This song began with a dream that my wife, Kelsey, had, in which a group of well-dressed, professional-looking young men filed quietly into our house and proceeded to steal all our belongings, filling cardboard boxes with everything they could find.
Kelsey watched them from the couch and asked, “Excuse me—why are you taking all my stuff?” One of them turned around and reassured her, “This is perfectly normal. It happens to everyone. We’ll be out of your way momentarily,” then resumed his polite theft. Within minutes, the intruders were gone, along with everything we had owned.
It’s such a striking dream. It seems to be saying something like, “Growing up involves all kinds of inexplicable moments of incremental loss, but provides no ceremony for its accompanying grief.” Somewhere along the way, we pick up the unspoken expectation that we must keep moving forward, unshaken by the layers of skin we’ve shed.
“Grace” is my interpretation of Kelsey’s dream, guided in large part by the wisdom of Wendell Berry. And you might just hear Kelsey’s voice in the recording, too (she did an awesome job).
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