Ownership

Yesterday, I took a long foray into Youtubeville.  It started with a song I heard on Pandora at work:

Which is definitely winning the award for best hair.

Then I went on to Chamaeleon Church, which featured Chevy Chase on drums, something I didn't know.  Here's their song "Off with the Old":

Not my favorite of theirs, but still, it lead me down the direction I want to go in.  For future reference, remember that there is a lyric in this song that goes:

"And there are some things that shine more than the stars
And we are everything, cause nothing's really ours."

Just keep that under your hat for now.

Listening to them lead me to Anne Briggs, whose great version of Willie O Winsbury I am posting here:

Like so many old folk songs, this one tells a story.  Here we learn about the king's daughter, Janet, who has "lain long with" Willie of the Winsbury and become pregnant.  The king declares that Willie should be put to death and calls the man before him.  But when he sees him, he says:

"It is no wonder," said the king
"That my daughter's love you did win
For if I was a woman, as I am a man
My bedfellow you would have been"

 And he promises Willie not only his daughter's hand but all his lands, to boot.  Willie states that he will take the lady, but not the lands, and the song ends like this:

He's mounted her on a milk-white steed
Himself on a dapple grey
He has made her the lady of as much land
As she will ride in a long summer's day

A long roundabout route to the same location: the concept of ownership.  As you can see, it's plagued people for as far back as the 1500's, since there is some evidence this song may have been about Madeleine of Valois, who was married to Scotland's James V.

The notion seems romantic when confronted with the hard facts of our bodies.  But there is something about this idea that is singing to me over the needy grumblings of my stomach or the straining of my eyes.  I am struggling to put it well, but the idea comes to me now that there is a kind of freedom in objecting to the worship of things, or perhaps, in the recognition that all the things in our lives, our books, our chairs, even our bodies, possess their own life that continues even after we are done with them. Or they done with us. 

In that sense, a folksong is the best impetus for this thought because it was the type of song nobody claimed to own. These songs were, in a way, free to meddle and ebb as they would with the outside world.

Right now I'm Googling the phrase "Letting Go" and what's coming up is an article from the Mayo Clinic about forgiveness.

It occurs to me that letting something go, like a cherished thought or a song, may well be an act of forgiveness, or a way of lightening the load.

With that in mind, you are released out into the world, blog post.