Monday, November 16, 2009

Seasons of Light

It's such a cheesy phrase but I'll say it: the soundtrack of my life. Been thinking of that as I'm preparing playlists for a party for my upcoming "landmark" birthday, because, well, I want the evening to have more meaning than just another get-together, helping me take the next steps toward my approach to the next phase of life. And I do feel one phase is ending and another beginning.
But, really, I'm always there, running over the soundtrack of my life. Still loving the music I grew up with, and savoring the songs that moved me and soothed me and turned me on and helped me blow the cobwebs out at so many different points.
So it is with great excitement and satisfaction and gratitude that I'm playing, once again, Laura Nyro's "Seasons of Light," a live collection of songs that, singly and as a journey from one to the next, was such a part of things for me for a time that I wore the cassette tape out. Have been wanting to hear it again, in toto, but could not find what it was until I asked a friend, a fellow Laura fan, and he knew, right away: "Seasons of Light."
And here it is again, a gift. And just one of the many new and changing and returning things in my life that stitch my soul together through the years, like the people I love, and poems, and places, and moments, looping and unraveling and holding and stretching and rolling back again, holding this heart together as I live through my years.

Spring rain in the railyard, Centralia, Washington