Have I Always Been in Love with Joni Mitchell and Just Didn't Know It?

The power her music has to heal is truly worth remembering

Photo by Fatih on Unsplash

I can see those words lending form to an insignificant life at a carnival or something. A chapter’s worth of aspiration, heartbreak, drunkenness, and recovery seem lifted from the pages of a Hemingway novel. Those words own me.

“Both Sides Now,” (watch here) my favorite song by Ms. Mitchell, transports me to comfy little pockets of time colorfully wrapped in the past fifty years. Slipping unnoticed back into those eternally passed moments, I see the younger me dreaming, planning even the next moves that would take me to this day, sheltered by the present — writing about Joni Mitchell.

I am in my 50s and hardly a child, but I am still not entirely sure that my mastery of nuance is such that I can stop searching, learning, and striving to improve. As Joni sings angelically, suffice it to say that if you care, don’t let them know lest you give yourself away — oh, how many times have I forgotten those words, wearing my anger, my hurt, my despair on my sleeve?

The “dizzy dancing way you feel” has been my rapture, all of ours, and you know exactly what I am talking about. Those moments when you catch yourself and realize how genuinely splendid it all is; how so happy you are that your parents had one last hug, one last whatever in them to have brought you to this place.

Dizzy with the joy, even when sitting barely still, you at least feel the urge to dance until overcome— I am here, eyes scan the people around me, and we acknowledge—yes, we are sharing this moment, regardless of how insignificant it may seem. This moment is also a part of eternity, a never-ending resource: heady stuff.

“Dreams and schemes and circus crowds,” what was the moment, the good mood on that morning, or late that evening, when Ms. Mitchell sat down with a guitar and harnessed these sentiments? We don’t know, and it’s irrelevant because just hearing them summons inside me that love she felt. Thanks to her and the clouds hanging outside, slowly sauntering past my window, off to the horizon, I, too, can look at life from both sides — all sides even.

Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
Looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and they snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way (Both Sides)

Could there be anything more wonderful than ice cream castles in the air? Feather canyons? Could there be a better hobby than lying in the grass staring at the clouds and watching an epic novel form and un-form? Watching the decorations being constructed and then removed from a palette whose presence forever casts us in those alternating shades of now, sadly undergoing the endless iterations unnoticed by most — simply because we are too busy staring down, fretting?

Joni Mitchell one day found herself “doing nothing,” distracted by endless cloud formations, and this song grew, as a result, in her heart. It made her smile one of the purest smiles I had ever seen.

I do believe I am smitten, if not head over heels, in love.

Let it rain, let it snow, let them block the sun and distract me; I don’t care. I want everyone to stop for a few minutes daily to take them in; the ice cream castles lined up like angel hair.

Maybe, as a result, we can stop and check this moment and agree: it’s not supposed to be like this.

We may be today, sliding back to what seems to be the present from the past. We may have a chance now to alter the future by doing just one thing differently, one thing better.

Look skyward and ask yourself: “Is it love’s illusion…or just a fairytale?”