Lion and Magic Boy

Today I spent some time hearing some of the music from my past. Music has the magical ability to evoke whole eras in one’s earlier life, whole perceptions and experiences, acting as a pathway to the you that you were once. It does for me, anyway. Sometimes I find I have undergone so much transformation that a particular piece no longer acts on me in the same evocative manner, no longer triggers memories, visualizations, and feelings that belonged to me in an earlier time, but more often than not I find myself transported, at least momentarily, across time to certain periods of my life that seem significant to reopen later on.

That’s what happened today. The era? The early 1990’s. Sure, I paint time backward in bright stunning colors, likely brighter and with far less pain than the original, but something in me today was really reaching out to that particular time in my life, reaching to the person I was then, reaching to all the possibilities that existed within me then. This was before meeting The Ex, before Nathaniel and Serena and Eric, before moving to Colorado and back again. Before. I was driving a lot for my job then, driving from one location to another, driving the spaces between when I’d have to don my Manager Hat again and become the identity I thought I had to be to get the job done, and in that driving time I lost myself in the music, immersed myself in finding new roads and pathways in it, new ways of expression.

I was struck today by the number of possibilities I remembered from that time, remembered now but that went unappreciated at the time, unappreciated since I was bent on paring them down quickly to one, one road ahead, straight ahead with no turning back, no turning aside, no stopping to look. Life for me can be like that at times, as often I have jumped onto a seeming fast-moving belt hurtling in one direction only, one direction with no turns, no bends, no stops, just onward to that destination experience.

I’d like to stop more now if I can, not out of caution but from a desire to enjoy the process, to enjoy the path rather than fixate on the ending. I’d like to think too that these paths aren’t simply one-way anymore, that they have lovely curves and twists and often even revisit some of the same places, places that of course look and feel different each time they are visited.

Touching that music today reinforced my desire to step onto a certain path, a path I’ve been tentatively reaching a toe to in the past year. I don’t know where the path leads, not exactly. I’m not even sure what places it passes on its way, but there’s something about it that calls to me, calls ever-strongly, unceasingly. It calls with music, it calls with touch, it calls me with everything that so much of me cries out for, all those long-released possibilities that lay dormant all those intervening years while I explored other paths, those possibilities that I touched again, recognized instantly through the magic of music. They’re not the same as they once were, those possibilities, as I can never look at anything the same way I once did when I saw it for the first time, but in the meantime those possibilities have grown and have become far larger than I ever imagined them when they were new, and it’s those I reach toward now, those that are part of the path that I am about to step onto, about to grab hold of, about to place my trust in.