Light, Dark, Light Again
An ode
There is a particular album (with a plus one) that has been a friend through this season of challenge: Light, Dark, Light Again by Angie Mcmahon. It feels a little tender to name just how connected to it I feel - it calls up a young, un-self-conciously earnest part of me that dove so deeply on certain artists and albums that my love for them almost became a part of my identity.
The + one is not on the album, but it was my initial introduction to Angie Mcmahon ,and is why I came to this album at all, in the exact right timing. Here's how it went: A year or two ago my partner and I were watching Shrinking*. As he does, he noticed the song playing in the background. He said, "oof, that lyric" and in one of the ways technology is still magic he asked his phone what the song was; Just Like North by Angie McMahon. The lyric: "Pain will be on every map just like north is..." The whole of it speaks to the heart of my August Ache—an annual onset that settles into my bones, connects me to deep old grief, and the essential lost-ness of being human—never complete, never finished, always learning—always destined to lose what we love**. Sometime in the first awful week of this latest August as time dilated around fresh new wounds, I asked "Hey, what was that song again?" He knew immediately. We were in the car. I shook for a bit and put on her top songs when it finished, which began with Serotonin and oof, I was crying again as she sung about the challenge of this year months before the August ache ever set in.
I will run to lift the levels
I will dance at the same time as breakfast
I will schedule my friends in
And I'll eat more tryptophan, oh
I will work on moving through it
And how I communicate it
Serotonin took me to the album, which landed on repeat through our roadtrip up the northern California coast. I can't yet listen to these songs without cracking a levee of personal grief, so I choose carefully when to play it—when I'm alone, when I have no obligations for a moment or blessedly finally a few hours, sometimes with my partner—listening with him helps me straddle dissolving and keeping my hands in the now. It's the lyrics, the tones—a visceral harmonic wail in particular places; it's the connection to the body, to my own bodily experience (Saturn Returning), to the earth (Mother Nature), and a familiar sense of heartbrokenness that comes of self-betrayal. She seems to be writing from another part of the emotional and growth cycle than the one I am in now, and one I also recognize (bless)—the part where the wisdom of lived experience arises and is being integrated, where a tenderness for the broken self has emerged from all the painful "you should have knowns" and "get UP damnits" and "who are you to's?"(Staying Down Low). It connects me to the part that holds a gentle-ness and an awareness that connection with the self is not a steady state, its a familiar rhythm and flow that has followed me through new experiences, and sometimes gets disrupted or distracted or confused and diverts me from what I know. She describes a particular place I've encountered in some of the big cycles in my life: oceanic grief in the loss of a loved one or a friend, awakening to the deep unhappiness my early adult choices had placed me in, a significant relationship I tried too hard to maintain for too long--folding myself smaller and smaller until I couldn't find me anymore.
Got a hard line on pretendin'
When I hurt somebody just by holdin' my breath in
Thank God I erupted
Instructions on people pleasin'
Rained down like a bar fight on the ceilin'
And yes, I did my best to hide that scary, silly mess
'Til I could barely find my silhouette
I don't know much about Angie McMahon, I haven't gone digging into interviews or anything she may have shared about her process. I do know there are phrases that refer to romantic breakups, a whole song that seems to refer to being at the cusp of 30 years old—a frequently identity-shifting era of life as it was for me, as I find myself in now once again. These songs feel like deep medicine to receive from someone so much younger than myself. It's humbling and sweet—a reminder that there was a 29-31 ish year old me torn from what I thought my life would be, who allowed themself to sob in the car at stoplights and with strangers, who refused self-pity and channeled energy into raising funds, into writing and other forms of creativity, who embraced a burgeoning adult love of poetry and the felt sense and learning, and who through trial and error followed their instincts onto wildly unexpected paths (that somehow, in a very circular, cyclical and probably actually predictable way put me on a very old, expected one.)
I'm gonna love every inch of this body
The limbs that are writing each day of this story
I'm gonna surrender my keys to the Universe
Please, always catch me the way that you caught me
I'm gonna let Saturn returning distort me
Just wanna be wide awake when I'm forty
This album, this music helps affirm that I am actually still deep in the cycle that pain can make me think I'm severed from. They pull me up and out from the current sharpness to a bigger view of my life, the decades before, the ones to come. I am coming out of the hardest part, just in time for a related big letting go that has needed to happen for a long time, that I’ve found impossible until now (Letting Go). There will be grief there too - and celebration, satisfaction. And someday - maybe someday soon, maybe in another 10 years, I will inevitably encounter another shock or personal heartbreak - over again and again and again, because grief is a part of the rhythm of life (Making it Through), is part of what lets us know we are alive, we love, we care deeply, we are breakable.
And when I grow up, I wanna be like a tree
And change with the seasons, helping people breathe
But all I've achieved lately is making it through
Just making it through
…Time is supposed to run out, time is supposed to
Sun is supposed to go down, sun is supposed to
Like your mood, like your power, like your battery
Rise, fall, rise, life, death, life again
Sky, ground, sky, day, night, day again
Rise, fall, rise, life, death, life again
Sky, ground, sky, light, dark, light againLight, dark, light again, light, dark, light again
Light, dark, light, again, light, dark, light, again
*The mental health professional in me can't help but say: Not a good representation of ethical boundaries within our current culture! And clearly intended for storytelling and entertainment. Also, great ensemble cast—of which Jessica Williams and Harrison Ford have my heart.
**As my teacher Carey Smith said in a recent workshop.
