Down Here Below

I called this thing Lyric Girl, so I guess I should include some. Last week I was in the remarkable melange of humanity in New York, walking to work from the Downtown Marriott, past Ground Zero, which was jammed with trucks filled with building parts, and with (more than I expected) tourists with cameras. Presumably they had come for the anniversary of the attacks, and had stayed over the weekend to extend their trip into the next week. Up on the 41st floor of the JP Morgan Chase building where our office is, the views are spectacular, and you get that birds-eye view sense of looking down on the busy people/ants living in their world. The perspective is humbling. A different feeling from the one I get looking at the majestic Rockies and feeling oh-so small and irrelevant, but similar in the sense of feeling that as small and ant-like as we are, we are all a part of the collective. Humanity as an entity. So, then, that naturally got me singing the Steve Earle song "Down Here Below" in my head. In the song, Pale Male, the hawk is circling above Manhattan - with this narrative voice over:

Pale Male the famous redtail hawk performs wingstands high above midtown Manhattan
Circles around for one last pass over the park
Got his eye on a fat squirrel down there and a couple of pigeons
They got no place to run they got no place to hide
But Pale Male he’s cool, see ‘cause his breakfast ain’t goin’ nowhere
So he does a loop t loop for the tourists and the six o’clock news
Got him a penthouse view from the tip-top of the food chain, boys
He looks up and down on fifth ave and says “God I love this town”

Then, the chorus, really the only part of the song that's a song.

But life goes on down here below
And all us mortals struggle so
We laugh and cry
And live and die
That’s how it goes
For all we know
Down here below