The time for leavin'

It seems a terrible kind of leaving is in the air these days.  All the couples are breaking up.  And not just for normal reasons-- quiet differences of opinion-- but for the worst: Cheating.  Maybe it is the age we are, but for some reason a lot of our friends are falling apart.  Two of these couples were very very close to us, in that our hearts were torn doubly as we also knew and liked the male (cheater).  It's easier when you don't know one party, I think, because you can demonize them.

This morning I'm listening to Robinella and the Once-CC String Band.  See, Robinella was married to CC (Cruise Contraris) and they were a sweet, sweet local couple, eyeing each other lovingly through shows at Barleys every Sunday.  They were both very attractive folks, too (in  Knoxville way, not Hollywood style), so of course that made them more prominent.  She got pregnant and then the baby came and seems like the next month they were broken up, the band too. :( 

For some reason-- an illogical one for sure-- I hear their music this morning and think it is unnatural for them to be broken up, and a tragedy.  They were so good together-- more than good-- meant for each other.  And yet I know life is not this simple.  Just because your energy combines beautifully with another's in music (or sex or conversation or whatever the outcome variable is), doesn't mean you can last. I'm sure there was a severing unsweetness they never put in the music. And it's foolish to feel we know someone just from listening to their art and seeing them around town.

Of course this made me think of my own band and our break-up.  P and I are rebuilding now, and we've got two girls from church who can sing great. But it's not the same, and I wonder if I am ever again going to find a group of people so perfect as he, C and I were. Any combination of two of us just wasn't that good. It's strange the way synergy works in art and in love. And how suddenly it can leave.

I guess I just have to trust that it will return, and not have my head stuck in the past with nostalgia and regret, so as to miss it's arrival. Still, life is sad without that magic. And it is magic.  

In the YMCA there was a quote that hung above a picture of White Jesus (you know the one) that said: "Whenever two or more are gathered in my name, I am there" (or something like that). Maybe this is what they meant: 

The magic of human connection, community, and the artistic synergy that arises out of things, greater than the sum of their parts... all those powerful cliches.  Emergent properties, I guess, if you want the scientific framing. That is my reframe, at least.