I was drawn to the spirit of Brazil before I knew two words of the language, through the open-hearted music of Milton Nascimento, playing over the vegetable fields in Glencoe, Minnesota. Similarly drawn by the music of Silvia Pérez Cruz, I wanted to translate this rendition of a poem by Maria Mercè Marçal, a Catalan poet who lived and taught in Barcelona.

A few days ago we learned that Catalina’s cousin in Sevilla had passed away from cancer; that afternoon I began this translation, only to discover with a chill and a cry that it was Marçal’s poem about her own impending death, from breast cancer, in 1998 at the age of 45.

The lines connecting this landmark to that begin to fill in. I am the spider who, having cast a first thread into the wind, having that thread carried by the wind to a neighboring tree limb or ledge, adds with patience effort those radial spokes that construct his web. Then the outward spiral begins, and the zig-zag connection of this strand to that. Welcome to my lair! (don’t get stuck)

The year is 1990, and I am standing in a field in Glencoe, Minnesota. The horizon is wide here; the trees that rush from the east to greet the Mighty Mississippi seem hesitant to venture far from her safe waters, into the wide, wide prairies, and huddle here and there around farmsteads, brought two or three generations ago by the sodbusters who begged shelter from the merciless Alberta winds, even partially, even for a moment, that sped unimpeded from the Rockies to the Great Lakes.

Multi-instrumentalists Round Mountain deserve more visibility. What fine music, with references and calls out to all parts of the world. It is amazing how much two brothers can do with what they inherently possess.

This track from their album The Goat has as many faces of travel in it as do my next few days – acknowledging their authorship and musicianship, here’s St. Joseph, for your listening enjoyment:

St. Joseph - Robbie and Char Rothschild

An indeterminate date before the turn of the millennium: we both live on our own by now, but find ourselves together that night (a holiday? a vacation from school?) in the basement of my parents’ last family-sized house: the one down the hill from the church, whose grand oaks shaded the back lot until wilt took every one; across the road from a square mile of meadow and marsh, where we would walk our errant husky, waiting an hour until she was ready to return home; a modern design for the pastor and the nurse, dark brown panels accented beautifully (almost nordically) by three graceful birch near the front door.

What is the source of songs? I would think it arrives from somewhere deep within, and is related to your birth, your education, your mother tongue. In short: your music begins with your roots. I would think that.

But then, a song like this arrives. We lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, far from the Midwestern farms and towns and kindnesses and communities, and further from the complicated, vital Brazilian noises from the south of that country. Isabela was just of school age, Nicolas a few years her senior. We walked to their classes each morning.

There are points in the career of an artist, whatever his or her art, where the collision of beautiful forces – the fluency of artistic technique, the fullness of life experience, the vibrancy of physical form, and the collaboration with artistic equals – like the splitting of atoms, crash together to release pure and nearly-perfect light.

It is the brilliance of beginnings. No: it is the brilliance of what follows just after, when the uncertainty of a beginning falls away, and there is a comfortable happiness and ease in creating something together. As an audience for that art, you hope that as your favorite performers mature their skill increases, their stamina holds out, and beauty continues to flow from their hands or mouths or minds: like Joni Mitchell or Paul Simon; like the best works of Woody Allen; like Bob Dylan or Georgia O’Keefe, like the dancers and composers and writers and painters that have decorated your generation.

Caetano Veloso is one of the founders of the Tropicália movement in 70s Brazil, a great songwriter, an amazing voice, a remarkable and unique spirit. This early song shares traces of the rural roots of that country, and for me at least reflects the generational and geographic distances between the small-town “campo” families and their urban and world-hungry children.

Elis Regina was the most-loved Brazilian singer prior to her death by unnatural and self-induced causes. Check out her cover of Aguas de março by Tom Jobim, available on YouTube.

- Thought 1 -

Spring has come as a surprise, as winter was a surprise, and the rains of the past few days have cured the branches of their buds, the leaves unfurling themselves, gladly, green skin to the warm sun that followed when the clouds fled.

Leaves whispers to me: the garden is late. I could turn the soil… but then, it would be an empty bed. With you, it would be a harvest plan. I could sow seeds… but then, only plants would come up. If you were here, there’d be fruit instead.

What was the greatest gift I received, through my years living in Brazil? Was it perspective on our own nation, and my place in it? Was it the sights and sounds and flavors of the Other, of another portion of our planet, one physically quite as large as the continental United States? Was it the friendships, the loves, my children born there (as if to two mothers), the great efforts, the greater successes, the greatness of the failures?