The Song That Remembers Us

Carl R. Nassar
1 day ago
7 min read

I think about the village, the way we lived for two million years, and wonder: what must it have been like? That's when I imagine Kai. She's three years old, wandering toward a glacial river, her river, as it winds down from snow-topped hills into a wide, grassy meadow. Two villagers fall into step beside her, not watching, joining. They crouch in the mud, track grasshoppers leaping from stone to stone, and hold her when her wooden toy breaks and frustration becomes tears. And when Kai tires, a lap opens, a melody settles over her, and she folds into it like she was always meant to be there. Because she was.

Her little egocentric mind whispers, Look at all this love. It must be because of me. I must be precious. And she's right. Not just because she's special, but because everyone is. That’s what the village knows: preciousness isn't something you earn; it's something you're born with. And the village's most important job is to never let you forget it.

In Kai's village, this sense of preciousness isn't reserved for fellow clan. It extends to all of it—every living thing.

The sacred isn't up there somewhere, watching. It lives in the interconnection of everything. It is God not as doctrine, but as the living song running through all things. It is in the hunter kneeling beside the deer, singing to it, thanking it—because he understands, in his blood, that the deer's death is feeding his children… and one day, his body will feed the earth, which will grow the grass that will feed the deer's children … and this is not a transaction, but a prayer.

It isn't that the villagers just believe in the sacred. It's that they live inside it. Joseph Campbell described four functions that every living mythology must serve: it must awaken awe before the mystery of existence; it must make the world feel holy; it must root the moral order in something deeper than rules; and it must carry people through the passages of life together (The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology). In the village, all four are alive. No one has to be taught to feel them. They arrive the way morning arrives … because nothing is blocking the light.

There's a song most of us know—a song that has lived in us since childhood, though we may never have asked why. It’s called “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. It aches for a place. Not a fantasy. A real place…

There's a place for us

Somewhere a place for us

Peace and quiet and open air

Wait for us somewhere

And it longs for a time, unhurried, unscheduled, where closeness doesn't have to wait its turn:

There's a time for us

Someday there'll be time for us

Time together with time to spare

Time to learn and time to care

We know every note. We feel it in our chest before the first word is sung. And the reason it moves us so deeply is that the place and time it's longing for aren't somewhere we've never been. They're somewhere we've already been.

This.

Kai's meadow.

The hunter's prayer.

The lap that opens.

The song running through all things.

For two million years, this was home. And something in us still knows it.

The way light leaves a room

No one woke up one morning and chose to leave this sacred space behind. That's what makes the departure so heartbreaking. It happened the way light leaves a room at dusk—so gradually that you don't reach for the lamp until you realize you can no longer see each other's faces.

The departure began some twenty thousand years ago as a whisper of fear, hardening into belief: what is ours must be defended. This belief became a wall here, a closed gate there. The walls bred scuffles between villages; the scuffles became wars; the wars built empires; and the empires swept across continents, dismantling the small societies that had held humanity for millennia, annexing the lands where the last songs were sung.

Each loss was a thread pulled from a fabric so vast and so ancient that it seemed impossible it could ever unravel. But, thread by thread, it did.

Sadly, this was only the first departure. Campbell called it the opening movement of the hero's journey—the separation from the world the hero was meant to inhabit (The Hero with a Thousand Faces). But this departure wasn't just something that happened once, long ago, to other people. It's happening right now, tonight, to some child lying in a crib, reaching upward for arms that aren't coming, because the signal has gone dead…

The departure that arrives again

From our very first breath, we raise tiny arms, reaching skyward for a promise two million years in the making: My clan must be near, ready to scoop me up, meet my gaze, and hold me close. But, to our mind and body's surprise, no circle of villagers arrives to welcome us.

In their place stand two weary parents, unable to give us what a village once could. Not because they don't love us. They love us with everything they have. But everything they have is what's left after the jobs, after the dishes, after the world taught them that closeness comes only after all the bills are paid.

And so, instead of arms to hold us, a quiet arrives, settling over our cribs. Not the peaceful quiet of a sleeping village, but the aching silence of an absent one. And yet, even here, something inside us still reaches…

Someday. Somewhere.

We’ll find a new way of living.

We’ll find a way of forgiving.

Somewhere.

The departure that began with walls and empires arrives again—in our tiny rooms, in the dark, in the space between our cries and the silence that answers them.

The song is still here

I think about my mother, eleven years old, hiding inside a building in Cairo while an angry mob floods down the street toward her home, the world burning around her. And four men step outside her building and lock arms, and the mob parts around them like a river around stone.

Those four men weren't soldiers. They weren't heroes in the way the world uses that word. They were a porter, a repairman, a janitor, a groundskeeper—ordinary people who did the thing the village had always done: they turned toward the one who needed them. They stood between danger and a child. They didn't fight. They didn't speak. They just didn't move.

That is the only thing that has ever reversed the departure—not fixed it, not solved it, but turned the tide back toward home. Presence. Stillness. Compassion. The willingness to stop what you're doing and turn toward the person who needs you, not as a strategy or a technique, but because it's the oldest thing we know…

Hold my hand and we’re halfway there

Hold my hand and I’ll take you there.

Somehow. Someday. Somewhere.

For two million years, that was the song. And the song never really stopped. We just built so many walls we couldn't hear it anymore.

But the song is still here. It was in that Cairo doorway. It is in Huilloc, a Quechua village high in the Peruvian Andes, where the ancient practice of ayni still means that when one family needs a house, the whole village arrives to build it. It is in a drum circle in a church basement where strangers sit in a ring and discover that rhythm does what conversation sometimes can’t—it puts you inside the same heartbeat as the person beside you. It's in Froid, Montana, where fourteen people drove seven hours across the state for a neighbor's eight-minute court hearing—because someone they loved was in trouble, and the only thing they knew to do was show up.

The departure is never complete.

The song remembers us.

It always has.

It always will.

Somewhere.

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MythBlast authored by:

Carl R. Nassar, PhD, CIIPTS, is a writer, researcher, clinical trainer, former university professor, and psychotherapist. His writing is part-science, part-story, exploring what both research and lived experience have taught him… that our sweetest ending is not individual triumph, but reunion, a return to connection, kinship, and the village. Carl lives in Colorado with his wife, Gretchen, and their daughter, Kaila. www.carlnassar.com

This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey.

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