I love Joni Mitchell’s music for so many reasons, but the songs that capture me the most are the ones that express her restlessness and her longing for stability. She released an entire album about it, Hejira, in 1976. If you made me pick one of her recordings for a desert-island exile, it would be Hejira. That might even be the only pick, if I only had one.
From the very first song, “Coyote,” you hear that tension between settled and unsettled. In this song it’s between a lover who’s “up early on your ranch, brushing out a brood mare’s tail” and the singer, “a hitcher, a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway.” From her “Blue Motel Room” in Savannah, she wonders, “Will you still love me when I get back to town?” And she starts the title track with: “I’m traveling in some vehicle / I’m sitting in some café / A defector from the petty wars / That shell shocked love away,” a verse whose first 3 lines repeat at the end, but with a different last line: “Until love sucks me back that way.”
Most people focus on how the songs on Hejira and many of her other recordings are unrequited love songs, but I see them (also) as ruminations on that internal tension between independence (solo travel) and connection (settling down). “Urge for Going” (1966) didn’t make it onto one of her albums (as far as I know) until the recent release of the first volume of her archives, which includes 2 live performances of the song. “I get the urge for going but I never seem to go; I get the urge for going, When the meadow grass is turning brown.” So many others expressing this tension … “All I Want” (“I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling…”), “California,” “Free Man in Paris,” the list goes on and on.
I’ve been driven by the urge for going but conflicted by nostalgia since I started moving on my own. During my first semester in college in Ohio, at a beautiful leafy campus of 1500 or so students, I subliminally felt uneasy, until the leaves dropped in November after a glorious sunny October. I still remember my feeling, something like an unclenching and exhalation after holding my breath too long, when I could see the neighboring hillsides that the maples and oaks had hidden until that moment.
Whew, what a relief, for a person who became aware and mobile in a sprawling sunbelt city redeemed mainly by being surrounded by thousands of visible square miles of New Mexico. But as the clouds closed in and the days got shorter, the relief went away, and the homesickness pervaded me. I complained, I cried, I tried to back out of it, to return to Albuquerque. In my friends’ letters, they responded to my whining with almost-audible eye-rolls. The one I remember best came from one of my favorite high school teachers, whose card said (I think it only said), “Bloom where you’re planted.” It was obviously the lesson I needed most. She was right, but it took me a while to figure that out. Even so, the nostalgia never goes away, nor the second-guessing about moves I’ve made, almost all of which have involved both pushes and pulls.
I’m writing this from the second floor of our house in East Riverdale, Maryland, a week before I get back on the road to my condo in Champaign. For the first couple years of my current job at the University of Illinois, when people asked me whether I was settled in, I would respond: I’m settling into being unsettled.
But having lived with Leda in Maryland for more of the past 15 months than in Champaign, and having traveled again to the home of my heart in New Mexico for the first time in 2 years, that’s not exactly right anymore. Instead, I’ve begun to reframe myself as having more than one home. Because home isn’t an address as much as connections. I have abiding connections to my people in (and from) Albuquerque; important newer communities of friends in the DC area; and a circle of musicians who have made a home for me in Champaign-Urbana. Such a luxury, such a treasure, and so many places to bloom.
