A Word from Pastor Nathan

During our July 31 worship service, Linda Bohnert and Evan Collins played an instrumental
arrangement of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. When I saw the music on the piano, my heart skipped
a beat because Joni’s music is as sacred to me as any hymn.

Mitchell wrote the song when she was nineteen. When I was 19, I was graduating high school and
preparing for my first year of college. To have said then, “I really don’t know life at all,” would
be a gross understatement. I was naive and immature, and I had no way of looking at clouds, life,
love, [or faith] from both sides. How Mitchell wrote the lyrics and music at 19 is a mystery to me,
but I think she must have been then an “old soul,” as poets and painters are.

In 2000, Mitchell re-released the piece with an ethereal orchestration that is sublime. I commend
the whole album to you. Listening to Joni’s recording from 1969 next to the one from 2000 discloses
that there’s “something lost but something gained in living every day.” The later recording is
slower tempo; its mood is reflective. In the thirty-one-year gap between the two releases, Joni
experienced life’s triumphs and tribulations. She looked at clouds, life, and love from “both sides
now.”

A few weeks ago, Brandi Carlile hosted a “Joni Jam” at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island.
The biggest surprise for the audience was that Joni herself would grace the stage, play the guitar,
and sing her most treasured songs. The closer was Both Sides Now. In the twenty­ two years since
that wondrous recording, Joni experienced an aneurysm, and she had to learn how to live again. The
rendition of Both Sides Now had everyone on stage and in the audience in tears. All of us are older
than we were when we first heard her song, and we’ve lived through a helluva time recently, which
has helped us look at clouds, life, and love from both sides now.

Joni’s song is sacred to me because I think we look at faith from both sides, perhaps many sides.
Seasons of life and love cause familiar words that we’ve treasured for decades to sound new again.
What a wondrous gift of God’s Spirit–to look at clouds, love, life, and faith from both sides now.