Lovers of poetry will immediately spot this song’s reference to Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening. That famous piece is often interpreted as a musing on impending, inevitable death. I actually find it more meaningful, though, at face value—longing to be still and appreciate the beauty at hand, but feeling the weight of pressing obligations.
Perhaps less obvious in the lyric is another piece of writing that equally inspired this song, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are. In spite of its dubious title, Kabat-Zinn offers useful thoughts on mindfulness in that book that stick with me fifteen years after I first read it. Among them is the idea that the flow of life and history closes around us like a stream around a stone.
If I were to die today, what would happen? There would be sadness, some expectations unmet and some processes would be disturbed, certainly. But then things would gradually work themselves out and life would move on.
All that worries us, all that seems profoundly urgent and important — it would all work itself out one way or another. In that knowledge, Kabat-Zinn urged us to let our anxiety go. To pretend that we have died and that it is no longer our place to worry. Then to come back to the here and now, to the extraordinary gift of this day, and leave the worry behind.
On this morning, as we head into our to-do lists and try to meet the challenges laid before us, my prayer for us all is that we may trust that in the end, there is no need to worry. God really is in control and our anxiety is neither necessary nor productive. Quakers speaking of ‘walking lightly over the earth.’ May it be so for us.
Dark & Deep
©1997 Lower Dryad MusicOn a two lane road through the mountains
I am taking the corners too fast
My head is spinning as fast as my wheels
Shifting from future to past
So many things to attend to
So many places to be
The mountains roll right past my window
Like a half-watched bar room TVIf I could die just for a moment
Let these worries work themselves out
If it would all go on without me
Tell me what’s all this worry about?
A promise is not like a moment
A moment’s not something you keep
I’ve made too many promises lately
And the woods are lovely, dark and deepI remember this friend down in Florida
She used to get lost just for fun
She’d take any turn that presented itself
Just to see where the road might run
It’s amazing the places they’d take her
The people and things that she’d find
I’ve been meaning to look her up again
But I can’t seem to find the timeIf I could die just for a moment
Let these worries work themselves out
If it would all go on without me
Tell me what’s all this worry about?
A promise is not like a moment
A moment’s not something you keep
I’ve made too many promises lately
And the woods are lovely, dark and deepTrying to make all the ends meet
It’s like I’m skating the edge of a knife
I’m so busy making a living
I’ve got no time for a lifeIf I could die just for a moment
Let these worries work themselves out
If it would all go on without me
Tell me what’s all this worry about?
A promise is not like a moment
A moment’s not something you keep
I’ve made too many promises lately
And the woods are lovely
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
