Answer #7 - It's Full of Stars

There are books I'd write that I've thought aloud, with a hundred years more and a fountain pen, and a fountain pen, and my worries gone, all my worries gone, write em down..

Heading to Europe to release the new album Mid-March. It's an amazing experience everytime I go. This is one of the best parts of the job - the travel. Sparks snap shots, which spark stories, which spark songs. This story/essay, jotted down while being driven through the Dutch countryside, sparked a song which didn't make an album, but, in turn, kicked a new song that did '100 Years More' - a lyric from which is above.
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The man in the green shirt looks down into a hole. The horse stands there, seemingly patient, but who knows what dark thoughts are held in the half-crazy horse mind. There are no tulips today and there should be, but spring is late this year. So instead, the hue of the world is neutral beige and olive gray, with accents of red barn paint and tiled rooftops.

We could just as easily be in Iowa. What is in the hole the man is looking into? If we were in Iowa, would there be seeds tucked away in a sack? Seeds would maybe be in the hole - maybe some corn and a dead fish, like at Plymouth Settlement, before the big feast and the small pox.

But we’re not in Iowa. And we’ve never been to Iowa. I tell him that the man in the green shirt is probably burying a heart in a shallow hole, and that it will most likely keep him awake at night – or float up to his porch steps at the next big rain, like a puffy purple sailboat. He isn’t listening, but I don’t really care. I’m not really listening, either, and he didn’t see the green man. Besides, burying a human heart is solitary work, and I feel the weight of eavesdropping, the dirty pleasure of spying. So I look away. The heart will find him soon enough, though. It always does.

Someone says we’re going west. I don’t remember metric conversions, so I navigate by the distance from the shallow hole, and it is 2 hours behind me. He knelt next to it, looking so intently. Maybe he’d already buried the thing, maybe years ago. Maybe he couldn’t take it anymore and came, finally, to the far corner of his fields to dig it up. But the rains have started. Maybe he changed his mind at the last minute, and sat at the hooves of the anxious horse and cried.

There is a price for everything. There is always a price. So you follow the skyline and your eyes land on a green man, and suddenly you’re part of the story, and the beating of the thing, and you’d look away if you could, but you walk the furrough alongside the patient, crazy horse and breathe shallow every step of it. Because you don’t know where you’ll end up or what price you’ll pay for it – not ever understanding why you always manage to think the worst. Maybe you can’t ever get far enough from Iowa and shallow holes and cloudy fish eyes. Even when you’re speeding toward Amsterdam in the back of a blue sedan.