Goodness still exists / Tour Wrap-up
It’s Sunday morning and I am in my own house.
My child is attempting to climb out of his cage pack ‘n play, my wife, for once, is sleeping while I am awake, I’m drinking coffee, and in about an hour, we’re going to church.
I’m a doubter by nature, which is exactly why I go to church. I get enough input throughout the week to fuel my doubts and questions, and I have a church that understands doubters like myself and helps us to embrace the questions because we believe that there are answers. I spent a lot of time pretending that my doubts were the devil in me, manipulating my thoughts to destroy my soul. And while I do believe there is evil (there must be evil, otherwise I cannot begin to reconcile the gut-wrenching wrongness of things like poverty, death, abuse, etc…) I now think that my doubts are all just part of the game. If we were created with no capacity for doubt, no question as to the rightness and wrongness of things, we would have no autonomy and free choice would be a useless thought.
As to why evil exists in the first place… Well, that’s one of the questions that keeps me going back to my church. If ever I feel that I get a satisfactory answer, I will most certainly pass it along.
If I am certain that evil exists, I must also be certain that there is good in this world, and this month I have been shown a lot of it. Time at home seems to first upend my ship, then right it again. My child, despite his attempts at escape, is all at once entertaining AND a fascinating study of how we humans learn. And he’s learning to give hugs, so my days are pretty rich.
My saintly wife has decided, yet again, to still be here when I return from my travels, to welcome me back with open arms. My son inherited his hugging skills from a savant-level hug-genius. I couldn’t do what she does, being at home while I am away. My absence from her (and the boy) has been a huge factor in my decision to re-think my touring strategies.
And then there’s the kindness of others. I have had generously donated to me an iMac with a complete ProTools 8 setup. Something that I could never afford to go to the store and pay money for. It’s a significant upgrade from my old Mac Mini / Protools 6 / MBox setup, on which I recorded all of “Civil War…” and all of my parts of “You Are Never…”
The tour with Kate Havnevik was amazing. I met a lot of incredible people. I promised my new friend Mike Savino that in return for letting me crash at his apartment in New York City for two nights, I would post a link to his band, Tall Tall Trees. What I didn’t tell him was that I would have posted the link anyway, because their album is brilliant, and definitely worth whatever it costs on iTunes.
We also played in Pontiac with a great little band called Local Natives that I highly suggest you see live if ever the opportunity presents itself.
Lastly, Nashville afforded me the pleasure of meeting Matthew Ryan. I’m telling you, between these three artists, you just got a Christmas present from me.
I could go on and on about the incredible people we met / stayed with, but honestly, you would get bored, and I would get really wistful. I’ll just say that the kindness that was shown to us this fall… well, it was the kind of generosity that causes me to believe that maybe good will win this battle in the end.
I feel rather proud of myself for finishing a blog for the first time in months, so I’ll just stop here. If I just hit the “publish” button right now, then all you spam-commenters can commence to trashing up my comments inbox. Have fun, robots.
Eva Says:
