Music Memory

"Things are different now, things are different now” – strains of Robert Mirabal run through my head, and I pick up the bongos. When I listen to Indian music my internal landscape changes and I see a coyote leaping a low fence and crossing a dusty road under a full moon in the sage and boulder wash spilling out from the blue-bearded mountains. And when I open my eyes that actual landscape is there, but it’s not the same as when I daze out my car window on a weary trip back from Santa Fe, parallel worlds apart, white and sweater clad, shoes too tight, coffee too strong, talk radio keeping me company until droning static tells me I’m all alone along the Rio Grande. Then I turn on the Mirabal CD, at first resistant of the change I know will occur. But then the flutes that rise along the canyon walls and float like smoke through the branches of the bosque trees and out into the faltering blue above the red escarpments, take me back to a place where I must have been because it hurts too much not to be true, and it is this land that is that place. And what I know when I write this is that I have been buried here, in the soft sand along the river, at the foot of a mountain next to a boulder, many times buried and birthed. Then the guitars kick in and Mirabal chants in a witch doctor’s wail, a medicine man’s entry into the wound, and I am with him. The pain, I realize, is in stretching myself across these parallel walls in an unconscious state incapable of sewing up the space, collapsing the worlds, remembering they are one. And then I remember, and it doesn’t take much; 20 seconds of a song, and I soar with the bald eagles through the album, chanting along, banging on my steering wheel, looking out to the west as I crest the horseshoe to see the cut in the earth on the caldera, my ass feeling a horse beneath me, my eyes setting with the sun through a lone, leaning tree on the edge of the mesa sea. And I understand how hard it is to reach back through the killing times, the unfathomable loss of recognition and understanding, to the times when the sun just circled the sky. But, I know as I’m listening and looking that I have to reach back to be here, and not just once, but every day. And then the CD ends and I see the sign for the golf course. I’m 7 miles from home. I forget again.