This past weekend I played one of the biggest shows of my career as a musician. It was exhilarating, nerve-wracking, wonderful and exhausting. Months of preparation, days of travel, hours of rehearsal distilled to 90 minutes on stage that passed in a blur.
I lay awake in the hotel bed after it was all over replaying it in my mind: the time I flubbed my guitar part, the song on which I went to the chorus too soon, but also the soaring refrain that sounded so beautiful we played it twice, just savoring the sound of our instruments floating out across the late summer twilight, the last of the light turning the gathered crowd to brilliant gold. And then we packed up our gear and began the long journey home.
Same but different
Back at the ranch, everything looked pretty much as we’d left it — the garden was a little overgrown, the weeds one step closer to winning their battle against the cultivated crops, the dogs overjoyed to have us back, the barn cats indifferent as long as food kept arriving at regular intervals. Out in the pasture the cows slowly sailed along the green horizon and the bum lambs, now half-grown, grazed in the yard, barely lifting their heads at our arrival.
Everything looked pretty much the same, but I felt completely different. Getting dressed before the show, so nervous I wondered why in the world I ever thought I wanted to be a performing musician, I had looked into the large lit mirror of the dressing room and unexpectedly said out loud to myself: “You are making too big a deal of this.”
I was so surprised by this thought I stood wondering at my own image reflected back, and suddenly I knew it was true, not just of this one night of music, but a lot of things in my life. Something big shifted inside me.
As a recovering perfectionist, it is constantly tempting to believe that my life is full of defining moments, moments where I can finally “get it right” and then things will be good and easy forevermore.
A big, important performance is a great time to believe one of these moments is nigh, but playing live music, like child-rearing, like ranching, like all of life actually, is a journey, not a destination. I’ve known this for a while, but until that moment in the mirror, I’m not sure I really believed it. I stepped away from the mirror and walked out to the mic as calm as I’ve ever felt on stage.
Nature’s stage
After we got home and cleaned up the camper, I fixed a quick meal, got the kids settled, and then took the dogs out on a walk across the pasture. The wind was low, waving the grass gently, carrying away the last heat of the day.
Instead of a soaring chorus of instruments, I listened to the birds’ evening songs, the swish and hush of the cottonwood trees, and the distant calls of coyotes and owls as they woke to begin their evening of hunting. The two young dogs raced ahead, rolling and jumping through the tall grass, but my old girl, Ellie, stayed by my side, glancing up at me every so often.
The sun set and the sky darkened by increments. Overhead, a young red-tailed hawk greeted us with a shrill cry, circling so close I reached up to wave, and it all felt … well, perfect … as so many evening walks have felt this summer.
Shakespeare famously wrote: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely Players …”
Sometimes the stage is a literal stage, sometimes it is the rolling grass. Sometimes we are the main act, all eyes focused on us. Other times, we are supporting characters, there to uplift someone else’s story.
Either way, there’s joy in the telling, in the unexpected twist and turns the story takes, and best of all, we can’t miss our cues, or forget our lines.
The script is eternally unfinished, the next chapter lingering on the horizon, and it is already and always just as it should be.
