Believe
You think you know your life. You’d think you’d recognize it, say, if you saw it walking down the street towards you, that it’d just be a matter of ‘Hey. How are ya?’, and off you’d go together.
But it’s just as likely that your life is off on a bit of a wander, out of sorts or worse for the want of companionship with you. Of the two of you, maybe it’s your life that has more need of you than it has want of another. Maybe your life’s little sorrows are for want of you.
*
In the blunt force crash and burn of my 2024+, I lurched to a clutch of certainties about what was left of my life: soon enough I won’t walk well, or eat unaided, or ponder or wonder, or write another thing. But, if I’m honest, it was the trouncing of the chance of ever again joining a room of people in proper bewilderment, life assail, awe, that hurt me at my hurtingest place. I ached over the likelihood that I’d seen my last ‘bubble, bubble, toil and trouble’, the last orchestra of amen that for so long had been lent to me, that I’d be well advised to adjust my understanding of my life’s likelihoods accordingly.
That meant that I’d have to make peace with never going on the road with the Nights of Grief and Mystery again. By then I shook in the left hand quadrant of me. I still do. And, ignoble as this sounds, I didn’t want to be seen in involuntary, unmanageable tremble. I couldn’t shake the dread, the assault on what I thought was my dignity. I walked for months carrying that around. I recorded much of my end of the Caldera record with that in me.
*
Belief. It’s an old Saxon word. It didn’t really mean ‘conviction’, not for the longest time. It wasn’t the opposite of ‘knowledge’, though it has that ring now. The prefix of the word signalled a kind of adamance, or depth of declaration. It meant something like ‘to the depths of ’, or ‘the emphatic doubling down of’, or ‘something so exponential’. And the root word of belief is recognizable with a bit of shift in pronunciation. The root is ‘love’. So, belief, when it’s done in the old time way, is the calling in of big, big love.
*
A week ago tonight, I was in the Scottish Rites Alhambra Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico, substantially far from home. I’d done three reckoning sessions with Kimberly Johnson, which had gone beautifully well, and this evening was the summit of those meetings. It would be the first time we played songs from the Caldera record, the first time we’d hear them jazzed to aliveness by the particular kind of crowd this project has drawn to itself since 2015.
I moved through the display cases backstage, all of the esoteric pagentware of the Masons in wondrous array. I took my breath in, and then out, the expectational buzz of a full house wafting through. Then, I called the band together for a moment. Bless them, they just let me talk. Gregory, Lisa and Adam watched me, listened carefully. I said something about the privilege of the thing, the mystery of it all, the ‘go figure’ of being so wrong about your life sometimes. And then we walked onstage, to a generous amen of an audience.
We sat down, nervous and thrilled. And then, before we played a note, I reached to all of them, and I did something I hadn’t done before, not really, not well. I told them that I loved them.
And then I believed that, go figure, I was there again.
I was there.
— Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
Learn more about Caldera here.
