Friday Listen: Richie Havens, Synchronicity, and the Search for Meaning

Oh, the memories.

I’m not sure how I found Richie Havens’ music. I just remember having the CD Résumé in college at Bowling Green State University, listening to it over and over again. I can still see it: lying in my small second-story bedroom off campus, looking out at the streets below, lost in sound and thought. Those were days of deep reflection — not fearful, just uncertain — trying to understand who I was and what I was meant to do.

During that time, Follow by Richie Havens became my soundtrack. Its earthy voice and gentle rhythm carried a message I couldn’t fully understand then.

The song spoke of rivers rocking you like a cradle, of reaching toward the treetops — an invitation to grow, to go beyond what you can touch or see. It felt as though Richie was gently saying, trust your path even if it’s not yet clear. And that became a sort of mantra to me.

Top center window was my bedroom 1996-7. 517 Pike Street, Bowling Green, Ohio- "The Mecca"

Years later, a strange and beautiful synchronicity unfolded.

In 2003, Richie Havens came to play on the very streets of Bowling Green — just six years after I had sat in that upstairs room imagining what my life might become. He performed at The Black Swamp Festival, and I was there. It felt surreal, almost dreamlike, as if the music I once looked outward to had circled back and materialized right there. Life imitating song.

Meeting him later and seeing him perform three times in total only deepened that sense of connection. Havens, the man who opened Woodstock, radiated something beyond music — a kind of grounded spirituality. When he sang about walking through gardens, tasting the air, or finding beauty in the smallest sensations, it wasn’t just poetry; it was permission to be fully alive in the present.

He had a way of turning awareness into melody.

Circa 2003

Back then, I thought the song’s message was simply about letting go- or being completely present.

Now I realize it’s about seeing newly. When he suggests closing your eyes to truly see, or listening beyond what your ears can hear, he’s speaking of expanding consciousness — stepping beyond the illusions of everyday perception. All these years later, as I’ve been "studying" consciousness and quantum physics, I’ve found myself circling back to that same idea: maybe reality isn’t something we discover, but something we create.

Science now hints that we don’t perceive the world as it truly is — we build it through awareness.

Havens was, in his own way, already there. His refrain — that what we think we see, hear, or feel might not be what it seems — feels like a lyric translated straight from quantum theory. Reality, both in his song and in science, might be a kind of dream — and yet it’s a dream worth exploring.

Looking back, I understand now what my younger self could not. The uncertainty that once felt vast and undefined was actually freedom. Like the song’s gentle reminder, I realize now that following isn’t blind faith — it’s trust. It’s accepting that even when the road ahead dissolves like mist, there’s beauty in the step itself.

Richie Havens taught me that long ago, from that second-story window in Bowling Green. And still today, as I walk further into the unknowable, his voice echoes softly through the years — reminding me to keep following, wherever the dream may lead.

Please take a few minutes and take a listen...you won't regret it.