Stones that roll

I seriously wonder how many times
I would have to listen to Gimme Shelter
before the intro stops giving me chills.
I need it louder,
I need it to fill not just my ears,
but every corner of my cells -
it swirls in the air around me, but
it fills me up, too...
Songs like this are a drug for me,
songs that make me feel this...thing...this...
need 
to be turned inside out
and infused with their essence,
not the notes on a page,
not the distinct syllables of the poetry within them,
but to become one with the soul of the song.
I heard Jane Says on the way to work,
windows down
volume up
and I felt like I could fly.
Perry Farrell, you demon of goodness!
I half-smile, as a memory flits through me of another Perry I loved.
The smile quickly fades as I remember more;
what a wild time in my life that was...
it sometimes feels like an era that lasted so long it should require carbon dating.
I lived a lot of adventures in those short few years
between a perfectly sheltered mormon upbringing
and my first marriage.
Hiking to the hot springs with the ornithologist's son,
or with my guru,
or the time with the rattlesnake in the path,
but every
single
time
there were naked middle aged men lounging about
in the steaming water
in the deep night of Diamond Fork Canyon.

They were mostly benign,
except for that one time,
that one guy was so insistent on giving us foot massages,
even though we didn't want our feet
anywhere near his
lap.
Or the long-haired hippie boys laughing with each other and
swapping accusations of playing the skin flute,
(the first time I'd heard the term,
which conjured images of a tribal musical instrument)
and stopping them in their tracks
by softly stating my proficiency at that pursuit.
Or the time we slipped and hopped and balanced our way across the rushing water
to brave the frigid waterfall and see what was behind it.
Cold-wet-dark-rocky
ness
was behind it,
and I regretted leaving the warm embrace of the water,
and the fading sobriety of the ornithologist's son.
He slipped away,
back into the teeming valley of prim and proper students and professors
from which we'd escaped to seek out
life
and growling intensity
and wild abandonment of
everything we'd ever known.

The girl I was then:
 (showing off the wicked sunburn I got the first day in Hawaii, 1996)

(Looks like I'm repeating myself, haha!)