You can't always make the long ride last
If you need hope, if you're coming apart ...
Back in 1996, the singer-songwriter Catie Curtis released a perfect album called “Truth from Lies.” (Yes, indeed. That’s the name).
“Truth from Lies” was Curtis’s debut album, and when I listen, it reminds me we don’t hear women’s voices in music anywhere near enough.
It feels good to open to the softness that is an innate part of our nature.
If you need something, when times get hard …
The first track is “You Can Always Be Gone” — a love-road song. These many decades later, it comes back to me as a reminder that no matter what promises the world and Meta makes us, there’s no escaping our everyday reality.
“You can always drive fast/
But you can't always make the long ride last…”
Visiting Northern Michigan with my longtime friend, Cathy, during the second Tr*mp presidency, surrounded by the murk of the 47th school shooting of 2025 (as of Sept 10, 2025), and on the heels of the assassination of radical gun advocate Charlie Kirk in Utah (presumably by a white, cisgendered neo-con male), it’s all still here.
One cannot be human and walk away from it.
However, leaving the house — taking time away from screens, getting out into nature — does help. And it is a necessary part of human maintenance.
It helps to breathe clean air.
It doesn’t haven’t to cost much. You can just go outside and go for a walk in the park. You don’t have to get on a plane and fly to another state or put one’s toes in a Great Lake to get away from the stress of the rat race.
Don’t come too close (or you’ll see my edge is rough)
Of course, outside, there will be all those people.
Making sand angels alone on a deserted beach seems preferable to talking to an unvetted American these days.
Though, the opposite is quite true. It’s a great thing, indeed, to meet the strangers out there when you leave the house. These are fellow brave souls who are also trying to skirt the hard things for a bit, for the chance to feel less alone.
It’s OK to to not think about it. To not worry how they voted when saying hello (even if they are boldly wearing MAGA tennis shoes).
It’s a good thing to just smile, and to make small talk about the weather.
The external looks real, but is it?
Stepping out of comfort zones, we run into people, places, things that are familiar, yet unknown — things that cause anxiety, things that are wild, and beautiful, and richly unavailable.
A tree grows silently — bending to the winds’ whim, lies down on the road —
It doesn’t matter if you prefer to chase wonder — new and different locales — whenever offered the chance.
It doesn’t matter if you’d rather revisit again and again the same shores or playgrounds, familiar and broken in.
No matter where you go, or when, or how, with you goes that special someone: your one true love.
I lost my glass slipper as well as my ride /
I have to admit that I don’t know the truth from lies /
Truth from lies.
Love is stronger than any words anyway
The work of a lifetime is finding out how to make one’s way in the world with the one person who will always be there.
At the top of Stop 9 on the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive of the Sleeping Bear Dune, the National Park team has a sign that says “DOWN IS OPTIONAL.”
The dune’s descent is 450 feet at a steep incline. It’s rocks and sand and — unreasonably far off — a thin sliver of a Lake Michigan beach
Life hands out gravitational runs, head-over-keister tumbles, uphill slogs. And there will be those spates of trudging in the sand.
Downhill may be optional — but uphill is mandatory. Along the way, there’s no avoiding people, choices, and regrets.
Will I need help? Will they? What is the cost?
What should (shouldn’t) I do today?