Today this gorgeous song came on my play list.

When it ended, I flipped to Joni Mitchell’s first recording of this song.

So many years difference in between. I loved the first recording. The haunting purity of her voice. That voice spoke to all the innocence and yearning inside me when I was a young adult. I was on the precipice of so much. That voice carried me and kept me balanced on the high wire, crossing into adulthood while hanging onto myself.

But this more recent version…Oh my, the seasoning in her voice. The depth of musicality. How she knows her voice now.  How she lets it dance with all the other instruments. How sure she is of her own.

Sometimes I worry about getting older. Aging out. Becoming irrelevant. But when I listen to her older voice, I stop worrying. Maybe we can’t hit all the high notes the way we used to but, it doesn’t matter. The notes now are deeper. Life is so much richer on this side of the wire.