimming with stress and the loneliness, the loneliness of working at these things alone. And now, here I was, at the midpoint of those four months, kneeling on the rocks at Lake Superior’s edge, kneeling on the rocks just about as far north as my car could take me within the United States. Loneliness very present, but this time, not in a suffocating way. This time, in a freeing way. This time, freeing, with the stress sliding off, lapped away by the cold, clear water.

The world, for a moment, paused.

I wrote once on here, back around Easter, about my tendency to have these little moments on various shores, and to touch the water, to touch that water on my feet or on my forehead and to pray, sometimes without words, to pray to be washed clean and set on some righter path. It’s not a hard-and-fast ritual, but there are ritualistic elements to the habit. I’m certainly looking for something spiritual when it happens. I did that there, there beneath the lighthouse, there on the shore of the largest freshwater lake in the world. And then, I walked up the stairs. I conducted my business with the lighthouse’s gift shop. I drove back down the lake’s coast, back to a diner known for its pies, back from there to Duluth, and then onward back down to my brother’s house in Minneapolis. The next day, it was down to Des Moines for a cousin’s wedding, then onward from there back to Texas on Sunday. Back to those next two months—two easier months, many times, but still not easy months. The easy months were a ways off, still.

What are you doing here, Elijah?

There are times in our lives, or at least in mine, in which we run. We either run through it or away from it or a little of both, and when we run away, we come to an endpoint, metaphorical or literal and definite or indefinite or all of the above. There’s a pause at that endpoint. There’s a breath. And from there, we resume.

What are you doing here, Elijah?