After All

On Monday one of my spiritual advisers sent me a link to this song. It was a real blessing, because at the time I was feeling totally blown out on the trail: this book is extraordinarily hard on me psychodynamically. I absolutely loved the song and listened to the studio version and two live performances; I have supplied a link to one of them.

The song is simply stunning. You owe it to yourself to invest the 5 minutes, 10 seconds it takes to listen to Williams' performance.

"After All," by Dar Williams

You go ahead, push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold
Once upon a time I had control
And reigned my soul in tight
Well the whole truth, it's like the story of a wave unfurled
But I held the evil of the world, so I stopped the tide, froze it up from inside
And it felt like a winter machine that you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

Then when I chose to live, there was no joy it's just a line I crossed
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost, so I was not lost or found
And if I was to sleep, I knew my family had more truth to tell
And so I traveled down a whispering well to know myself through them
I'm growing up, my mom had a room full of books and hid away in there
Her father raging down a spiral stair, till he found someone
Most days his son and sometimes I think my father too was a refugee
I know they tried to keep their pain form me
They could not see what it was for
But now I'm sleeping fine
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
I am the daughter of a great romance
And they are the children of the war

Well the sun rose, with so many colors it nearly broke my heart
It worked me over like a work of art and I was a part off all that
So go ahead, push your luck, say what it is you gotta say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it'll push right back and there are worse things than that
'Cause for every price, and every penance that I could think of
It's better to have fallen in love than never to have fallen at all|
'Cause when you live in a world, well it gets into who you thought you'd be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me, I think life chose me after all

[Dorothy Snowden "Dar" Williams (1967 - ) is a singer-songwriter who performs primarily in coffeehouses. She has nonetheless acquired a national reputation and has opened for Joan Baez, who performed a duet with her in a song entitled, “You’re Aging Well.” In an adoring review of one of her concerts, Hendrick Hertzberg of the “New Yorker” called Williams “one of America’s very best singer-songwriters.”]