Like a Rock

As sometimes happens, music pulled together my thoughts this week.  Lined up and made order of the jumble of emotions and ideas in my head.  The last 6 weeks has been filled.  Ups and downs, highs and lows, and work work work.  We'd decided during Spring Break to look at houses in Kansas City, MO, and the week after returning we placed a bid on a home there. Two weeks of negotiating a contract, and then 4 weeks of packing, decluttering, garage sales, and tying up all the loose home improvement ends. Regularly the Spring Clean Up in the yard is a huge job, but with preparing to list our home for sale it became a job for me, 3 sons, a husband, 4 laborers, a neighbor and his young man assistant, a trash hauler, 75 bags of mulch, and about 200 annuals.

As sometimes happens, attitude pulled apart everything over the stress of the work and expectations.  I retreated into my last major job, painting my bedroom, put my iPhone on my little JBL docking station and blasted the Pandora.

After an hour or so, I am a rock by Simon and Garfunkel came on. The ideas in the song made me smile with the irony is that it's sung in a perfect harmony with a lifelong friend.

I've built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It's laughter and it's loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I am an island. 

Around age 14, Simon and Garfunkel started writing songs together and practicing harmonies, recording themselves on Garfunkel’s tape recorder. From the beginning, Simon and Garfunkel worked as a team. 

But even though they seemed to be at the height of their success, they could no longer work together. “Making music together, once so easy, had become an abrasive, divisive process,” wrote Morella and Barey. “And the recording studio, once their favorite creative refuge, now seemed like a prison.” Years of tension between the two finally pulled the musical team apart. Fortunately, the friendship was only temporarily put aside. Credit

The opening chords of the next song Pandora chose for me brought me fully out of the heaviness I'd been feeling and into the clear-headedness that prompted me to pause soon after and jot down notes in my journal. Yes, honey.  What Heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten.  Moving is a lot of stress, remodeling is a lot of stress, having 7 children is a lot of stress, having 3 teenagers is a lot of stress.  And sometimes we take out our stress on each other.  Sometimes we even want to build a wall, move to an island, run away from it all. But think about all the times I have fallen, and you have prayed and lifted me up- just like we said in our vows all those 17 years ago, a cord of three strands is not easily broken. You, me, and the Spirit who indwells us.

Southern Cross, written by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Think about

Think about how many times I have fallen

Spirits are using me, larger voices callin'

What Heaven brought you and me

Cannot be forgotten