The Valley that Time Forgot

There’s billions of ways to define what makes for good art, one for each person who has a relationship with art—which we all do. And even if we all applied just one person’s definition, we’d still disagree over what art is its best embodiment.

For me, good art chimes. It picks up the light from the rest of my life, and shimmers with that significance, like it already had my personal metaphors built into it. And it causes the rest of the world around it to chime too, reverberating and echoing with shared symbolism. Everything mundane around me can suddenly become charged with a deep importance.

I had that experience recently with a musical group. I’m still having. Weeping, laughing, gaping slack-jawed. The first flush of experiencing music that’s new to me is intense enough that it’s almost like an affair. I can’t even think of other music for a while. I just loll about listening to the same songs over and over, talk about it like a religious fanatic to anyone who is too polite to tune me out, run the lyrics through my head without end, google every reference I can find to the group or songs online.

This time, there was something I found myself circling in the music, trying to get at it. I couldn’t make it out but they were saying something to me, reminding me of something I’d forgotten, or forgotten how to feel with immediacy. Then I stumbled across a reference online in someone else’s blog, about how this group’s music evoked something about Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. And there it was. And suddenly, there I was, too. Again.

There was a woman in Seattle. We’d met at an event in Portland and felt a connection. I began making trips up to Seattle to explore that connection, as she would come down to San Francisco to do the same. We danced and played Nina Simone at each other for hours. After several such trips, she rented a cabin up in the Cascades one weekend and we got lost in the green and the fog that folded the entire valley into a separate universe. I fell for her that weekend. And I think that was the weekend she gave up on exploring that connection with me any further. That was 10 years ago.

I never stop loving anyone I’ve shared parts of my life with, no matter how brief. I suspect no one does, but I know for sure I don’t. In that way, I do still love her. I know we weren’t a good fit for one another, her and me. She made the break, because making breaks is something I’m terrible at, and I was utterly blind at the time to the need to make one there. I know she made a good decision. Now.

But I was devastated for a long time. Much longer than most people realize. It took time but I’ve long since moved past pining for her. And while she was an amazing woman, and no doubt still is, a lot of the time it took to get over her had to do with something beyond who she merely was. There was an energy she brought into my life, a kind of honest rootedness, that I am still madly in love with. She seemed deeply attached to her life and made me feel bound to mine. Or at least left me feeling like I wanted to be. And that feeling still moves me. That rooted feeling she shone with was a large part of why that valley grabbed hold of me so firmly. I’m in love with the valley, with the music we listened to, with the deep sense of place and time and connection I felt when I was with her. Something in her presence made me want to gather my family and loved ones around me, made me want to reach out into my life and dig my hands hard into the soil of my personal landscape, get my hands dirty planting something, some large green thing we could all gather under together and celebrate. Something more real than any tree, any family, any party, that I could just soak in the sheer corniness of it all and not be embarrassed by how cliché it might otherwise seem, the way it sounds to me now trying to describe it.

I really don’t know how to bring that energy into my life on my own. I’ve grown to let go of expecting someone else to manifest that for me, certainly. And if she and I had stayed together, that feeling would have faded long ago leaving me groping for it now all the same anyway. But this music swells around me and for a while I’m back in that ludicrously green valley, bundled in fog, amid those tightly knotted mountains and trees, by that river we could hear but couldn't find and I suddenly feel hopeful in a way that I haven't felt in almost 10 years.

I know the feeling will pass. And come again later. But it will have to be something else that triggers it. There’s only so much one collection of songs can do.