EyeOfTheStorm

Restless wind
Moans through the wires again
calling my subconscience out to play
scattering my thoughts
along their way
I'm caught in the elusiveness
of the meanings passing by
How things are set in motion
to make us question why

Fairweather friends
they come and go and
and they don't say when
the ties that bind are fragile things
entanglements and unravelings
There's a rustling in the trees
as if the leaves already know
about the losing
and the leaving
and the letting go

Too many times
people put their faith
into things
the winds blow down
I've found that openess
among the boughs
lets it all pass thorugh
Parts of you
will be taken
parts will be shaken
down to the ground
It's the hardships
that define our very forms
naked in the eye of the storm

Paper thin
I can see the nature
of things within
written on the wind
dancing in the flesh
in between the pages
of our lives we're pressed
those confessions in fire
and gold
and rusty earthen browns
it's in our very attachments
that all our releases
can be found

Round and round about
for everything supressed
another part crys out
from birth to full bloom
to bittersweet decay
every single thing
has to find it's own way
Must autumn paint you a picture?
Do you need beliefs
to connect the dots?
You're either busy living
or making excuses
for why you're not

Too many times
people put their faith
into things the winds blow down
I've found that openness avong the boughs
lets it all pass through
parts of you will be taken
parts will be shaken
down to the ground
branching out to possibilities
we're reborn
naked in the eye of the storm

Barren trees
in the end it falls down
to what you believe
shake off the old and start anew
hanging on to everything
you thought you knew
it's out of your control
what makes you feel whole
or empty within
I hear October
whistling a tune
I turn my collar
to the northern wind

Too many times
people put their faith
into things
the winds blow down
I've found that openess
among the boughs
lets it all pass through
parts of you will be taken
parts will be shaken
down to the ground
branching out
through possibilities
we're reborn
standing naked
in the eye of the storm

Doc's Notes:

The struggles of our lives and the mastering of the arts are almost connected by definition. If you can feel it inside whether it be good or bad, then you can give it a voice and express yourself. Our happier emotions have a way of just tumbling right out. It's hard to keep them contained, but sometimes they can be harder to reveal, more painful to confront. More emotional to overcome.

Erenest Hemmingway once said "If pain is the only thing that you're feeling and dealing with, then use it, goddamnit!! Use it!!"

As we go along with our lives we begin to become aware of an interesting constant, that it is from the struggles themselves that we gain the true identity of who we really are. So much of the beginning of our lives seems beyond our small control, until later, when we wrestle the responsibilities for ourselves away from other people and things. Creating our own sense of self. Our own self worth. The world may rage around us on any given day but the fine art of living comes from confidence in who we are. Centered at the eye of the storm. This is a very elemental song about the reflection of exsistance and being.

I was living in Louisville, Colorado, when Mark sent me the music to this song on a cassette tape in early March of 1985. Mark was living in New Jersy. Peggy and I were not married yet but that would chage by the years end. I really wanted to meet her parents and see the farm she had grown up on, so we took a drive the 200 miles to La Junta, Colorado together.

For the length of our visit there we stayed in Peggy's recently deceased grandmother's mobile home next to the main farmhouse. It was there that I began to write the lyrics to 'Eye of the Storm' starting with the chorus first. I wrote the first two verses before we left.

Walking around down on the farm was very elemental and emotionally satisfying but south-eastern Colorado was very cold at that time of year. The lack of leaves on the trees play predominately into my writing though. "I've found that openess among the boughs lets it all pass through". Interesting enough, when Peg and I came back home the song's appeal slowly waned.

In 2007 my interest in the song spang to life again for consideration on the new CD. I asked Mark if he remembered the song he had sent me all those years ago. And he did! I took that as a very good sign. He played it a little bit differently than I remembered, but that was alright. We built the song around what we had and went from there. Some of the lyrics were changed around a little along with some of the song's structure,but it has a better feel now than my recollection of it.

I was happy to hear the finished song with Peggy's production touches high-lighting everything, especially the middle part of the song at the very 'eye' of the storm and the fade out over Mark and I doing our best impressions of vagrant breezes. Good energy and production. It would have been a shame not to have broght the song to life for other people to hear and enjoy.