Pulling a Britt Paul with the lyrics =)

So I asked a friend about it on a bad day
Her husband had just left her
She sat down on a chair he'd left behind, she said
"What is love? Where did it get me?
Whoever thought of love is no friend of mine."

-- from "Iowa" by Dar Williams

If you're reading this, chances are pretty good you know how I get when I find a song that really truly resonates within me. I listen to it several hundred times, write out the lyrics if they're special enough, read them, listen to every version of the song, sing it, try to play it (usually failing miserably at this), and even take moments of meditation to it if it gets to that.

For some reason, this song "Iowa" has been resonating with me for the last couple days. This line specifically-- though there are other lines I want to say more-- sends a shiver down and up my spine every time I hear it and I can't explain why. It doesn't seem particularly profound, except for the fact that Dar's watery voice singing these words paints a lovely somber image in my mind.

But in the midst of this week's despair and hopelessness, it brought me back to remember why I'm doing what I'm doing.

I don't know if everyone has these moments, but when a work of poetry, writing, music, film, etc. touches me so deeply, I just fall apart. I shed something. I am stripped of everything I thought I was, and I disappear into its art. Sometimes these moments are explainable-- Walt Whitman has many spiritual teachings in his poetry-- but sometimes, like with this song "Iowa," I don't know why I'm so moved. Yet I discover that moment of reconnection in these works, and this is what brought me to be an English major when I was so set on health. And you know what I'm realizing as I write this? This spiritual connection I find in certain works of art is part of healing.

So on a day when I am disheartened (or pulled apart at the seams more like it) over a bad grade on a paper I truly thought I had nailed, it was lovely Dar Williams who reconnected me with my purpose. Behind these words I found the message, "Get up. Get back at it."