The love that I was giving you
was never in doubt
Let go of your heart
let go of you head
and feel it now....
Babylon."
These decade-old lyrics, sang by Brit David Gray, now serenade my open ears
as I quietly sit in an Ocean Beach establishment. Immediately, my body, mind and spirit is swept away back to a time now relegated to that fictional realm called memory.
With my mane of thick, brown curls infested with lice, I awoke on my 25th birthday in a sprawling bed in an upper-crust town home in Vienna, Austria. I had spent the night before waxing poetically - over education and politics - with my Austrian friends and their well-to-do parents. I marveled at the luxurious state of my life, even as my six-months spent working the international school camp circuit left me scratching my head in embarrassment. Months before, while living and working in a chalet on a mountain slope in Anzere, Switzerland, my English roommate had introduced me to Gray's White Ladder album. And, there I was, on the dawn of my 25th with the catchy prose playing out like a broken record in my traveler's bed and body. That refrain "Let go of your heart, let go of your mind" arose from deep within the pits of my subconscious - serenading me into consciousness.
I don't know what any of it "means."
These days, I am simply just trying to listen
and respond.
Nonetheless, I still don't "know" what I'm doing - any of it.
And, maybe, that is the beauty of it all...
One thing that I do know, however, is that Todo Mundo has a refrain about "Babylon" in one of their songs. Santiago Orozco and his band of wandering Gypsies will be rocking today's Ocean Beach Farmer's Market.
Come check it out and join us on a street side dance floor with ambling views of a rollicking Pacific. We'll be looking for you...
