Real World
Paying homage to my #1 on Spotify Wrapped in the year I was married
First, I would like to say that I always want to see your Spotify Wrapped. I love seeing them. I care. Was it all deep tracks this year? Tell me. Were your top five songs all (Taylor’s Version)? Awesome. Was your top track this year a white noise track from trying to drown out a snorer in a group hostel room, like my #1 song in 2018 was? Share it with gusto.
Here’s mine. There was one surprise artist, one album, and one song in particular that had a yearlong hold on me.
It’s a quick and simple song, which she apparently wrote in an hour and a half.1 Like her other songs on the album, it is about ordinary time, ordinary love, and being awake and alive to it all, which I need. My personality lends itself to living in the future far more frequently than the present, and I get bored and disenchanted quickly. An encounter with beauty, that wakes me up to what’s real, is key.
By Real World, I remember to practice presence and ordinary love this year, my wedding year.
Which, by the way, I did get married, about four months ago now. It was such a beautiful, glorious, fun day. A more real day than many of the other ones. I’ll share some photos, which I’ve felt sort of shy about sharing on socials. I probably will eventually share these and more (they are too beautiful not to share!), but Substack feels much more like the space where my real friends are. You all are the ones I actually want to show photos to, much more so than the quasi-friends from my freshman dorm hall who I don’t actually keep up with at all but still follow me in a lurking sort of way on Instagram. Anyway! It’s tempting on a day like your wedding to be out of body, to float three feet above the events that are happening, but here are the things that kept me in the real world.
Harvesting my wedding flowers, which my mother-in-law grew on her land in Broad Run, with my cousin and a handful of dear friends two days before.
Waiting to get my hair and makeup done until later in the day so I could run freely around the venue, hug my cousins and aunts and friends who were installing florals and placing décor on tables, and sit with my friend Peter and chat about life and the momentousness of the day for awhile.
Our beautiful, ethereal ceremony music by my longtime musician friends.
Serving communion during our ceremony to our congregation, and getting to look so many people I love in the eyes and offer the body of Christ to the body of Christ. We had no receiving line and the reception was a tremendous blur (I think Jake and I made it to three tables total), so this was a gift.
In my first year of marriage, I’m looking for songs about living with ordinary love. I had a conversation with Elizabeth recently about harnessing emotion in the creative process, and how in making a sustainable life and career out of our craft, we cannot constantly create from the borderlands of our most intense feelings. Though this is one of the great gifts of creativity — broken hearts, mountaintop moments, jealous rages, highest highs and lowest lows have a blessed place to go when we have a creative outlet! — if we’re going to make good art with any amount of consistency, we must be able to engage with it on ordinary days too, at our ordinary desks in ordinary time. A painting, or writing, or photo editing session in the Real World.
So I’m starting a playlist with a specific theme. So many love songs are about the edges of love. Will we fall in love? Will we make it? Will I be noticed, and will my love be reciprocated? Or the other side — falling out of love, facing rejection, living with the heartache that hollows a person out. I’m looking for songs about that love that’s good and sweet and so completely ordinary that it can get flown over in mainstream art, but that is perhaps more commonplace and real than all those mountains and valleys of love’s cusps. Anaïs Mitchell’s album embraces it wholeheartedly. She wants to dance in the real grip of her beloved, receive and give love on the good and bad and sad days, wonder if she’s being present enough in the moment, and take a late night cab home together, sharing dreams, riding that high of simply being together. Why aren’t we romanticizing our ordinary lives more, penning the beautiful myth that is real life and real love?
Anyway. Send me your songs about this, please. Leave some of your favorite songs in the comments that put you back into the Real World or your Real Marriage or your Real Friendships, Real Housemates, your Real Life.
And peace to you. :) I hope you’re well.