Tara Phillips
Into The Mystic
The first time I heard it I was twelve years old. I listened to it often then. I’d close my bedroom door, turn up the song as loud as I could, and I’d swim in it… sometimes three or four times in a row, stopping only to press rewind and play on the boom box. I never tried to pick it apart or figure out what I loved about it, because it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was my song and nobody else’s… and that something about it made me feel as if I were the only person in the world, for three and a half minutes.
In my twenties, I still listened to it. I listened as the sound of the instruments drifted, and as Van Morrison sang about sailing into the mystic. He sang about how he heard the foghorn blow and that he didn’t have to fear it, and “I wanna’ rock your gypsy soul just like way back in the days of old. And together we will float into the mystic.” I listened and I sang along…and I cried. I listened to the saxophone tell me in eight measures that everything would be okay. I thought of all the doubts and confusion, and where my life was headed… What had happened to my dreams? Who was this man I had married? Where did I belong?
I still listen to it now in my thirties. I’ve grown to understand and appreciate the song the way I’ve come to understand and appreciate myself.
“Smell the sea and feel the sky. Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic.”
It encompasses the mistakes I’ve made and the paths I’ve chosen and the place I am today…It’s the epitome of everything I’ve always loved about music and how I’ve developed a longing to create it and express myself through it.
It represents everything I have loved or lost…everything that hasn’t happened yet…all painted into a masterpiece at first of subtlety, simplicity… innocence. A bass line holding down the steady heartbeat of the song, easing gently along the bottom of it like the keel of a sailboat. Guitars, piano, drums, horns… spinning into a climax as the singer sings, holding nothing back, and every instrument is present at its grandest: And somehow it all blends into something that makes more sense than anything has ever made. It’s my life flashing before my eyes, all of the crucial moments being played out on a flickering reel.
“We were born before the wind...also younger than the sun”
Love, Marriage, Divorce, the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met…
“When that foghorn whistle blows, I wanna’ hear it. I don’t have to fear it…”
…everything beautiful and painful and terrible and wonderful all at the same time until it’s almost more than I can take…
“…and magnificently we will float into the mystic.”
An exhausting sense of calm and relief and gratitude… and a sense that my gypsy soul has been rocked.
“It’s too late to stop now.”
© 2009 Tara Phillips