I think I truly heard Auld Lang Syne (which means times gone by) for the first time last year, though I’d heard the familiar chopped up version of it many New Years Eves gone by. It moved me so that I wrote after the performance:
Hot tears streamed down my face. I sat in the Kennedy Center audience listening to a beautifully-voiced Scotsman sing Auld Lang Syne, Red, Red Rose and Ae Fond Kiss. Each speaks of tender love, wistful longing, nostalgic hope. Why did those steamy rivers flow from my eyes, my heart, my soul? What freedom do I want to gain or regain, what precious acceptance lost, for what real-ness do I thirst? Maybe I only hope for peace, the recognition I’m not under a threat but a promise.
Hearing the song sung (all the verses) with passion about life and the hope that things long past need not be long lost, I regained a little more hope and joy, two things that maybe, just maybe were not gone for good but still there, available, for me to take back.
The song enhanced my life at that moment. The words urged me on a bit, opened my awareness, healed. That’s part of what living literarily is all about.
