The song was “Drift Away” be Dobie Gray. I’ve always enjoyed it, so much that I found a way to include it in a playlist of songs I workout to. In the shower I remembered the day when I first heard this song. The music carried me back to that moment.
It was Sunday morning. I was a ranger then, and I had responsibility for opening and admitting people, to this beautiful 4000 acre park, that I lived in. It was a quiet morning, being Sunday, and late in the season (probably late October), and the few people who might come, would not arrive for many hours. For entertainment, I turned on the FM radio to my favorite station. There I heard, for the first time, Dobie Gray singing “Drift Away.”
I didn’t know then, what I know now, but I don’t think I could have been more surprised, in either timeframe, by what happened next. In the past I heard the radio station play this same song, “Drift Away,” over and over again. This happened all morning. Strangely, I felt compelled to listen. Over and over I heard the band play “rock and roll,” and felt the music “soothe my soul” until “I drift[ed] away.”
Did a disgruntled employee do it? Did someone fail to show up at work? Was this some form of experiment, art project, breakdown, moment of genius, stoned forgetfulness, or just plain outright neglect? I never found out. I never knew why — to this day. I only know that in the midst of whatever this was, I felt more awake, aware and alive than usual. I went about my day, as if in a dream, startled into some other-worldly form of wakefulness, because I was mesmerized and had no idea what was going on. In some crazy fashion I drifted away.
The mystery of that moment, where some spontaneous strangeness broke through my routine, carried me away. That moment ended, or did it? Thirty-five years later I am struck again, carried away by the music combined with memory, and find my soul drifting into a landscape that is familiar for lacking any kind of recognizable landmark.
What I didn’t know then liberated me. I woke-up to a world that that didn’t operate in any way that made sense to me. That jarred me, and stirred me from sleep. Showering, trying to rid myself of the old stinky, unclean, detritus of living I am again awakened, drifting close to a freshness that is also life. The music is again transporting me.
I’ve been interrupted. Something is reminding me that I really don’t know this place, that I am truly a visitor to this world, that the moment is full of surprises, that I can be, and am, swept along by forces I don’t even recognize. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing or rightdoing,” Rumi says, “is a field. I’ll meet you there.” My experience in the shower, between the past and the present, carried away by familiar music and the unexpected memory, is that the field is not somewhere else, that needs to be gotten too, but right here.
The mystery is right behind everything I think I recognize. I keep looking and think I’m seeing what I have seen before. I see what I know and I am blind, seeing the world I have made up, the world I’ve inherited, that all about me agree upon, and I am participating in a massive trance, a collective blindness.
For some reason anonymity appeals to me now. I have this idea, certainly it is true about me, that people (myself included) have grown so jaded, that no good idea, insight, or revelation can be trusted if it comes from an identifiable man or woman. Everyone seems to have an agenda, everyone seems to want to profit, or everyone seems susceptible to being turned to someone else’s purposes. Because this seems so, I find myself distrusting human motive.
I have an idea this relates to Drift[ing] Away,” but I’m not sure how. Maybe the fact that such aliveness was generated in me, by what came out of nowhere, at no cost, has awakened in me the old giving impulse. I just have the feeling that my happiness, and the happiness of others, resides somewhere near-by, and it is a gift we give each other, by letting the world we know how to make use of, drift away.
l/d
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I have also created a blog for the elder’s salon, which has some good pieces in it (including mine). See it at elderssalon.blogspot.com
See also thslowlane.blogspot.com (note the misspelling).
I have also added a link. I don’t usually recommend websites but I have long felt that we (society) needed a vision of a future worth having and this short film points in that direction, Check it out http://www.ted.com/talks/nic_marks_the_happy_planet_index.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-08-31&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email
