These words came at a low moment for me.
I can light my songs on fire
Come on let the smoke rise higher
Nothing that I’ve ever won
Hasn’t already come undone
It was the summer of 2022 and I was feeling at a dead end. I hadn’t written songs in several years, and just about every aspect of life felt hard and overwhelming. Parenting, partnering, working, house-holding, grieving, it was all too much.
I poured some of my hopelessness into this song, and was surprised to find a chorus that felt very hopeful indeed.
Oh daylight, my love
Even on the darkest days, this chorus came to me as a reminder that the sun rises. Again and again. And that in the sunlight there is the promise of life renewed.
A memory came to me from earlier in the pandemic. I took my child Wrenowyn to Lee Martinez Park and paused under an oak tree. I stooped down to pick up and acorn, and upon rising had a mystical experience. I was completely flooded with a sense of awe. I deeply felt and appreciated the movement and mystery of life, all around me and pulsing in my hand.
Shining sparkles in the sand
Things that I don’t understand
Acorn humming in my hand
Asked her can I join your band
This is a song that contrasts how damn ugly and brutal life can feel sometimes with how absolutely wondrous this world is. All of it, the brutiful nature of reality, is included.
I’d like to share here, making public for the first time, my initial voice memo of the song in its early phases. I find it a delight to go back and listen to my songs before they were fully formed.
To all who taste feelings of despair, overwhelm, depression, anxiety, fear, and rage: I am with you.
May the sunlight kiss you, may the stars bless you with their cool light. May you feel the life thrumming under your feet. In the words of that prophetic farmer-poet:
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.In Kinship,
Crispy