Kacey Musgraves’ “Middle of Nowhere”
Roughly two years ago, I sought out a quieter way of life in the Hudson Valley and called it hibernation. In truth, it was closer to giving up. I couldn’t figure out how to live with long covid. I’ve written several times before about the illness’ physical and emotional challenges, but the cruelest part continues to be its inconsistency. Each day could shift, like a storm sweeping suddenly across a sunny sky. I never knew what to expect.
Faced with those limitations, I yielded to the impulse to retreat. Life already felt compromised, smaller than it had once been, so I’d give into that smallness, accepting what it offered and relinquishing the expectation that I would get anything more. The solitude felt like a benediction.
Kacey Musgraves‘ new song “Middle of Nowhere,” off her forthcoming album by the same name, perfectly captures the craving to leave the world behind. With a delicate arrangement of acoustic guitars segueing from 4/4 time on the verses to a sashaying waltz on the chorus, the song details Musgraves’ desire to be entirely alone. “Gonna find my own peace,” she sings with the hushed resignation of surrender.
Given the theme, “Middle of Nowhere” could easily have turned bleak, but Musgraves paints it like a mauve sunset breaking through the pines, the atmosphere lit in tangerine and soft purples. Her instinct, following a series of enervating relationships, is to still her mind rather than let another man agitate it in the name of romance. In falling back into her own silences, she’s able to finally able to hear what she’s been missing. “I’m trying to lean in to the in between/ It’s just me and me, and that’s all I need,” she sings, her pearl of wisdom all the more luminous for being hardwon.
It took real time, but the same thing happened to me. In the seclusion I found in the Hudson Valley, I could at last hear myself, which sparked off an unexpected transformation—a rewilding of my spirit. Some of that happened alone as a result of time and tranquility, while other parts happened in community: a somatic therapist who nudged me toward feeling my feelings rather than merely thinking them and covid-conscious friends who reinforced my values at a time when I didn’t see any sign of them in the larger world. Slowly, things began to shift.
As I started emerging from the cocoon I’d concocted, I found myself wanting something that looked more like a life—not the way it was before long covid but not the shell it had become since. Some new in between. I’d outgrown my decision to hide out in the smallness of an isolated half-life. In two weeks, I’ll set course away from my “middle of nowhere.” It’s been a long road—in the getting here, the growing, and now the leaving. What an astonishing thing, to feel wings unfurling, to still be capable of flight.
