The Power of Memory

Memory is amazing. After 42 years of probably not even being aware that a song used to- or even still exists- there it is.

I was listening to Folk Alley this evening (HIGHLY recommended) and I hear a strumming followed by some more strumming. Then the drums start and a chorus singing.

I know that song.

Peace in the end.

I glanced at the screen and a multicolored medieval-hippie dressed group appeared.

Fotheringay.

Hope in the end

I know them. A one-album, no-real-hit wonder of British folk-rock in 1970. A break-ff from Fairport Convention. Kind of a 70s cult favorite.

I couldn't pull back all the words, just that title line. But it was as real and familiar as if I had just heard it yesterday.

What makes this all the more amazing is that recent science has shown that there is really no where in my brain that this song memory is stored. Not a single location. It is all over the place and my brain had to put it back together from these scattered bits and pieces. 

THEN, in even more miraculous ways, feelings and other memories come along. A smile of an unremembered memory of some night I might have played that song on my radio show. An internal feeling of being 22 again as if I never left that time behind.

I don't know what part all this plays in the evolutionary development of humanity and human consciousness. I don't know why it's so important. It may be human hubris to believe it is even important at all. Yet it exists. I am not the only one who it happens to. Each of us has more than a few of these things in our memory bank. The awe I feel at the ability to experience today is probably more than the awe of the first memory.

And it wants to spur me to continue to make these kind of memories and not live in the one from the past. God forbid if all I have to look forward to is a glorious past.

Anyway- with the help of You Tube, here's my rolling bits and pieces put back into a song. Enjoy, even if you have never heard it before.

Make a memory.