Good In The Beginning, Good In The Middle, Good In The End.

Summer begins and I'm overdue to finish an album I started a ways back...

Good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end is a Buddhist principle of making which my friend Anna Schuleit Haber taught me.  Beginning energy is very different from maintaining;  finishing energy is very different from beginning.  But the speed of days makes it hard to remember exactly which chapter of making I’m on. I run a damp paper towel over the sill of our porch window to remove spring pollen.  I’ve cleaned the closets, done the laundry, cut vegetables for the week;  it’s a miracle.  This rainy, three-day weekend has given corners of my house which had forgotten my name tenderness and attention.  The whole place feels different.  After long tours, I loved to clean drawers on arrival home, a similar feeling of mutual nurturing after neglect. Now, the neglect just comes from everyday life.

“Everything is clean except for my room,” Jean notes dryly.  “And YOUR office, which is NEVER clean.”  It’s true.  Her room is an explosion of paint brushes, pipe cleaners, and a fort with a front porch consuming piles of clothes and pillows on the floor.  It’s a different kind of mess in there – not daily responsibilities, not office maintenance, not unfinished piles.  It’s hiding places, potions, magic.  

The slowness of the long weekend has felt luxurious and melted into my body. I don’t want to do anything ever again.  My list of things to do makes me cringe to the extent that I can’t imagine doing what’s on it.  What do any of them MEAN?  What DIFFERENCE will it make?  Which items REALLY need ME?  Invented purposes, convenient convictions, lists of things to do are a strange moat of comfort to distance questions of meaning and loneliness. Today, in the rain, I iron.  It’s a once a decade occasion.  The warm steam is completely satisfying.  Jean is throwing glitter around in the room across the hall.  I can’t bring myself to think that life will return to a frantic pace on Tuesday morning.  Something insists inside me; my compass pushes back against the current of regular life.  Sales prices, advertisements, haves and have nots, the way it is, the grind of bad news, deadlines, texts and the existence of youtube — no time for something deeper.  Ironing is some kind of cream cheese frosting in the pace of 2023.

The urge to pare down, live spare, eliminate the extraneous and monk up has always been in my cells. Before Jean was born, I used to run away for a month at a time to begin writing something, or finish writing something.  Sometimes in nature, sometimes in France, always somewhere where I could get lost in new rhythms, remove cultural norms, meet a regular day with a delicious sense of wonder, become reacquainted with how time elongates when invited, and remember how exquisite living on earth is.  My job, during that allotted time, was to be free and to write down what I found. No email, no showing up otherwise, no unworthy distractions — those are some of my happiest times. 

Jean has run a bath.  She enters my room naked, covered in bubbles.  “Look, I’m a glazed donut.”  We live a few blocks from a Krispy Kreme; refusing her glazed donut dream is a daily drive-by.  She circles, proudly, so I can see the bubble glaze in full.  Her feet draw a wet ballet across the floor and retreat.  

There is no leaving real life now, and there’s no desire for it.  Being Jean’s mom on my own is an unexpected place of freedom and relentless wonder, a new trust in the universe that the mysterious spider web of grand design exists, beyond sight and understanding, as something we walk into together between trees. 

“Do you remember how much I love you?”  I shout after her.

“More than the galaxy. More than you can say.”  She recites tiresomely, as if rolling her eyes. She has memorized this; I nod gratefully.  She is filled with more than I am, capable of more than I am. My job is to steady her before taking her glazed donut flight. 

Balled up shirts transform beneath hot metal.  Jean’s getting older; she needs me less.  The panic of changing course — getting off the road — and making a new way has evened out too.  There are still months I wonder where the money will come from or which project will next come to a boil – but it’s nowhere as scary as facing the nothingness of stepping back from touring life with a blank calendar.  I have developed a wider artistic practice and, if anything, my plate overflows with goodness. The strangely pleasing repetitive motion of unfurling cotton somehow makes clear a precipice; there is room, where there was none, for a thoughtful beginning.

A friend calls.  I tell her, hovering above a white shirt, that I really want to slow down.

“Can you even do that, Tift?  I mean, can you?” 

“I don’t know,” I admit. OF COURSE I CAN, I snarl inside.  It’s just been a long time since I was afforded it. I’m a tour manager / project manager because I support the work I want to do.  I’m a breadwinner / dinner-maker because I’m the mom I want to be.  I’m a think-aheader because it is my responsibility to build my life intentionally.  If someone said, here’s a day job that you don’t care about that will make life easy, I’d say GO AWAY.  But is the sit-still-be-free side of me such a stranger that my friends wouldn't recognize the woman who loves doing nothing but surfing, playing guitar and drinking cocktails all day? I guess it has been that long since anyone, including me, saw that person.

I don’t want to leave my life for a month to find her. Could I protect my mornings as sacred writing time, the way I did whole weeks in Paris?  Might there be a little room, now, for even a boyfriend? Could we have no phones at the table, after six o’clock?  Could I eat no white flour as I’ve promised ten thousand times?  The capacity to begin creeps in, bringing promise and long shadows of failed attempts; it is the start of summer.  I refill the water in the iron and what is beginning is clear. It is the time to finish the record I’ve been working on for far too long.

A number of years ago, a few months off the road with my 19-month-old daughter, Donald Trump was president and I sat on the floor of a motor lodge for sale — in between boxes of moldy books, a dozen space heaters, and a pot of about 700 rusty keys on the stove – inventing projects out of nothing because I did not know what was next.  I was scared stiff.  In the abandoned lobby, in my hometown where I never wanted to return, raising a child on my own, come home to my mother — the motor lodge, almost reassuringly, was a bigger mess than I was.

How much sage would a person have to burn to shore this place up?   The old letters, the broken dreams hiding in month to month hotel rooms — how could a person genuinely care for these stories, pick them up and clean them gently, and make the ghosts a home? 

Not as much sage as they will have to burn at Dix Park. I guffawed out loud, alone, pleased with my own joke.  Dix Park is the mental asylum on a hill in my hometown being reconstituted as a public park.  All the unwanted people pushed to the edge of town are now smack in the heart of things, valuable real estate, a centerpiece, so now we’ll all go play frisbee on that tumultuous hill like nothing happened there — a collective memory blinder.  I picked up a pair of gold rim spectacles, left as if their owner had locked the door to go to work and simply never come back.  A sane person would think of all this as trash; I kept thinking there was some story buried within worth telling.

Somebody ought to write something about that asylum, I thought.  Before I even finished the thought, a GODDAMN IT followed. It’s me. 

And so, I began – sifting through old buildings, boxes, archives; collecting objects and asking questions of the trees on site; looking for maps, lyrical presences, hope, and lessons forward.  I’ve pulled at threads for ways our tangled lives inside and outside the asylum might make sense, where mostly they do not.  What I’ve found is more questions.  What is dislocation from reality in modern life?  Who are we, as a community, when we treat our vulnerable members so terribly?  What was it, really, that we were looking away from as we drove by those dark windows?   What is sanity in this mad, mad world? 

I’ve written a bunch of songs and sketches but I’ve been terribly afraid to finish this record, most of all because the questions do not end.  I’ve taken up research as a wholesome form of procrastination.  Of course, there is also the music business, which reminds me of past rejection, complacent systems, my own mediocre work.  Making a record renders me closer to the factory world of touring, the social media cafeteria. Celebrity culture, shouting louder than I want to, reminds me that not only am I an outlier, my work is too.  But, today, in the steady rain, the worn fabric is warm and pressed as I fold the corners with the pleasure of finishing a task.  Good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. 

Returning to real life and my desk on a Tuesday, the headlines are something like It May Be Too Late To Prevent Nuclear War;  AI Poses Extinction Risks; Conservatism Is Coming for Your Child’s Library; The Last of Saturday Pancakes, Butter Hits All Time High Price; Systemic Racism, It’s Faster Than Poison Ivy.  My list of things to do shouts now, now, now, promising only to create more emails.  I wish there were more ironing.  The unfinished songs, the unmade calls, the yellow post-it reminders in a line on the wall, the speed of everyday emergencies across the world — the whole thing feels, well, crazy.  I refuse the list and greet a part of myself I haven’t seen in a long time.  The morning is a canvas without knowledge of time; I may as well be in Paris. Good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.  I offer myself up to whatever hot iron insists on only me, to do what little I can.  I clear the pollen, cease the thinking, stop telling myself stories that aren’t true.  Summer begins, questions never end.  Write.