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(And for the full experience, put in headphones and close your eyes.)

I'm sitting at a desk left behind by a National Geographic photographer whose wife left him behind. I'm trying to apply to my writing the same elbow-grease discipline I used in my previous career. It isn't working.

Trees are quaking in the hot air balloon rising-heat of summer, just beyond the line of sight of my computer screen, when an email from a friend appears, with a link to a song I might like.

"Expansive and introspective," he says, "like looking out over the Pacific Ocean." A long-ago piece of me re-surfaces like a jagged glass bottle with a sodden note thrown out to sea a lifetime before.

My mind drifts through a wormhole: to those three magical years when I lived by the land's end in a tall, crumbling building with hints of being once-spectacular, like a 1970s Rockette in the present day.

Then farther back, to a time when this friendship was still in the laying-concrete-slabs phase. Before the cross-country moves and alternating heartbreaks and passing-ships contact during times of travel. Before life began in any meaningful way (though we couldn't have known that then), when tender souls were on full display, like bodies behind sashless robes.

And now here we are again, because everything is cyclical — including the hiding and seeking and finding and showing of self with bold displays of external expression. Especially with music, that identity-solidifying glue holding together decades and a circumference of friends within your circle.

The temporary soundness of some of those friendships and the time-worn durability of others.

The steadfastness of music reflecting the wilds of your weathered soul like the Pacific Ocean itself: expansive and introspective.

Like the music that you are.

Credits

Accompanying music: The Warm Familiar Smell of September by Slow Dancing Society

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