Ryan + the Machine

Where do we find our inspiration? Why do some people, ideas, places pursue us across space and time, grab hold of us, haunt us?

Sometimes it wafts up through the courtyard in your apartment in Copenhagen and calls you down to the quay. Sometimes it comes up through the floorboards, when the neighbors below are holding a party, and you are instantly and forever drawn to its particular alchemy of voice, instrumentation, and arrangement, however muffled, and you wonder with heartache if you will ever hear this one song again; and then you do hear it again, at a birthday party in a restaurant, and you ask a suspiciously with-it young person whose CD collection (should he know what CDs are) did not reach its apex in, for example, 1996, and he tells you that you are searching for something called Florence + the Machine.

Sometimes you write a really long sentence.

I suppose the mystical answer, the Jungian answer, is that we find something of ourselves in the things that find us. And whatever light (and darkness) we find elsewhere are already in us, our built-in star chart to discovering what strength we may yet possess, what demons below deck we carry.

I do not own a Florence + the Machine CD, have not yet downloaded a digital copy, have only watched several (visually stunning) videos on the website. I know that "Dog Days Are Over" is the thing that hooked me, and that "Cosmic Love" is even better, and so I look up its lyrics and can do nothing but smile, and laugh a little, and give thanks, when I find words from an artist who may as well be on the other side of the Cosmos and yet somehow seems to know what I'm searching for:

I took the stars from my eyes,
And then I made a map,
I knew that somehow,
I could find my way back,

Then I heard your heart beating, you were darkness too,
So I stayed in the darkness with you.