Both Sides Now - Grace Shaw

Welcome to the mess.

I have loved this song in every way a person can love a song. Worn it out on repeat. Handed it out like candy. Committed it to memory.

Now, old friends, they’re acting strange.

They shake their heads;

They say I’ve changed. Well,

something’s lost

but something’s gained

in living every day.

Life is a mess. God has reminded me recently that we’ve lived in tents for a long time, God’s family. We pitch a tent every night in the wilderness of Now. And we sleep. Around us, sand dunes shift. When I am too tired to string up the light, metal frame and thread it through the tent mesh, too tired to unfold the tarp and hammer in the anchors, God has done it. Sometimes I help. Sometimes I mope. Usually I whine: Dad can’t we just go a little bit further tonight? What’s over that ridge? In reply, I most often get a kind smile that says: I love your spunk, Grace, but we’re staying here tonight.

And every night I go to bed taking for granted that God will be with me when I wake up. Instead, I lie awake wondering what I will find in the morning: Will the sun come up? Where will the sands have shifted? What will I have lost? Or gained?

Something’s lost

but something’s gained

The image in my sketch above is part of a visual language I’ve sort of developed for myself over the past year or two. It features both sides: the visible and invisible. The sprig and the Kingdom. What we can see in the natural and what we can see with eyes of the heart. What is right side up and what is upside down depends on perspective. You could even see the branches of the tree double as the roots to that little sprout.

I’ve looked at life

from both sides now:

from win and lose

and still somehow

it’s life’s illusions I recall.

I really don’t know life at all.

This year, God has been teaching me that love is to see another person as they are; not as I wish they were; not as my fear or anger would have me believe they could become. And He’s convincing me that to be loved is to be seen as I am. No one is “all good” or “all bad.” Neither am I. Seeing from both sides is, I think, the way of love— the way of surrender to what is; consent to camping wherever we land for the night, even if it limits our vision of what’s over the ridge.

Here is a damn near genius poem a friend of mine wrote awhile back (“Tempered,” Ekstasis Magazine, 2021). I read and reread and reread it to remind me of what love is like:

What I’m not trying to say is that God is unknowable. Even though God “will not / be known from” the Whole of Love, Love is alive (as in, we can know the resurrected person of Jesus right here, right now). However, what I put my weight on in this poem and in Joni Mitchell’s song is the question: What if the loss of what I thought I knew is not really a loss? What if it is an invitation to a deeper love?

Whenever I hear “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell, the still, small voice of God asks me to open: Maybe life’s not what you think it is. And maybe that’s a good thing.

And in the loss, God is patient with me. And in the gain, He is patient. And He is teaching me to be patient too.

“Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits at God’s right hand in the place of honor and power. Let heaven fill your thoughts. Do not think only about things down here on earth. For you died when Christ died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Colossians 3:1–3

Lost,

Gained,

Grace 🙂