Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Hi everyone, welcome. I’m Carmen Acevedo Butcher and we’re thankful you’re here at Learning How to See. We’re so glad because today Brian and I are speaking with the musician and poet Carrie Newcomer, and she brings up and into the room all of the wonders of music, which started me thinking. A good 3000 years ago now, young David, future king, as we read in 1st Samuel, did what amounts to what we call today music therapy with then King Saul, who as we hear in the Message translation experienced the spirit of God leaving him and in its place came awful tormenting depression. Saul’s advisors went looking for a musician, David was found and came to play the harp to tormented Saul, and we read that David’s music calmed Saul down and he felt better as his depressed mood lifted.

We also appreciate the Hebrew scripture’s wise, enduring Psalms that are an integral part of any old or new monastics diet. Thomas Merton, in fact called the Psalms Bread in the Wilderness in a book by that title because he says they provide nourishment for the interior life. The power of music then is nothing new and you’re going to experience it today in Learning How to See.

For me, my name Carmen means song or poem, even incantation. The plural of Carmen, the word is Carmina. Ordinary singing or chanting is one of my daily practices for many decades now in all kinds of interior weather, sunny, cloudy, serene, stormy. Singing somehow grew for me out of severe childhood trauma from my father and from deep kindness from my mother who loves to sing. I gravitated to hymns at church, songs at school, on the radio, and ones I would make up as poems and then sing. I never quit doing this somehow. Singing has helped me express gratitude and celebrate the wonder of everyday blue skies or soaring crows, egrets, turkey vultures. Also the Appalachian mountains of my Georgia heritage and the rolling hills of California that I so love. And singing has given me rhythm even on painful days and during painful years, helping me through severe anxiety and past depression to experience that God loves me and I am love too. And so are you.

You’re in for a treat today on Learning How to See, because as Carrie Newcomer puts it, you’re going to experience short-form empathy during Brian’s and my wonderful conversation together with Carrie. Her songs reveal and help us touch the sacred in the ordinary, and Carrie has such calmness and such generosity of soul that she also sings on the podcast in ways that are just unique and draw you in. Also a poet in A Permeable Life, Carrie really appeals to my country girl heart when she writes in The Hayfield, “I am in love with the untamed things, the cloud, the dough, water, air, and light. I am filled with such tenderness for ordinary things, the practical mule, the pasture, a perfect spiral of gathered hay.”

In the poem Showing Up, Carrie reminds us why songs matter, writing, “This wounded world needs all the songs we can pull from the air. Every story that helps us to remember. It needs every single gift, large and small,” and she adds, “to each one of us.” And yes, dearest, this grateful world does rejoice every courageous time we are true to ourselves and to our gifts. Being true to ourselves is the ultimate singing, honoring the sacred gift of the breath. You’ll see in the conversation that follows how Carrie helps us pause and recognize the sacred mystery of the present moment and find new strength in the divine beloved who yearns for us as we yearn for the divine mystery who eludes words even as God is closer to us than our own soul, as Julianne of Norwich expresses it. May you be blessed through this Learning How to See offering and may comfort through us all being together wherever you are.

Brian McLaren:

We welcome all of you to this episode of Learning How to See, a very special episode because we have an amazing guest, Carrie Newcomer, a gifted musician and poet, and one of the people who’s enriched my life in beautiful and special ways over many years. And I’m so happy to have Carmen Acevedo Butcher, my colleague and friend and co-host. We’re ecstatic about this chance to talk with our friend Carrie about Learning How to See through eyes of love. Carrie, welcome. We would love it if you would just introduce yourself to us and all the listeners, tell them what they need to know about you, and we’d love to hear some music as well if you’d like.

Carrie Newcomer:

Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Carmen. It is so lovely to be on this program. I’m just delighted and honored to be asked to sit at the table with you. So I am a musician, I’m a songwriter, I’m a poet, I’m an activist, I’m a Substack writer, and most of all, I’m a seeker. I’m a Quaker, I’m a seeker. And so there’s a whole lot more things I could add to that list, really proud mom, community member, gardener. There’s a lot of things that I could add to that list, but maybe I’ll just start with a song because it always comes back to music for me and this song is called Holy as the Day is Spent.

Holy is the dish and drain, the soap and sink and the cup and plate.

And the warm roll of socks and the cold white tile. Shower heads and good dried towels.

And frying eggs sound like songs with bits of the salt measured in my palm.

And it’s all a part of a sacrament, it’s holy as the day is spent.

Holy is the busy street and the cars that boom with a passionate beat.

And the checkout girl counting change the hands that shook my hands today.

And hymns of geese fly overhead, spread their wings like their parents did.

Blessed be the dog who runs in her speed to chase some wild and elusive thing.

Holy is the familiar room, quiet moments in the afternoon.

And folding sheets like folding hands the prey has only laundry can.

I’m letting go of all my fear like autumn leaves made of earth and air.

But the summer came and the summer went as holy as the day is spent.

Holy is the place I stand to give whatever small good I can.

And the empty page and the open book.

Redemption everywhere I look.

Unknowingly, we slow our pace and shade up unexpected grace.

And with grateful smiles and sad lament as holy as a day is spent.

And morning light sings Providence as holy as a day is spent.

Brian McLaren:

Oh my. Carmen, what were you thinking when you were hearing that song, Carmen?

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Oh, I was thinking how much I appreciate, Carrie, in your music and in your poetry, how you always bring our attention back to the present moment and whatever’s happening, and also how your music is really an expression of Psalm 19 of the way that the earth speaks with us and just the beauty washing over me. Thank you.

Carrie Newcomer:

Oh, well thank you, Carmen.

Brian McLaren:

Yeah, that song has been like if you took maybe my 10 favorite songs that’s been on the list since the first time I heard it, Carrie. As I was listening, I kept thinking of Father Richard Rohr’s definition of contemplation. He has many different definitions, but one of them is a long loving look at the real. And I feel one of the things you capture in that song is what happens when the looker and the look is a look of love. And that’s what we’re thinking about in this season of Learning How to See, how to look with love, how to see with love. And I wondered if there’s a story that might go along with that song or that it touches you in your life when you think about times your eyes were graced with being able to see with love?

Carrie Newcomer:

I think, well first of all, thank you for your kind thoughts about the song. I really appreciate that. My life as a songwriter, as a poet has asked me to consider how I look at the world on a daily moment-to-moment kind of way. I think it was Billy Collins, don’t quote me on that, but I think it was Billy Collins who said the first work of the poet is to look out the window, that our first job is to pay attention and then to take in what we see with a certain kind of spirit and for me, a certain kind of love. And I think it’s a practice and the more you practice it, the more you see, the more you see, the more you see with love, the more you see with love.

I think too, and with that particular song really came out of a certain sense of contemplation on small things and small moments and how there can be great meaning and great love in small things. I love a lot of things I have to tell you, there’s big love. The big things I love. I love my husband, I love my daughter. I love justice. I love mercy. I love the natural world in all the ways it connects us so completely and perfectly. I love so many big things, but I also, my life is filled every day with all those glorious little loves. I love blueberries and I love the smell of lilacs and I love how little kids hold each other’s hands when they go across the street. I love that smell at the top, very top of a newborn baby’s head. I love rain and when the rain comes down and the ground smells like, I mean, I love my two shaggy dogs, the way that it sounds when a really good knife just clicks through a fresh carrot.

I mean there’s just so many things I love that my life is so filled with if I’m paying attention, if I’m willing to see and experience it that way. And that’s really where the song came from, this joyousness. And sometimes in that kind of practice of looking at life, looking at the small moment and the small thing through love, it’s not always completely joyous. Sometimes there’s nostalgia, sometimes there’s loss or a remembrance that is bittersweet. Sometimes we also notice the things that are hard that we wrestle with. You take it all. When you decide I’m going to be here, I’m going to be present and I’m going to be present with love, you take it all.

Brian McLaren:

So well said. You introduce yourself as a Quaker and for a lot of folks, they might not be familiar with the rich tradition of Quakerism, for folks who are listening to this podcast and have a connection to the Center for Action and Contemplation, I think one way to introduce Quakers is to say, Quakers were kind of the mainstream of the contemplative tradition in the Protestant world, right?

Carrie Newcomer:

Yeah.

Brian McLaren:

And I think of you and Parker Palmer as being probably two of the great people who’ve reintroduced people to that rich tradition in recent decades, and I noticed in the song, words like sacrament, hymn, words that talk about the holiness of the little things in a day. Could you talk about that a little bit, Carrie?

Carrie Newcomer:

As a songwriter, something happened in my songwriting development when I really embraced the idea that I write songs, but I write songs about something. And this particular song has a lot to do with a spiritual thread that’s running through my life.

There’s a spiritual thread that runs through my work in the world, my art form, my poetry, my songs, because there’s a spiritual thread that runs through my life. If it wasn’t present in my songs, I would be censoring something really elemental about how I walk around in the world and experience my own life and I experience transcendence in my life. Yeah, in terms of contemplative practice, I’ve heard it said before that contemplative Quakers and contemplative Catholics or from other denominations, we meet on the other side of the barn, which is kind of an interesting way of the worship form may be different in some ways, but that love of mystery, the love of the silence and what happens in the silence, the love of, well, in many cases, the love of what we find at going to that well, how we bring it into the world and how we then express that love and what we find at the well in our daily lives. I think there’s a lot of connection there and there’s always been a lot of connection there.

Brian McLaren:

On the other side of the barn.

Carrie Newcomer:

The other side of the barn. I don’t remember who told me that, but I thought, “Yeah, pretty much.”

Brian McLaren:

Learning How to See will be back in a moment.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

We are going to chant for about three minutes and I want to briefly frame this. It’s a simple chant. Its words are from Buddhist cones a friend of mine shared with me. I lived with them, reflecting on them during walks in the marsh while driving and while navigating very serious family health crises during the pandemic and one day a melody emerged. If you want to write the words down, you can hit pause and go get a pen. The words are, I am gratitude. I am gratitude. The present moment is my true self and I am whole right now. I am here. I am here. I am gratitude. It takes about 20 seconds to chant all the way through. What I love about chanting is you don’t have to be good at it. It’s not a performance. You don’t even have to particularly want to do it every time you do it.

I go for walks and chant kind of the way I floss my teeth. At first, getting in the habit as a preteen was hard, but now it’s a joy to floss my teeth, so simple and so good for me. I mean, I don’t always chant on walks or driving, but I do very often I love it now. I also don’t wait to feel any type of way to chant. I chant and see what comes up. It doesn’t have to fit, I’ve discovered, some idealized notion of a perfect experience. I can be chanting about gratitude and thinking the news is overwhelming. I am not grateful for the cruelty of the world. And then my mind can name a litany of cruelties that anger and break my heart even as I’m chanting and feeling gratitude for life and for what kindness I can contribute.

Also, I chant with curiosity to see what chanting has to say to me. It can be a wordless feeling or longing, a new appreciation for what I’m seeing in the marsh. Some image to consider, a loving awareness of the breath, a question for God, a wanting to do something, a letting go of something or no words, just intimate awareness of God’s nearness. What Catherine of Genoa calls [foreign language 00:19:57], my deepest me is God. And so because we’ve listened and have Carrie Newcomer here and we have this joy of music, we’re going to participate in it right now together. We’ll sing this chant together seven times. And the words again are I am gratitude. I am gratitude. The present moment is my true self and I am whole right now. I am here. I am here. I am gratitude.

I am gratitude. I am gratitude. The present moment is my true self and I am whole right now. I am here. I am here. I am gratitude.

I am gratitude. I am gratitude. The present moment is my true self and I am whole right now. I am here I’m here. I am gratitude.

I am gratitude. I am gratitude. The present moment is my true self and I am whole right now. I am here. I am here. I am gratitude.

I am gratitude. I am gratitude. The present moment is my true self and I am whole right now. I am here. I am here. I am gratitude.

I am gratitude. I am gratitude. The present moment is my true self and I am whole right now. I am here. I am here. I am gratitude.

And we’ll slow it down For the last one.

I am gratitude. I am gratitude. The present moment is my true self and I am whole right now. I am here. I am here. I am gratitude.

I hope that blessed you. You may want to consider making up your own chant at some point to enjoy that playful feeling of experimenting that children know instinctively. You can make up a new melody for these words or pick a verse from scripture you love or from a favorite poem and live with it and lean into singing any melody that emerges over time. Record it on your phone, make it your own song. And may your chanting bless you.

So Carrie, we just loved your singing so much. We’re hoping if you want to share another song we’d love it or a poem along with the theme of how we see through the eyes of love and how we’re seen through the eyes of love. Do you have a story that you would like to share of a time when you were seen through the eyes of love?

Carrie Newcomer:

What a great question. Thank you for asking such a great question. I do have a song. The song grew out of a collaborative piece that I did with Parker Palmer. We did a spoken word in music piece together and this song was written for that collaborative project. And it came from telling a story about a friend of mine, a friend of mine had this wonderful phrase she would say to her two daughters as they were growing up, she would say, “You can do hard things. Yes you can.” And I loved the phrase because it acknowledged that what they were going to do next was difficult. It was not easy. It might even be scary. And at the same time completely affirmed that they had everything they needed to take the next step. Everything had brought them here and they had everything they needed to take that next step and support. You can do hard things. Yes you can. So I’ll go ahead and sing the song.

There at the table with my head in my hand.

A column of numbers I just did not understand.

You said add these together, carry the two. Now you can do this hard thing. You can do this hard thing.

It’s not easy, I know, but I believe that it’s so. You can do this hard thing.

At a cold winter station breathing into our gloves.

It would change me forever, leaving for God knows what?

You carried my bags. You said I’ll wait for you. You can do this hard thing. You can do this hard thing.

It’s not easy, I know, but I believe that it’s so. You can do this hard thing.

Late at night I called and you answered the phone.

The worst, it had happened and I did not want to be alone.

You quietly listened. You said we’ll see this through. You can do this hard thing. You can do this hard thing.

It’s not easy, I know, but I believe that it’s so. You can do this hard thing.

Here we stand breathless and pressed in hard times, hearts hung like laundry on backyard clotheslines.

Impossible just takes a little more time.

From the muddy ground comes a green volunteer.

In a place we thought barren new life appears.

Morning will come whistling some comforting tune for you. You can do this hard thing. You can do this hard thing.

It’s not easy, I know, but I believe that it’s so. You can do this hard thing.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

In a place we thought barren, new life appears. Thank you, Carrie. That’s so beautiful and so needed for today to remember, you can do this hard thing. Thank you so much.

Carrie Newcomer:

Thank you. And in terms of your question about times when I’ve been seen through the eyes of love, I think every verse really was a little vignette, a scene with some person in my life saying that phrase to me in one way or another, “Yes, we can do this, we can do this together, you can do this.” Seeing me at the place I was at, whatever the challenge was, whatever I was trying to navigate in that moment and saying those all-important words, “I believe in you, I believe in you, and yes you can and you have support.”

Brian McLaren:

As you say that, Carrie, it reminds me the other day I heard someone say that someone had said to him, “I believe in you.” And he felt how absolutely affirming that was. And he felt that when he would speak of God or the divine and he would say, “I believe in you,” it struck him in a new way. It was a little bit like what you just sang in the song like, “Wow, we can do this together. We can get through some hard times together.” I love that idea that there is this empowerment that comes when we believe in ourselves and believe in each other and share in the sense that the impossible, it’s not a cement wall with barbed wire on the top of it. It’s got some permeability to it.

Carrie Newcomer:

Yes. And support for it. And I think that’s an important piece. And also kind of going back a little bit to the first part of the program, talking about spiritual language. I use spiritual language in my work, but I’m very careful about it because spiritual language can open the heart, it can slam doors so fast, it’s blinding. So I use spiritual language very deliberately. It’s never a placeholder. It’s never a metaphor that I’m not thinking through. And this idea, I believe in you sometimes…

My husband is a great problem solver. He’s a lawyer, he is an entertainment lawyer and he teaches entertainment law though I think I told you earlier when I met him, he was in a band called The Dorkestra, which makes him still my favorite dork. You can’t make up stuff like this, but he’s a great problem solver. But sometimes when someone comes to you with something they’re navigating or wrestling, not really looking for problem solving. Sometimes you are, you’re looking for brainstorming. But often I find if I stop and I listen first and I ask good, open, honest questions, that’s often more of what’s needed. My husband now will say, “Okay, when can I brainstorm on this? Or is this one of those times when we’re just listening?” But it’s true and sometimes the only thing that’s needed is I see you, I love you, I believe in you, and I’m here.

Brian McLaren:

Yes. Carrie, when you speak of the care in using spiritual language, I think that’s what part of what you meant when you talked about meeting on the other side of the barn, it’s like there’s this barn full of language and arguments and terminology, but there is this place, Rumi talked about it as a field where we meet beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing. It’s this kind of space. One of your songs captures that space as well as anything I’ve ever read or heard, and it’s the song I Don’t Know Its Name. Would you like to say anything about that song or maybe even sing it? Would that be too much to ask?

Carrie Newcomer:

Yeah. I’ll tell you a little bit about the song. In the Dao De Jing, there is a phrase, “The Dao that can be named is not the real Dao.” And sometimes I think in spiritual community we have certain words that were originally thought of as metaphors and then they become kind of encased in glass and they stop being that mysterious word. Yahweh was not to be spoken actually, it’s breath. It’s the in-breath, it’s the out-breath. And so thinking about language as having that beautiful ability to point towards something more than it’s actually saying. Music is like that too. I think that’s one of the things that has always drawn me to music and to songwriting. At the heart of a good song, at the heart of a good song, we see one another. We sense where we’re connected as human beings. A good song is short-form empathy. It really is three and a half minutes of empathy.

So but also at the heart of a good song is something that comes from me when I sing it, something that comes from you when you experience it and hear it. And there’s something that starts to swirl in the mix between us, something wordless and transcendent, and I love it if we’re talking about this episode being about the things we love, I love what makes music that short-form empathy, that what swirls between us at the heart of a song.

The song I Do Not Know Its Name, I really was playing with this idea of the sacred and somehow naming the sacred falls short, that sometimes we need poetry, sometimes we need an image, sometimes we need a song. There’s several vignettes in it and one in terms of people who saw me with love, I was on an early morning shuttle really early in the morning on a Sunday morning in San Francisco. So from the hotel to the San Francisco airport, I was on this shuttle and this man picked me up, this wonderful man and he was the driver and no one else on that shuttle bus. We started talking. He saw my guitar and he said, “You know, I sing. I sing in a gospel choir on Wednesday nights.” I said, “Oh, that’s wonderful. Isn’t it great to sing?”

And he started to sing for me in this beautiful baritone and he sang and he drove and as he pulled up to the curb, he gave out this last gorgeous flourish and opened the doors, and I don’t remember his name, but I will never forget that song and I will never forget the way he looked at me with a sense of love, with a sense of sharing, with a sense of, “Oh, how we both recognize what we love so much at the heart of a song,” especially a song of praise. So that’s one of the vignettes in it. And so I haven’t played the song in a while, so I’m not sure I would remember the words without pulling them up on the internet. Isn’t that something when you have that many songs? I guess that makes me officially been around a while, but perhaps if you use recordings, you could go ahead and use one of the recordings.

Brian McLaren:

I think we’ll find a link and share that and people will understand why I love that song. And peaches, oh my goodness, I don’t think I’ve eaten a peach since I heard that song without remembering that verse of the song.

Carrie Newcomer:

Oh, that’s love too. I was traveling with a whole bunch of guys. I was in a band at that point and we were traveling and we had been on the road a long time officially what we called road scrut. You really don’t want to be too close to anybody and just road scrut.

And so we’d been on the road a while and we are driving through this part of Georgia and there was a peach stand and it was peak peach season. So we pulled over the van and we all got out and we all got peaches. And I just remember they were the kind of peaches that are so juicy. You have to lean over to eat them because it’s just going to run down your entire self if you don’t do that. And I was leaning over eating this peach and I looked to my right and I looked to my left and here’s this whole line of music guys and they’re all leaning over and their eyes are closed and it was like, I love this moment. I love this peach. I love these people. I love the roadside. I love this peach stand. It was just this moment and it felt there was a certain moment of transcendence there. It’s good. It was like amen, amen and amen again.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Carrie, thank you so much for being with us all today. It has been such a blessing.

Carrie Newcomer:

Well, thank you.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Yeah, and I just want to say what I really love about everything you do, your poetry, your music, your activism, everything, is that it starts in the details of every life, the joyful, the hard, the grief. You say in the poem that is the song Path Through the Evening Woods, “There are last years leaves scattered on the ground like countless letters of tan and brown. I remember when they were drifting down as I walked this path through the evening woods.” And you have a lot of poems and songs and in your Substack that are really pens to mud and I really relate to that as somebody who walks through a marsh a lot.

And then for our listeners, you have A Permeable Life is one of your books of poetry and I love in Visitation that you celebrate light, you remind us what a gift light is and you write, “It is always the quality of light that nearly flattens me with wonder, filling me up and spreading out like liquid into the corners of my eyes all the way to the edges of my peripheral vision.” So from peaches to Betty’s Diner to light to mud, thank you Carrie for being here with us today. We have certainly, certainly been moved.

Carrie Newcomer:

Well, thank you so much for this lovely conversation and great questions. And again, I would love to invite people to join us on Substack. I do have a Substack offering called A Gathering of Spirits, and it’s been a wonderful community presenting a lot of the similar ideas. I think we’re on the same wavelength in terms of the kinds of things we’re presenting and lovely conversations. In a time when the world feels so divided and at loose ends with each other, it’s always good to remember, I think it’s one of those things that I love about being a traveling folk singer, is that everywhere I go, including sitting here with you on this podcast, there are fine people, there are good-hearted people, there are loving people everywhere I go and each one trying to do in their own way what they can to make the world a little kinder, better place. So I want to welcome everybody to the Gathering of Spirits on Substack, but also just thank you for welcoming me to be part of this conversation with you here.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Thank you for tuning in. We’re so happy for your presence here. As gentle homework or a calm call to action, you’re invited to engage with a song of Carrie’s, steeping in it lectio divina wise as a brief contemplative journey sometime. So in the show notes for this episode, we’ve put links to Carrie’s songs I Do Not Know Its Name, Start With a Stone, and It’s Always Love. In our conversation, Carrie shared backstories to I Do Not Know Its Name, telling the story of meeting the man on the airport shuttle who saw her guitar and shared how he sang in a gospel choir before bursting into a beautiful song as he drove. Carrie sings about him there, “He sang a haunting gospel hymn, shameless and clear with only me a wandering stranger sitting there to hear. And I do not know its name elusive and subtle, but I believe it must sound like that man singing in the shuttle.”

One way to go on a contemplative song journey is to Google find the lyrics for Carrie’s I Do Not Know Its Name and read them before listening to the song. Then as you listen, simply ask yourself, “What comes up for me as I listen? What’s my version of Carrie singing, ‘Eating summer peaches by a roadside stand juice running down like laughter on our chin’?” Ask, “What’s a story in my life where I was traveling, met a stranger and they blessed me in some unexpected way? Or when have I felt juice running down like laughter on my chin?”

Or you could use A Great Wild Mercy’s Start With a Stone, which Carrie co-wrote with legendary songwriter John McCutcheon. Its lyrics bring into song Father Richard Rohr’s, encouragement to pay attention to what’s sacred in our daily experience. As Carrie sings, “Start with a stone, the humblest of things from this relic of bedrock, eternity springs. Go back to the source. Go back to your home.” As you listen, you can ask, “Where, when I pause, does my ordinary life reveal the divine to me moment by moment? Spotting a stone beside the path? Dishwashing? Looking at a bird out the window?” Enjoy experimenting with this song journeying. You can take notes in a journal too if you want. We close today’s episode with a meditation, reading It’s Always Love together from Carrie’s album, the Point of Arrival, a beautiful, beautiful meditation on seeing through the eyes of love.

It takes some starts and stops to hold a paradox, all that’s boundless and forever with an ever-ticking clock.

I am every lonely ache and all the times I knew to wait.

I am all that I did right and I am every bad mistake.

It is love that breaks your heart. Love that tears the world apart.

Always love that makes it worth it in the end. It’s always love. It’s always love again.

I don’t know what to say. There are no words anyway.

Some things are wider than words that only echo and fade.

But there are sentences and songs, the ones I’ve always carried on.

That I can sing while I am here and you can sing when I am gone.

It is love that breaks your heart. Love that tears the world apart.

Always love that makes it worth it in the end. It’s always love. It’s always love again.

It’s old and then it’s new. Luminous and true. T.

He best that we can love is the most that we can do.

I keep trying to understand and to hold it in both hands.

How to know what can’t be done and still envision all that can.

I am everything I found and I am everything I’ve lost.

I am all that I’ve been given and I’m everything it costs.

It is love that breaks your heart. Love that tears the world apart.

Always love that makes it worth it in the end. It’s always love. It’s always love again.

Thank you again to Carrie for dropping by. Thank you all for listening to Brian’s and my conversation with this wonderful Prairie Mystic, Carrie Newcomer whose songs, poems, and life are wrapped in kindness. May you be blessed.

Brian McLaren:

Big thanks to Corey Wayne, Dorothy Abrams and Vanessa Ye, who produce Learning How to See. Thanks to April Stace for her musical support. This episode was edited and mixed by the team at Sound On Sound Off. To learn more about their work, visit SoundOnSoundOff.com. Thanks to the Center for Action and Contemplation for making Learning How to See possible. And special thanks to you for your investment of time. And thanks for sharing, Learning How to See with others if you find it meaningful.