Featured Song: “Empty Container, Two Step Movement”
Storyteller: Jack Haskell
Teaching Artist: Alex Millan
Performers: Jack Haskell and Alex Millan
Connected Work: “The Journey” by Mary Oliver

It’s the middle of May and we’re onto our next Music In Conversation song where we’re exploring the theme of ROOTS. Welcome back! Jack Haskell is our storyteller, and boyy did he have quite the song in store for us. This song is refreshing; a thoughtful reflection on how childhood roots can be complicated and often twist and turn in directions that require us to care for them in new ways in our later life. There’s real beauty in messiness, and many of us are probably just like Jack: trying our best, everyday, to make sense of the chaotic, tangled root system that made us who we are – to honor that system, to water it.

The American Dream

Jack grew up in Fairfield, CT where he describes there being “a lot of love in the household”  but still being “prescribed the right way to be.” This emotional contradiction really struck me, because it’s not often we hear this truthfulness so raw and real in story or song. Couple that with Jack and Alex’s emotionally gripping melody? Goosebumps. For real. 
So where there is love, there can also be confusion.

Sometimes we can be held, nurtured and cared for, but despite all that, still feel unanchored in our minds – lost in the empty space of who we’re told to be, with little room for self discovery. You don’t often hear love described as “an eerie black hole” and that’s what makes this song so profound. Love can be deep and dark, can go on forever, but can snuff out our own light, the kind that we keep for ourselves, that we need to keep for ourselves.

Wrestling With Roots

What’s particularly moving about Jack’s story is there is absolutely nothing simple about it. There’s no hero, no villain, no neat explanation. Instead there’s an honest wrestling of what it feels like to have grown up in a system that both held him and shaped him. I have to thank Jack for telling this story, because after my first listen I felt relief. And by my third, I felt empowered to be vulnerable. It’s a reminder to not skip over the messiness, but to care for it because it’s uniquely your own – how beautiful is that?

There’s also strong recognition in Jack’s use of the phrase “empty container.” It feels incredibly personal, but somehow universal at the same time. Haven’t we all tried to fill our own empty containers of self with things that “make sense?” Say, the “right” identity, the “right” friends, the “right” job, or the “right” distractions? It’s easy to fill emptiness, the challenge is filling it with meaning. 

“Act like you’re not drunk / paper over that buzz” speaks to the stumbling that comes with finding our way through. It’s rarely a straight line, and we disappoint ourselves and make decisions that are counterintuitive to our own healing. But perhaps that’s part of the “two step movement” Jack sings about – the constant waltz between who we were shaped to be and who we’re still becoming.

The Practice of Presence

Stepping outside of ourselves, breathing another’s air, listening and being present is no easy task. But all of a sudden, there’s hope. We hear it as Jack and Alex move into this final section of the song – where the melody begins to blossom and Jack’s voice intensifies; we learn he may have found some groundedness in the world of teaching.

There’s a Mary Oliver poem called “The Journey” that kept coming up for me as I listened to Jack’s song:

“one day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.”

That “old tug” feels true to Jack’s story. The pull of expectation and memories, and the call to slip back into learned ways of being. But despite that tug, Jack moves forward, stretching his roots to find new soil:

“No self-serving nonsense

connecting with my students

the hardest thing I’d tried”

Jack reminds us that meaning may not be found within ourselves but by showing up for other people. Teaching requires presence. “Self-serving nonsense” moves to the bottom of the list – there’s little room for it within a classroom.

Although we return “over and over again” to much of what Jack experienced – emptiness, questions, confusion, family systems –  there comes a time when we begin returning to something else, too. Teaching, in Jack’s case, becomes a new root, grown from the same roots that once held him still. It’s that two step movement he sings about: the human instinct to grip onto what we know and the necessity to continue the search for what we don’t. Two-step with your tangled roots, why don’t you?

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