Some years ago – after the months in Indonesia, after working with the small publishing house, after co-managing the restaurant; before Brazil, before children, before hi-tech consulting – I helped start a small organic vegetable farm in Glencoe, Minnesota. It was the most trying and most wonderful experience. Hours of labor in the prairie sun that at once broke my body and built it up, found me falling into bed as though stunned, waking refreshed as though called out by the fields and the birds. Distant from neighbors and from community, close to life and spirit.
During the year at the CSA I met my future wife, Júlia, and as the first season came to a calamitous and successful close, we prepared to leave the States for a trip that would end up being almost eight years away, two children, a city, a park and a farm… more stories than I can ever write (though I should start trying). We had friends come along to help harvest the surplus. We had friends come along to wish us all well. Sun went down on those fields, left for the next tenants, and in that simple, struggling life, I wrote a song.
Maybe when the fruits have all been brought in, and the chill has taken the green out of the leaves, and there is a little more silence and solitude in the rooms than we wish, it calls out (as the migration-call of south-bound geese) memories and hopes for love. And maybe when we sing about gentle, kind connections, we help to make them happen, like a prayer.
(Should you post a scratch track? Well, I do…)
Evening Prayer
Sun goes down here pretty early
catch it if you can before it rolls on by
shadows draw down over these hills
fill the valley with the rose of the sky
and a light comes up in each separate household
all of their people gathered in
How was your day, then?
Glad to have you home again
sit here by my side
Old Roy sitting by his picture window
got a picture of a life going on out there
the TV is selling the beer he’s drinking
says he’s thinking of some better year:
” See that woman there? She lived here forty years…
never got married but, boy, who cares?
God I loved her.
Wish she were here now.
She’d be my evening prayer.
” ‘Cause when the sun went down and the stars rang out
all our people near
all that black space came spinning about
but it was warm in here. “
Friend’s getting married in September
been a long time waiting for a harvest there
seems a seed is planted, and in the darkness
then suddenly a flower’s blooming in her hair.
The couple turns us in their first slow dancing
while the planet leans into the autumn air.
There’s frost for the garden, snow for the rooftops:
rumors at the window, but no one cares
‘Cause when the sun goes down and the stars ring out
all our people near
all that black space comes spinning about
but it’s warm in here.
There’s laughter at the corner, in a circle of streetlight
the evening is all right, all right pull a chair up here…
Sun goes down here pretty early
catch it if you can or let it roll on by
shadows draw down over these hills
pull a curtain on the world outside
So good night neighbors! Good night friends!
Sorry to be leaving, but you know how my evening ends
I need to be there before the fire burns down
she’ll be my evening prayer.
‘Cause when the sun goes down and the stars ring out
all our people near
all that black space comes spinning about
but it’s warm in here.
The Common Harvest Farm, Glencoe, MN
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011