Anniversaries Are Meant to be Remembered, Whether it's Four Years or 250
On the anniversary of a reunion, and the life we built after it.
Four years ago this week, I came west to the Valley of the Moon, and I stayed.
I’d made the crossing before — coast to coast and back again, more than once, the way you do when you’re still arguing with your own life. But this time was different. This time I came to be with the one true thing I’d found, out of the blue, and to finally build the life I’d been carrying around in pieces for sixty years. We settled in the hills of Sonoma, in the Valley of the Moon, and for the first time in a long time, the compass and the tides agreed, working in harmony.
I’ve been thinking about why that arrival felt less like a move and more like a homecoming to a place I’d never lived. I think it’s because I come from people who did the same thing, journeyed out toward a horizon that they had never known.
My family came here from Ireland and Scotland — hard people from hard places, who got on boats with almost nothing and pointed themselves at a country they’d only heard about. My grandfather was a Renaissance man, a maker of things, the kind of person who could turn his hand to anything and usually did. Somewhere back up the line there’s an ancestor named Peter Grant, and when I trace the thread from him down through the generations to me, sitting here in California writing songs and books, I understand that I am not the beginning of anything. I’m a continuation. The dream I’m chasing is the same dream that put my people on those boats, and me on my own.
My maternal grandmother was the first storyteller I remember; she would share the stories of her childhood with great enthusiasm and what sounded like urgency. All of it traced back to one man, Duncan Grant of Banffshire, Scotland. Duncan had a son named Peter Grant, born in 1786, who sailed to Nova Scotia in 1806. He offered his skills to homeowners looking for work wherever he could find it — a pattern I would adopt after setting off on my own journey as a boat builder and carpenter, nearly two hundred years after Peter Grant forged the same road. I, too, took on jobs all over the country, using my tools and my wits to build a future for myself, finding love and starting a family along the way, passing the dream on to my own children and grandchildren.
“You’re My Safe Harbor,” from the Journeyman Soundtrack Vol III
That’s the thing I most want to say in this letter, on this anniversary. My own and America’s 250th birthday.
We climb out of difficult beginnings. All of us, or our people, did, somewhere back there. My own beginning was difficult in ways the book spells out, and I won’t rehearse here — but I climbed out of it the same way everyone does who ever climbs out of anything: with faith, hope, and love. Those weren’t slogans in my house. My mother taught them to all her children as tools you actually use, a set of instruments for steering when the sky goes dark. Faith was the compass. Hope was the horizon you kept sailing toward even when you couldn’t see it. Love was the harbor you were trying to get everyone home to.
I’ve come to believe that underneath all our noise, we want the same handful of things. The freedom to chase a dream. A fair shot — real equal opportunity — for anyone willing to do the work. And a society we’ve made a little better than we found it, one we’re not ashamed to hand down to the next Americans coming up behind us. That’s not a political statement. It’s older and simpler than politics. It’s what got the boats moving.
People have been coming to America for generations seeking their dreams. Jack London found his version of it right here, in this Valley of the Moon, and wrote it into the ground he walked. But here’s what I’ve learned in a lifetime of journeying and four years of living in my valley: there are valleys of the moon all over America. Yours might be a coastline, a mountain town, a city block at the hour the light goes gold, a kitchen table where the people you love are still sitting. The beauty isn’t rare. It’s just easy to sail right past when you’ve got your head down, chasing the dream so hard you forget to look up at the reason for it.
That might be good advice for a couple on their anniversary, but also for a nation celebrating its 250th birthday.
So that’s my invitation, and it’s really the whole point of this project.
If you’re moving too fast to notice your own valley of the moon — because you’re building something, raising someone, climbing out of your own hard beginning — then pause here for a few minutes every other Friday. Read the letter. Follow along. See what I see, hear what I hear. I’ll bring you the paintings, the photographs, the songs, and the stories behind the book, and maybe somewhere in there you’ll catch a glimpse of your own beauty, right where you already are.
Four years west, and I’m still just getting started. I’m glad you’re here for it.
Faith, hope, and love —
Tim