First Thoughts
On Joni Mitchell & Cultivating Openness
If you’re new here, First Thoughts is a call-back to my first year on Substack, which took its name from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I wrote weekly about whatever made itself available: poems, stories, essays, and weird little lyrical bursts. I’ll occasionally pop in here when I feel the vibrations. Not that you need it, but I want to give you permission to skip over these if you’re mostly here for book(ish). I look forward to the next installments, a three-part series called My Year in Reading, featuring many guest contributors. Meanwhile, here are some thoughts on openness. Thanks for being here.
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Last night we put Frances to bed, and while I was doing the dishes I listened to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” about twelve times in a row. I’d never heard it before yesterday, which, now that I’m reading about its history, seems impossible. More likely, I just wasn’t paying attention. I (re)discovered the song from Jeff Tweedy’s World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music, a book I guess I’m predisposed to loving. The mere fact of him devoting a chapter to this song that had an instantaneous effect on me has me so melty-feeling that I am tempted to write Tweedy to ask if he will adopt me. Actually, this feeling isn’t new. I’ve wanted him to adopt me since 2011, when I fell headlong into Wilco’s music and Tweedy’s writing. So much casual wisdom rolls off his shoulder:
I don’t think you should ever override what your body is telling you about a song. Life’s too short to let your critical thinking get in the way of being moved by music. I mean, what’s more important? Catharsis? Or feeling intellectually superior to someone else’s art?
This is part of what I was talking about last week with my inner conflict in writing about books. Mostly, I want to do what Tweedy says here: Hey, fellow humans! Something is happening in my body, and let me try and figure out what it is and why it is, and I’ll try to share that Art Encounter with you.
Don’t we live for these moments? When some song or movie or book injects itself into our bodies like a vaccination put there to fortify and protect? I keep asking myself, why that Joni Mitchell song? Why that moment? I’m still not really sure, but I think it has something to do with openness.
The three of us had a quiet day at home yesterday, exchanging gifts, making popovers and a big salad with chickpeas and sweet potato and, later, some nostalgic American-Chinese. We read by the fire, watched movies, listened to a few records and a playlist some dear friends made. We walked our dog Fred, and talked, and cuddled, and traded texts with friends and family throughout the day.
I love being in this mode—receptive, un-critical, awake to the subtle jokes and background music in a movie, for instance. Alert to the finest details. Art, when you are in this mode, at your most open, can, I believe, fortify you. Can have a lasting effect. Can, who knows, change you in some deep-down, unconscious way.
It took all of fifteen seconds for me to fall for “Both Sides Now.” The song has a simple structure, but the real miracle lies in Mitchell’s powerful musings over her graceful, confident, bird-at-play voice. “Rows and rows of angel hair,” she begins, “and ice cream castles in the air,” she sings. Clouds once exuded celestial imagery, but now? “They only block the sun.” Observation of change veers into regret and a war with the self: “So many things I would have done / But clouds got in my way.”
She wrote this song in her early twenties, which is baffling, because her aphorisms flicker with hard-earned wisdom. She knows something—no, not something, seemingly everything—about impermanence and flux.
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day
She is neither optimist nor pessimist, but accepting of reality. The mind flits. The mind changes. And friendship and love? They come and go. And isn’t it all so discombobulating?
It's life's illusions that I recall
I really don't know life
I really don't know life at all
Pain, sadness, attachment, delusion, regret, acceptance, grief—it’s all there in one little, three-minute song.
Confession: I was a Grinch for a long time, dismissive of capitalism’s illusions and plunder of the soul. (That is still kind of true.) But you know, something changed when our friends started hosting a Christmas Eve brunch. It has become my favorite event of the year. No guilt, no shame, no pressure to give gifts (though some of us do), no shoulds. My heart was once a locked safe constructed by pain, loneliness, and mostly self-alienation. I closed off from many people for a long time, and every year when the holidays come around, I feel all the gift-giving and sharing of food and talk of the larger world busts that safe open just a little. The rusted hinges creak. The door opens, and lets another sliver of light in.
However you celebrated (or didn’t) yesterday, I hope you had a moment to cultivate some openness, whether through meditation, a simple walk in the woods, gathering with family or chosen family, prayer, or some other ritual. I hope you had an encounter with a story or a song or work of art that got into your body. I hope you had a brush with whatever magic Saint Joni harnesses when she sings “Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels / The dizzy dancing way that you feel.”
Take care,
Josh