Music Lyric Monday: Wide Open Spaces

Wide Open Spaces

Who doesn't know what I'm talking about?
Who's never left home, who's never struck out
to find a dream and a life of their own?
A place in the clouds, a foundation of stone

Many precede and many will follow
A young girl's dream no longer hollow
It takes the shape of a place out west
But what it holds for her, she hasn't yet guessed

She needs wide open spaces
Room to make her big mistakes
She needs new faces
She knows the high stakes

She traveled this road as a child
Wide eyed and grinning, she never tired
But now she won't be coming back with the rest
If these are life's lessons, she'll take this test

She needs wide open spaces
Room to make her big mistakes
She needs new faces
She knows the high stakes
She knows the high stakes

As her folks drive away, her dad yells, "Check the oil!"
Mom stares out the window and says, "I'm leaving my girl."
She said, "It didn't seem like that long ago 
when she stood there and let her own folks know. . ."

She needs wide open spaces
Room to make her big mistakes
She needs new faces
She knows the high stakes 

She knows the highest stakes
She knows the highest stakes
She knows the highest stakes
She knows the highest stakes 

~ The Dixie Chicks

_________________________________________

Today is the day my dear friend David M. officially moves away. The truck has been packed and his things have been sent. And right about now, he is somewhere pumping gas into his car and preparing to make that drive to Pennsylvania.

Something about this song has kept making me think of him. I feel myself inserting "he" in the place of "she" and imagining my wonder twin moving away from what had been his cozy professional home for something else. For some wide open spaces that, for him, could no longer be found where he was. 

Everyone was stunned. Leaving? Atlanta? Now? Yes. 

I can't say I was fully shocked. As his close friend I'd seen him itching for those wide open spaces and that zone of unpredictability that gives you room to make your big mistakes. For him, it was time. And yes. He knows the high stakes.

I've always loved that song and any song that's open for many interpretations. I always believed that we all face points in our lives where we need "wide open spaces." Sometimes it's just a simple redefinition of who we are. Other times it's a big step like packing up and moving to a completely different place. Those "new faces" can be in the literal sense or in the figurative sense with how we see and interact those around us.  

Yeah.

I love the dichotomy between the words "a place in the clouds, a foundation of stone." That made me think of my friend Angella Lister, whose daughter recently left for college. Those words touch me, reminding me that at some point we have to turn our children loose to live their dreams. We hope that we've equipped them with a solid sense of self and some kind of road map telling them how to give and receive authentic love. Because that? That's the foundation of stone that will allow those dreams to come true. Or at least a comeback if a failure is involved. 

So yeah. My friend Angella is living this. Her youngest now out of the house which has left her husband and her home in what some call an "empty nest." But as I type those words, I imagine that parents whose children have recently left the home aren't so keen on this term. Me? I like to think of this as a transition to some wide open spaces for Angella and her husband. Room to do things that parents with children in their homes don't always get to do. 

Also. I think of my mother when I hear that song. Growing up in a college town and then, much to her chagrin, moving all the way to Africa with her family after her father took a job in Liberia. Right before her senior year of high school, no less. Interestingly, she returned straight back to that same college town she'd grown up in to attend college. But that didn't last long. She met a handsome fraternity boy who would later become her husband. And also my father. He was a senior and she just a freshman. They married and had a baby. A bit stunning to her parents to say the least. 

And then? Dad's first real job? Out west. All the way in California. Now. Were her parents exactly delighted with all of these things changing so fast in their daughter's life? Uuuhh, my guess is not so much. But now that the whole thing has played itself out it's so clear. She needed wide open spaces, man. More room to make her big mistakes and to find her place in the clouds. But look at her life and you'd know that she'd had a foundation of stone that kept her grounded. 

Yep.

So those are the lyrics I'm reflecting on today. Listening to this again reminded me of how much I loved this song. And the Dixie Chicks--particularly that era. Their esprit de corps back then always made me want to run off and join a blue grass band. Particularly the fiddle parts.

What do you see when you read those words? What wide open spaces have you explored?