You’ve probably seen this commercial for the VW Toureg: A young couple in a VW take photos of a high and beautiful place, and return the camera to a woman waiting below. It’s a great commercial, right? It made about 26 cells, right in the most middle-aged, acquisitive part of my brain, sit up and say, “What am I doing sitting here? I must have a Toureg. There’s a dealer in Santa Barbara. Where are my keys?”

It wasn’t really the car that caught my attention. It was the music. A soft, graceful acoustic guitar, and a voice that I wish sounded like me.

Oh where you lay

And close on down*

I’ve had it in mind for weeks to find out about that song. I finally got around to it tonight. Turns out it’s Ariel Ramirez by Richard Buckner. I found the name on a forum for Toureg people. I found the lyrics posted on a blog. I fired up Limewire and downloaded the song, then checked out the album on Amazon.com.

My mistake was in going one step further, and trying to learn a little about the song’s meaning. It turns out that Ariel Ramirez is an Argentine composer of very unique and lovely sacred music. I listened to some of his music too. He has a cult following among San Francisco area drug addicts. So I cried. I read that, and in a moment the lyrics came clear to me, and I cried. I tilted on the edge of that lostness, and my heart looked down into nothing but cold stars, pocked moons, and took a hard step back.

I guess I’d been unconsciously teetering on the brink of it for hours, since talking with my Dad about how my grandparents’ house looked when he passed it the other day, now that it’s been sold. It’s gone, sold to people who won’t love it in its desolate imperfection, let alone know the memories of family I’ve stripped from its walls and packed within my chest. They won’t hear the creaking of the floors the way I do.

So much of what is beautiful, soft, and gentle in us lies in the craters of our souls, washed by a sea of rains. We drift in our orbits, taking hits from meteors, space debris. Hoping the scars we bear make us no less beautiful, no more accountable to God. When there is no accounting for our galaxies of grief, we have the cold and stoic face of Ariel, moon of Uranus, empathetic sylph of our long, addicted nights.

Take up your ring

Forget we’re dead*

*Richard Buckner, Ariel Ramirez, from the album Since.