It follows the three verses that end with her confessing "I really don't know clouds/love/life at all. To which Seeger adds:
Daughter, daughter, don't you know
You're not the first to feel just so?
So let me say, before I go,
It's worth it any way:
Some day we all may be surprised,
We'll wake, and open up our eyes
And then at last, we'll realize
The whole world feels this way:
We've all been living upside down
And turned around, with love unfound
Until we turn and face the sun
All of us, yes, everyone.
If this is atypical New Age idealism for Seeger—the same Seeger who wrote the hard-biting words of Last Train to Nuremburg and Waist Deep in the Big Muddy—it’s perfectly in keeping with the broader theme of Both Sides Now.
Mitchell is one who has crossed many borders in her music and her life. Her retirement from singing to rediscover painting in California is the kind of organic boundary—as opposed to a border—described by the late Kate Wolf, another California songwriter in her chorus:
It's gone away in yesterday
And I find myself on the mountain side
Where the rivers change direction
Across the Great Divide.
As he enters his tenth decade, Seeger has made that shift. He now appears only rarely, but significantly to savour the fruits he has spent his life cultivating: a world of communion across borders symbolized in the accession of Barrack Obama to the US Presidency.
It is in that benevolence Seeger addressed Mitchell as "Daughter" in his letter of 40 years ago: a parent who sees resolution of a lifelong struggle in reach for the next generation, especially one who puts the question philosophically as Joni did.
His addendum is more than a reassuring "It'll be all right" or "All you need is love." It’s an explicit nudge towards our Source however we conceive/experience it.
And if the medal awarded him by Bill Clinton is supplemented by a Nobel Peace Prize, then, in an Eighth Day of Creation, we can say, as in Genesis, "Yes, it is truly good."
Both Sides Now is a good place to end 60 days of discussion that began with President Barrack Obama's visit to Canada in February. Unlike Joni Mitchell, I cannot presume to say I've "looked at the border from both sides now," having spent less than 1% of my life in the United States.
Sharing a continent across the semipermeable membrane we call the Canada-US border is , however, a basis for the subtitle "Reflections of America by a Northern Neighbour."
I can claim a Both Sides Now in another sense. having moved back and forth across Canada's linguistic divide. For French and English have different words and different meanings to describe what happpens when we pass from one country to another.
"The Canada-United States boundary" (its official name) uses a word with a fixed sense to it. We do the same when we talk of "settling personal boundaries." We imply there is something to be held together: the root "bound" as to "bind tightly" or that something "is bound to take place."
Border that we now use interchangeably with "boundary" has a soften tone. The borders of a garden or of a page are not fixed limits. They are margins into which one may stray, though it's better not to.
The French for border, la frontière, is more a margin than an outer limit. It is not le front but something that stretches farther: a zone rather than a line. American folklore took the idea of the frontier to great length. It was something not simply to be crossed but to be explored and experienced.
That is the sense we need to import into the word "border" in English. The line between societies and countries is like a cell membrane through which fluids pass: something intended to filter but not exclude entirely.
The semipermeable border between Canada and the US has served both countries: in the passage of labour and capital, immigrants and ideas. It has allowed slaves and draft dodgers to escape pursuit and return home at a more opportune time.
As this movement takes place back and forth Over The Fence, lives and categories become blurred, and we can say with Joni Mitchell—and Pete Seeger...
I've looked on ... from both sides now ...
thanks !
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