Perfect Song #10

My friend Chance, a truly singular personality, has a great story about a job he took many years ago in remote Alaska as groundskeeper for a resort during the off season. A real REDRUM situation. He didn’t see another person for a long, long time. Whiteout conditions. No access to phone or internet. Just him, some books, and his fragile human brain. He talked about hearing voices. He talked about having a sort of spiritual experience out there. Maybe only withstandable because he knew there was a scheduled end. And maybe because none of the voices were demonic bartenders goading him into axe murder. Nobody was around to axe anyway!

When he did go home, one of the first places he went was a mall. After completely alienating himself from humanity, acutely sharpening his senses, and losing touch with reality at times, here he was immersed in a cacophonous carnival of capitalism on another planet. The music was blaring, the lights were glaring, the faces were contorted. This place that he took for granted as a latchkey city kid was now a completely foreign assault on his senses.

I was thinking about this story a lot after a short weekend getaway to Mt. Hood. Dramatic, I know. As I’ve continued to claw my way out of a bout of depression, it started clawing back. My spine and neck are, to use a medical term, royally fucked. In an effort to regain the ability to turn my head from side to side, I booked a creekside cabin with a hot tub last weekend. No cell service. Just a book, some DVDs, a short hike near Little Crater Lake, and lots of soaking in the hot tub nestled in ancient trees next to a babbling brook. For about 36 uninterrupted hours, I was at peace.

When I came back down the mountain Sunday morning, the gravitational pull of everything I had set aside came back with a vengeance. My spine? Shrieking like a banshee on the moors. Anxiety? A stampede of donkeys braying into my guts. And the social feed….my god. What can I even say? Really. Can someone please tell me what am I allowed to say?

Three days later (otherwise known as yesterday) I drove out to the governance center of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde for a check presentation. Under normal circumstances I would be looking forward to it. After all, I won this grant for my organization, I should be the one to proudly shake hands and take pictures. But in my current state, I was dreading the idea of being spotlit in a professional setting. Or having to interact with anyone about anything in any setting, really. The night before, I went into a tailspin just trying to pick out a shirt and got about 4 hours of sleep. But in the morning I sucked it up, drank a lot of coffee, got in my car, and headed southwest for the two-hour drive.If you’re from around these parts, you likely know this drive because it’s the same route to the Lincoln City area of the Oregon Coast. Rolling hills, clear blue skies and fluffy clouds, and the trees are still lush and green at this time of year. Not a bad day on the job turns out.

Feeling hopeful, I decided to hit shuffle on my Perfect Songs playlist to see if anything grabbed me, but one by one, nothing was really landing. This one is too shallow right now, this one too indulgent, this one probably shouldn’t even be on the list honestly…but then I heard it.

Today’s perfect song is “This Song Has No Title” by Elton John from the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

The background of this album cover looks a lot like parts of that drive!

Why did this song out of the dozens I’ve had queued up for months rise to the top? Aside from being a delectable two-and-a-half-minute morsel with an undeniably catchy melody, I mean. We’re dropped into it like we’ve entered someone’s inner world, mid-thought, with an unceremoniously swift fade in. I love this song all the time every time, but the key to its pull in this moment in history can be found right there in the opening line:

Tune me in to the wild side of life

I’m an innocent young child sharp as as a knife

This song is naive and eager. This song yearns to connect with something deeper, something ancient, something cosmic. This song wants to shed light in the dark corners of humanity. It wants to be shown the threads that hold the fabric of our universe together.

Take me down alleys where the murders are done

In a vast high powered rocket to the core of the sun

Want to read books in the studies of men

Born on the breeze and die on the wind

This song is begging to carry the weight of truth. But only the eternal kind, because it’s smart enough to know that’s all it can hold.

If I was an artist who paints with his eyes

I'd study my subject and silently cry

Cry for the darkness to come down on me

For confusion to carry on turning the wheelThis song is hungry and earnest and more clever than it lets on.

And each day I learn just a little bit moreI don’t know why but I do what forIf we're all going somewhere let's get there soon

Oh this song's got no title just words and a tune

After listening to this Perfect Song™️ approximately 16 times in a row while gazing out on a picture perfect landscape, I arrived at the tribal Governance Center. We heard from another awardee, a nonprofit called Medicine Bear, led by Redstone Rodolfo Serna. It’s rare to experience such an unpolished, completely authentic speaker in any kind of professional setting, but especially at an event where nonprofits are saying thank you to funders (read: kissing ass). We know that nonprofits are under threat and we know that funding is limited. There’s a constant all-consuming narrative of scarcity and competition, which is a fear based in reality of course. Nonprofits are scared and desperate and funders are openly defensive about their inability to fill the need, which only heightens the power imbalance.

Redstone talked about this incredible role reversal where the funders held his hand through the grant application process when he doubted his ability to figure it out on his own. Maybe the system just wasn’t meant for him. But the people with the money told him, “Give us a chance.” He shared the evolution of his practice, what he learned from his mentor, the loss in his community because of COVID, and the resilience in finding pathways to continue connecting youth to ancient practices despite the ever evolving and increasing attempts to extinguish entire cultures.

I sat in that very beautiful room, hearing a very beautiful and very real story that broke away from the persistent hopeless narrative that I’ve been living in, and I felt very real tears start to well up in my eyes. I felt like an incredibly lucky person to have gotten out of bed that day, to have finally chosen a shirt, and allowed myself to be tuned in to something deeper. Because it’s not a given. It takes intention. Looking at you, lady scrolling on her phone through the whole ceremony.

We are waking up in a new mall every day. The general concept is familiar, but the stores are all different, the music is strange, we can’t find the escalators. Even the people we came in with look different. Maybe we can’t find them at all. And I’m sure at least some of you reading this right now are also dealing with your own mental health stuff. With layers and layers of disorientation and rhetoric, how do we stand a chance of making it out of the god damned mall?

I don’t want to hear “go touch grass” because that’s just more rhetoric. It’s hollow and condescending.

Go be an innocent young child sharp as a knife. That is to say, stay attuned to deeper truths and make sure you’re well taken care of. You’re just a little kid!

My brother and his “swords” on the left, me and my emotional support wash cloth on the right (same haircut in the year 2025).

<3 Tonya