I’ve been measuring time in trash days. A temporal landmark that tells me another week has somehow passed. I just walked our can back home from the end of our quarter mile gravel road. When we’re taking it out again next Sunday evening, I’ll be finishing my 40th lap around the setting sun. It’ll be the 14,610th day I’ve seen that sun. Of course I don’t recall them all, and there were days that it sat diffused behind clouds or rain, but it was there. It’s shown up for me for nearly fifteen thousand days. So many people have shown up too. I haven’t always. And I question the ways that I have. 

Sure, 40 is just a number. And songs are just words. Everything is “just” whatever we want it to be if that’s how we frame it. But if it can be more, let it. 

If this number that is rolling over both of its digits wants to shake things up, I’ll let it. If it wants to grab my face and turn it to things that I keep turning away from, I’ll relax my face. There’s nothing inherently special about 40 outside of what we’ve forced into it, but if it makes me unplug my ears and stop believing my own made-up stories where I fail every time, then I'll let it be what it wants. It know it’s not a switch, but maybe it’s a signal. Things won’t magically change the moment the Earth aligns to make me alive for 40 years, but maybe it will lead to me aligning more with myself.

Leaving my previous career in a full-time capacity felt like an alignment closer to myself. I made decisions and changes that felt more true to who I am, and it felt freeing and fulfilling and that has since grown into more than I ever could have imagined. At the time it was a leaving to escape who I knew I wasn’t, but not because I had found who I was yet. That became more clear as the blur of the highways and backroads went past our windows. I let it seep in and blur to my own edges. But I think I made up those edges, or it was a trick of the light. I’m seeing now that I still can’t see the edges. I don’t think we’re supposed to. We need space to keep painting, to keep letting the color bleed. And then we keep backing up and letting the picture come in to a new perception. We all have edges that will come. Lines that our colors cannot cross. But we should not let our knowledge of their existence force down our brush. There is space to fill with beauty that can only come from our particular set of supplies. 

I don’t think there’s one big epiphany that will be arriving on my trash day birthday, but I’m feeling the pull to be open to all the little ones that have been waiting.

All of the school and training that I did for my previous career had me looking at everything I was doing as a step to the next thing. It was hard, so I guess it was my way of getting through it...telling myself that once I do this thing, then I’ll be here or I’ll have this other thing. I didn’t want to be in the moment, in the journey, because I might have given up. This way of thinking set my brain up to see other scenarios in this way. Anything hard or uncomfortable is seen as a step to some other thing that will certainly be great. But all I have to do is look back and see that that didn’t work before. I got to where I was going and realized it wasn’t where I wanted to be. It wasn’t what I’d built it up to be in my head. So why should I keep following that way of thinking? 

I shouldn’t. What I should do is be where I am. Work for what I want, but know it may look different when I get there, and that’s OK. Just last night we were playing a relatively newer song, one written earlier on in the pandemic, and I accepted and acknowledged that something isn’t right about it. I feel it every time we play it. So we started pulling it apart and trying new things that feel more true to what the song is telling us it wants to be—different chords, different vocal melody, different tempo, a few small lyric changes. I need to listen to myself like I listen to songs. Feel it in my gut, and do something about it. Like our friend Tom Paxton recently said...always be willing to rewrite. We too, can always be rewritten. Keep the heart of what’s there, but let it speak with more truth.

So that’s what’s on my mind as sit in the lengthening shadow of 39. I am grateful to be right where I am, and that we get to celebrate most of my birthday month sharing our music with you. After a bit of a break from livestreams, we’ve got several coming up, the first happening next Tuesday. All the dates and details are below. 

As always, thank you for being here.