The Astonishing Distance and Staggering Depth of the Windy Hills on Patmos
In 1996, I picked up the album Trampoline by Joe Henry. The album had been written up and raved about for the angle of its zag in a British music magazine I trusted; moreover—and more importantly to me—Trampoline featured instrumental contributions from Bucky Baxter, then employed-by and on-tour-with Bob Dylan, and my favorite musician on the planet.
(It’s an old and familiar story now, but when Baxter left Bob’s band a couple years later, he sold a few instruments on the nascent eBay. I bought one: a guitar. From the moment I picked it up, my life was never the same.)
I’ve followed each of Joe Henry’s zags and zigs, ever since Trampoline.
Often, and despite his fascinating discography of discovery and reinvention, I found myself moved most by his written word—liner notes, day of birth celebrations, obituaries (including the most magical one written about the mercurial Bucky Baxter upon his death in May 2020)—and his interviews and monologues.
Best of all? His appearance on the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett.
Joe’s interview was my gateway to the sprawling, divine, wildflower garden that is On Being, a meadow that included a path leading to its sibling podcast Poetry Unbound, and its host, Pádraig Ó Tuama.
Each of those podcasts—like Joe’s work—has enriched and illuminated my life and my relationships dozens of times over.
A couple weeks ago, and 26 years after picking up Trampoline, I found myself on the small Greek island of Patmos, some five-thousand-five-hundred-and-twenty-seven miles from my home, at a spiritual and literary salon entitled Journeying into the Common Good.
The ten-day salon was attended by 50 people from around the globe, and led by the aforementioned Krista Tippett, Pádraig Ó Tuama and Joe Henry, along with the incandescent Rhiannon Giddens and tacitly brilliant Francesco Turrisi.
It’s challenging for me to describe the staggering depth and stunning width of the experience. Words like “unforgettable,” “monumental” and “extraordinary” don’t do it. Neither do “transformational” and “transcendent.”
For now, I’ll simply share four scenes—none of which are unique nor exceptional to what I experienced each and every day of the salon:
In one exercise, Fiona Prine, Krista Tippett, a NYC book publisher named Anne, and I wrote a verse of a song together, set to the melody of “Greensleeves.” Then, we handed it to Rhiannon Giddens, and she sang it. Our collective breaths were taken away by her voice; our peers gasped at its beauty.
At a lunch with Pádraig and six others, after a session exploring “The Questions Behind the Questions,” I shared a story I’d never told anyone else in my life, ever. It was just the right moment to do so; and so it went, day after day, session after session, conversation after conversation. (And if you’re curious, just ask; I’m invisible now—I got no secrets to conceal.)
I ran sixty-two miles—coincidentally, exactly 100 kilometers—over eleven runs, over ten days, with 9,722 feet of climbs. I got lost twice, but only once was I genuinely worried for my safety, my wellbeing, and my survival. (And it wasn’t the time I was aggressively chased down by a furious rooster after trespassing on a hill farmer’s land.)
About halfway through the closing concert, during Pádraig’s reading of his own poems, I stared past the artists and to the sea; the moon was hanging up above in the still-light sky, the wind (as ever) gusting, the world, somehow and somewhere, was still turning. And I started weeping. The poem at that moment was concerning the death of Pádraig’s friend, Glenn; I was thinking about Denise, I was thinking about my kids, and my divorce, I was thinking about soaring love and bottomless loss, I was thinking about Bucky Baxter and the long, lonely sound of a pedal steel guitar. I wept the rest of the concert, all the way through the closing performance of Joe’s “Our Song,” arm in arm with his wife Melanie Ciccone, her own tears—and fears, and love—running down her face.
Oh, and one more scene.
As it turns out, Patmos is in the middle of a specific part of the Aegean Sea, called the Icarian Sea. It’s named that because it’s the body of water that Icarus, in another old and familiar story, plunged into on his final flight.
Life, y’know?
Life, and lucky guitars.
Footnotes:
Joe Henry, ‘In Memory of Bucky Baxter’: https://americansongwriter.com/joe-henry-memory-of-bucky-baxter/
Joe Henry on On Being: https://onbeing.org/programs/joe-henry-welcoming-flies-at-the-picnic/
“Phase One” poem on Poetry Unbound: https://onbeing.org/programs/dilruba-ahmed-phase-one/