During the Christmas holiday my wife Jane and I feasted, nay, gorged ourselves on movies. We wept through Lord of the Rings, remembered our lives in the 60's through Ali, and called upon our mental health experiences through A Beautiful Mind.

Perhaps the biggest movie surprise for me was Shipping News. Kevin Spacey plays the part of a somewhat pensive almost frightened ink setter who falls in love with a flashy but impatient young woman, only to have her run off and die. In the midst of his depression he moves with his daughter and an aging aunt to the old family home in Newfoundland. There he becomes a reporter for a local paper and discovers, sometimes inadvertently, that everybody has a story. In this hard-working community where survival requires all the skills one has, everyone has a family secret, a once upon a time, a year I want to forget, a tale I cannot tell. What we discover in these stories is that (as our reporter finds and brings to the surface) there is first shock, then anger, then relief, and ultimately, healing.

I saw this film only days after completing the task of writing nearly two hundred songs based on stories that people told me. Some of these were simply love songs, for example "to my wife and best friend, merry Christmas." Some of them were intimate family stories about fear, tragedy, poverty, relational difficulty, and hope where hope seemed impossible. This material, this sacred material, this close-to-the-heart material, it was my honor to hold gently in my hands, respect the wonder of it, and put it to song. The task was exhausting. More than the shear physical demand was the sense of wanting to tread carefully and respectfully in these rooms where I have been allowed as a guest. Shipping News was a wonderful confirmation (as if we need confirmation) that when we tell our stories in a loving, tender, supportive environment we can reimagine and reshape those stories and find healing in that process.

May this year grant people around you who have ears to listen, hearts to absorb, and hands to hold your story gently but firmly.

From the road,