The gale force wind is ripping at the tent pens and ropes. Lightning, now overhead, lights up the valley revealing the ten thousand foot peaks in all directions etched against a violent purple sky. Belly full of soup, head full of whiskey and a tattered heart filled with longing. I can hear my brother sleeping next to me, tossing and turning on the uneven ground and breathing deeply. We walked up and around The Amphitheatre in the Drakensberg mountains and via a couple of metal ladders at the top we accessed the escarpment. We were met with hard rain, hail and low cloud. We stumbled on the uneven ground with our heavy packs and soaking boots but finally found our campsite. With shivering bodies and freezing hands we set up the tent, got rid of our wet clothes and with a little hot water heating up on the burner crawled into our sleeping bags. We stayed in the tent for the rest of the day listening to music, talking about everything from our school days to our travels. Easy conversations, hard discussions, friendship, chosen family.
It's quite something being exposed to the elements the way we were the last couple days. The place makes you feel small and that is a good thing. Way too little humility in the world these days. With no cellphone reception and hours of nothing but thinking and staring to do the mind drifts back and forth along the highways and byways of life. You come across people and places loved and left behind. Places burnt into your soul. You find the strangers, the drifters, the lost souls. You find the ones you had to leave behind and the ones that still scratch at the door of your soul.
It's hard to walk away from people you love and care about. Especially when your friendships and relationships become one sided and you feel more empty and unappreciated with every abrupt, condescending reply and missed appointment. You realize that people move on. They fill their lives with things that eventually don't include you. You are made out as a fool for following your heart and passions. For choosing not to have the expensive wedding and the screaming kid and the Labrador with the picket fence. They assume you wouldn't want to be part of their lives because deep down they envy your freedom but instead of accepting you and including you, they choose to judge. Others however find away, because the relationship between you and them means more than excuses about feeding the baby or walking the dog. They want you to be part of their journey. They want you hold the newborn, pet the dog and celebrate the big events. It gets hard to draw a line....and to choose your side of the battle sometimes.
Once I love you, that love will be there forever. Love doesn't walk away, only people do. The hardest thing for me personally is to learn how to stop caring. To learn to walk away and to know when to let things go. And to be at peace with the fact that people come into your life for a time and a reason and that it's okay if they don't hang around. We are all in a state of becoming. We are all still looking for the reason and the meaning. All we owe each other is the truth and empathy. This life can be hard. That is where my job as a writer begins. I tell stories, some my own, some made up and some observed. I try and tell them and sing them in a way that the listener can find parallels between themselves and their stories and the ones I'm telling. Empathy. The knowledge that you as the listener are not alone in your predicaments and struggles. That there is hope no matter how hard it gets.
I want to thank you for listening, sharing and streaming my new EP, Midwestern Dreams. Thank you for your messages and emails. Thank you for your support. Slowly but surely venues are opening up after the pandemic and it's my hope to see you one of these days at a venue and tell my stories and shake your hand. I've got plans for a tour through the Northern Free State with The Vagabonds and I'm planning on releasing more music in the coming months.
So now as the crisp autumn air is slowly turning the leaves from green to red, yellow, orange and brown I dream of a buckskin horse sniffing the mountain air high above the desert plains. The creaking of saddle leather and the smell of wild flowers in the riverbeds. I remember her skin on my skin and the smell of her hair. I recall our last conversation and salt of her tears. Run horses...just run........
JB