Spring had blossomed in full in Worcester, Massachusetts by May 1980, people wearing shorts and frolicking about, the winter done, classes and exams all but over, graduation and summer on the horizon.
I sat in our apartment at a wooden desk we had stolen from school banging the keys on my typewriter as I reworked my thesis paper (I got to write about Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares under the tutelage and prodding of Bob Cording). The whole time I kept playing Van Morrison’s Moondance album, over and over, its sounds trance like, lifting me, floating me along to keep writing and revising.
We talk nowadays of getting in the flow; Van Morrison helped me get there, merging Kinnell’s lines, Cording’s echoes of support and challenge and my own words. And no song exemplifies that experience more than “Into the Mystic.”
YouTube: https://youtu.be/_6r2P4W9Yog?si=I5UG8GqyYsLydube
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/3lh3iiiJeiBXHSZw6u0kh6?si=2aaa6c32c4114c2a