Plague / Newborn babies wailing like a mourning dove

A cousin of mine brought this to my attention.

Just this morning I re-read the liner notes to Blood on the Tracks after a friend mentioned that he had just re-read them.  I remember standing in a record store in Bellingham in January 1975 reading those liner notes and weeping and then going home to listen for the first of many many times.  That was over 40 years ago.

The painting from 1990 above is titled "63rd Month / Talking 43-Hour Day With Roots Gathered From Coincidence."

This morning I woke up feeling something I couldn't define.  When I focused on the feeling, not the words about the feeling, my body sensations were minimal but murky and unpleasant nonetheless.  If pressed for a single word that matched the feeling, I could only come up with "flat." If asked for the color of the feeling, it would be a sickly tan.  Suddenly I heard Janis Joplin singing, "Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train, feeling just as faded as my jeans ..."

With that, the feeling shifted because I could hear a human voice singing accompanied by musical instruments.  The first time I heard that song was the morning my Richard arrived home from Vietnam.  We were riding in my 1965 Volkswagen, on our way out to the coast to surprise Richard's family, who didn't yet know that he was home.

Then I found this.

Don't know what else I want to say.  Don't know where I am going with this.  No easy answers.  Lots of questions.  Wait.  I know what I want to say.

We can refuse to live in fear.  We can know that we are not alone.  Any loving action, no matter how small, counts.