Rocky Mountain High: Revisiting a Song in Midlife

When I was growing up, I remember being told that I would develop some wisdom and understand life better when I got older. I was not sure what that meant and no one was able to explain it to me. Understanding life seemed like too much work at the time, so I decided it would be easier to wait.

While I still don't understand life as a whole, I do understand parts of it whose meaning had eluded me in my younger days. Now that I am in my midlife years, I understand a few things about waking up and seeing reality more clearly. As an example, let me share with you some insight I have gained into a song I first heard when I was a child--the kind of insight I think I needed a lot of life experience to acquire.

I was a boy when John Denver released his song, "Rocky Mountain High,"  I think I was 9 or 10 at the time--I don't remember exactly.  I do remember that the opening words of that song confused me so much that I tuned out most of the rest of it.

"He was born in the summer of his 27th year,
Comin' home to a place he'd never been before.
He left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again.
You might say he'd found a key to every door."

Well, as a lad, those lyrics were mind-blowing and made no sense to me.  How could you be born when you are 27?  Yes, I was like the skeptical Nicodemus asking Jesus, "How can a man be born when he is old?  Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” (John 3:4, WEB Translation).

I also wondered how any man could come "home to a place he'd never been before."  What does that mean?  How could a guy be "at home" in some alien place?

Ahhh, the questions of youth, of a boy who needed to understand everything literally just so that he could impose some sense of order and safety on his world.

Apparently, I was not the only one who had some trouble understanding this deeply moving song.  "Rocky Mountain High" was banned from play on a number of radio stations whose managers were concerned that the "high" referred to drug abuse, despite the fact that the song contains no references to drugs, even indulging a wild imagination.  In 1985, in testimony to the United States Congress at hearings concerning music censorship, Mr. Denver commented on those incidents of gratuitous music banning:

"This was obviously done by people who had never seen or been to the Rocky Mountains, and also had never experienced the elation, celebration of life,or the joy in living that one feels when he observes something as wondrous as the Perseids meteor shower on a moonless, cloudless night, when there are so many stars that you have a shadow from the starlight, and you are out camping with your friends, your best friends, and introducing them to one of nature's most spectacular light shows for the first time."

(Source:      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_High)

Controversy notwithstanding, at the tender age of 43, I now know what this song is about.  It's about what spiritual people often call "enlightenment" or "salvation."  I didn't even see this until last year.  Yes, sitting on the ol' zafu (meditation cushion) regularly during the last eight years has certainly helped me to see more clearly how this song expresses the opening of the mind and heart that can arise, not just from an encounter with nature, but with a keen awareness of such an encounter.

Beyond the time on the zafu, the experience of sitting at the foot of Pikes Peak on a Saturday evening in July, 2000 opened my eyes.  I had been in Colorado Springs for a series of meetings that involved working 12- to 14-hour days.  The sessions ended late Saturday morning, and I had some free time until my return trip to Chicago the next day.  After walking outside for most of the sunny afternoon, in the early evening, I did some sitting meditation.  I could see Pikes Peak from my hotel room.  While observing my breathing, I gazed upon the mountain that sits majestically, silently, and serenely at the "Gateway to the Rockies."  I saw some of the beauty that inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write "America the Beautiful" in 1893.

I was in awe of the mountain and its grandeur, but also of its peacefulness.  It "just sat there" radiating peace, solidity, and freedom.  I am not one who cries easily or often, but the time I spent with the mountain brought me to tears--fierce, intense, manly tears of perhaps otherwise inexpressible joy.  In that moment, perhaps I really had come home to a place I'd never been before.