on the lark of morning
When you’ve just returned from something you could call an epic journey, whether it’s of the body, mind, or heart, let’s face it. You wonder where to settle, where to take off the travelin’ shoes for long enough to feel the earth beneath your feet, or to let your mind fill itself in a new and different way, or to sweep the corners of the heart to make it clean for what will now take shelter there. I’m in that spot this morning, having woken up to a wavy clock after scooting across several time zones to land back home. My motherland had hosted me for a good part of May, sowing its seeds under an extremity of light I hadn’t experienced in quite that way before —twilight after eleven and birds chirping at dawn before three. Midsommer would arrive in weeks, and the thought of being in the place of the midnight sun gave me the kind of tingles that only come with that which is too marvelous for dictionaries.
What I was distanced from has now grown closer, the stretch of a sea no longer between me and so much of what I have grown to love. The feeling of being torn in two by attachment to place and attachment to people, to creatures, the oceanic histories running through the many shapes of what’s sacred…well, all I can say is, the feeling is one that belongs not to me alone. What of this human capacity for knowing home, letting it go, finding it again, leaving it, bumping into the glory of it by chance, strategizing to investigate it, microdosing on it, praising it, mourning it, wanting to capture and seal it in amber, raising a question to it, ignoring its existence, thinking you can live without it, learning from last year’s bird nest outside the Swedish yellow door you painted nearly twelve months ago now that returns are possible, the three blue eggs you saw there yesterday proof of it.
This morning, up early with my Scandinavian senses on alert for an already risen sun some fifty-three hundred miles away, a song swiped me back to 1975, to the 17-year-old I was when some peers more musically hip than I turned me on to John Klemmer’s Touch. I don’t know how many times I put the needle down on that album over those years of being more foolish than wise, but I’m glad I did. I memorized the order of appearances, each song a teacher, a balm for my confused and weary soul. Why it came into my mind this day, at the hour it did, had nothing to do with confusion or weariness. It had to do with love. With the want of a body to be near another. Touch. I searched the song on Spotify, propped my phone onto my pillow, and let its familiar feels rise in a stronger, keener, witchier me than the teenager who had been drawn to it. My next move would involve sharing the link, sure that the beat, the tones would land well where I sent them.
Then, the bonus tracks appeared — Chateau Love, released in late April, nearly forty years after Touch. John! You’re still here! The opening tune took hold of me from its first rhythmic notions and that voiceover, those trills, that tenor sax, all signature John Klemmer. The track list of songs — Love Divine, Heartbeat, Smile, Beautiful Words Part One, Bliss Kiss and more — urged me to press play and give myself another hour of vibing with some new healing sounds, courtesy an elevated soul music maker. Thank you, John, for appearing as an unexpected surprise just as the sun peeked over the ridge in the place that at this second I call home.
