Linger Awhile (2023)

OR: JACK IN A SIDECAR ON THE SATURDAY DRIVE TO WHIPSNADE ZOO

So my soul finds a friend
The zephyr Proverbs called Sophia
Shape-changing Spiritwind
Breathes into me
Then she blows away

It must have been before
Time out of time that I have known her
This warm and living wind
Breathes into me and blows away

We all were loved before
We ever set our hearts to searching
When soul does find her friend
Stand still
Stand still and let her blow away

And midway in my life
In this forest out of Dante
There is no other way but through
We have our time, we have our time
And then we blow away

Years of the clenchéd fist
Time for living open-handed
I cannot grasp this wind
Life breathes in
Life breathes in, then blows away

And I am split and I am threshed
And I am harrowed in the harvest
Warm this ingathering breeze
I lie fallow, I lie fallow
As she blows away

So my soul finds a friend
The zephyr Proverbs called Sophia
Shape-changing Spiritwind
Breathes into me
Then she blows away
Breathes into me
Then she blows away
Breathes into me
Then she blows away

Life breathes into me

Copyright ©2023 by Lee Krähenbühl / StoryDweller Music. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Permissions: LeeKrahenbuhl@aol.com.

Composed: Music, 1997; Revised lyrics, 2023

Notes: I started playing with a spiraling four-chord progression sometime around 1997. Like “Sanctuary,” this song has undergone metamorphoses of subject and lyric. During the pandemic, I took up a new tuning on bouzouki, and stripped the pattern down to four courses of two strings each. In Spring of 2023, two ideas meshed in my mind and interwove with the original breath-of-the-Spirit metaphor. The first is the longing plea of Goethe’s Faust for life’s loveliest moment to “linger awhile! thou art so fair!” (“verweile doch! Du bist so schön!”). The second comes from C. S. Lewis’ account of his conversion experience, on a Saturday drive on the Oxford and Thames roads in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle. Neither image makes its way explicitly into the lyrics (perhaps Hemingway was right about absence strengthening writing), but the title provides the lens through which I now see them.