JUDY EMERSON Author and Personal Coach

I listened again today to the song “Turn and Turn Again”, by All Thieves.  It knocked me out, as it does every time. You should watch it on YouTube. I promise. (Writers: Mark Bates, Rollo Armstrong, Tzuke Bailey.) I’ll wait while you pull it up and play it. Go ahead.

Wow.  These lyrics (see below, in italics) speak such truth about our political dilemmas. And also our personal ones. We don’t hear each other. Here’s what stirred for me as I listened:

“The road curves down… And the lights come up to meet us ” –We’re in a difficult, painful place.  But something awaits us.

“We enter this town like newborn creatures” –With “beginner’s mind”, we might discover something wondrously unexpected in this moment.

“Those I know I see anew” –I’ve memorized my idea of who you are. But what if I look again?

“I am human…and you are human too” –I glimpse heart behind the old armor.  We have more in common with one another than differences.  We are all bearers of light, shadowed by the effects of the darkness. Wisdom and ignorance in each of us, behind our defenses.

“Every traveler, please come home… And tell us all that you have seen” –Could we try to hear one another?  Share our stories instead of shouting to suppress the other. Might other voices, even those who oppose our ideas, have their own reasons for their belief, emerging from their experience, even if it’s different from ours?

“Return every gun to every drawer… so we can turn…and turn again” –Laying down our weapons, literal and figurative. If we listened, truly heard one another, could we subvert destruction, see the pain in each guarded heart, nurture seedlings instead of torching forests?

“Only priests and clowns can save us now… Only a sign from God or a hurricane… Can bring about… The change we all want” – Standard operating procedures got us to where we are. Does it take a hurricane to make us kind to one another for a minute?  Maybe we discover grace—something radical, out-of-the-box, a supernatural or serendipitous unfolding that opens into something we couldn’t generate by rational means. 

“And we’ve done it again… This trick we have… Of turning love to pain… And peace to war” –We’ve screwed it up again, negated what good had been accomplished, as humans do over and over.  Of course we do.  Because humans get uneasy in the face of ambiguity.  We want bumper-sticker simplicity.  Longing for perfection, we destroy the good. 

My own heart’s highest expression of what is right and good, moral and ethical—for me—might only rankle with folks I cherish for entirely separate reasons.  I don’t expect we’ll be suddenly simpatico if I insist how wrong they are.  They’d surely tell me I’m the one who’s nuts.  And then where are we?

Listen.  Maybe we could hear each other.  And turn again.

Maybe you heard something different in the music, and from each other. Share it. I’d like to listen.