Hearty Soup and Soothing Songs

At the start of last week I was sitting in the coffee shop during my lunch hour. On occasion I will have a bowl of soup usually a gumbo or maybe something hearty like potato. Then, I will match it with a toasted plain bagel and some ice tea for my midday meal. Filled and comforted and after about twenty minutes have passed I will return to work. Maybe I was an eastern European in an earlier life.

Often I sit alone with just my journal so I can jot some notes down for transferring later onto this blog. I know this place and I am known in this place. My habits are tolerated here. The coffee shop opened nine years ago and with the exception of a handful of days I have been here each day at some point in my working hours to grab an ice tea. Thus even if I sit alone I am such a fixture that somebody is bound to say hello and want to talk. I go to the coffee shop for peace, comfort and community. Seems to me that it is good to have a place like this in one’s life.

In the old days I would bring in lots of CDs to help provide the soundtrack of the store. But one day the CD player broke and it was replaced by an Ipod. I still give the manager CDs although our tastes have diverged a little bit over the years.
On the particular day in question a song came on. It was an old back hills thing gleaned off the sound track of O Brother Where Art Thou. The film is a top ten favorite. The song is in the top 100 of the gmanitou endless shifting pantheon of favorites. Here is a Youtube link to the song.



My liking of this song is tied to all that I learned when I was growing up. Having spent years in the Baptist church there in my small hometown I was repeatedly taught right and good exist as do evil and wrong. Repeatedly I heard to calls to return to the path of truth and light. I tried so many times to hoe that line but I am a fallen being. There will always remain in me a hope, a visceral belief, that there is a better world awaiting us. My intellect may say otherwise but the core of what I am fueled by, the old rituals and raw emotion learned when I was young still holds on to this hope and a song like this opens up the door to that space.

In my life it is hard for me to emotionally accept the status quo when so much of what I see seems hurtful, vengeful and oft times just petty. At times I wonder if there is something, an anti-developmental gene or behavioral pattern that is working against my best interest, on the issue of acceptance of the world as it is. In thinking on why I mouth off and stir up trouble so often I end up in a confused ball. Running to the cobwebbed corners of my mind I can look at the Buddhist sense of acceptance of pleasure and pain as equal that is it is what it is. If I could go that route I wouldn’t have to struggle with issues of right and wrong really.

On the other hand moving away from faith Darwinian constructs of evolution posit adaptation and change as the key to survival. Maybe my disquiet is the innate drive to successful adaptation and survival. The battle goes on.