Things recede under the deep waters of your life, and they never really go away.
This phrase for a song came to me as I sat in the steam room at the gym after a heavy workout, processing some of the loss, memories, and longing I found myself still wincing over.
I remembered someone wise once saying that a lot of our deepest, heaviest memories will become fully submerged in the ocean of our lives, but like a giant blue whale, will periodically come up to the surface.
These memories are always there, etched into the fibre of our being, however hidden in the “deep waters” they seem to be.
Interestingly, when I was able to put the phrase to a gentle melody, it became a softer, more general reality. Suddenly, it applied to both the darker, cutting memories but also the lighter ones from beautiful times with friends and family, or deep into childhood.
It strikes me now, too, as something similar to what Yeats described in his writing of The Lake Isle of Innisfree.
Essentially, everything we ever experience becomes a lasting part of us which can re-emerge in surprising forms at any time. There is no escaping it:
They never really go away.
We integrate it all, and, like the richness of an ocean, develop a whole, profound interior world in which everything co-exists, mysteriously and dangerously, but also beautifully. We form a kind of interior ecosystem that can be explored but never truly mined—not by us, and certainly not by another human.
All we can do is discovery missions that increase the sense of wonder, awe, and mystery of the richness of one human person.
This is a metaphor I will happily sit with for my entire life, as it offers a reverence to all of possible human experience, neither invalidating nor overemphasizing any one piece. It does not encourage victimization, navel-gazing, or hyper-focus on wounds, but rather gently requests a certain peaceful resignation to the whole scope of life.
In turn, we allow various things to come to the surface, and we can see them observationally as a mysterious piece of the rich whole. Many of these things, too, which were initially jagged and rough, eventually take on a softer, poetic quality as time goes on.
While things do stay with us forever, they also can be transformed. In the ocean, ancient things live and die, decompose and re-emerge in new forms, and this all almost entirely out of sight.
So it is with us.
I was happy to return home from that session at the gym with a deeper peace and acceptance of many elements of life, knowing that I could permit it all to exist in the deep silence of my own memory, perhaps forever.
I also somehow knew, immediately, that the capacity of a human being to integrate everything into a peaceful whole was immense, and that I could allow that to take place in my own life—even with some of the most painful things. A person can to a large degree allow the waves to wash over everything without fight, without resistance, without undue attachment.
I was also happy to include the simple, self-produced track for a re-release of an older album in an “expanded & abridged” version, as it helped frame my previous songs from years in a new light, almost as if inviting them, too, into this rich ecosystem of acceptance and hidden but abundant life.
As with all of my work, it is my great hope that these songs can be a form of catharsis, reflection, healing, and blessing to those who listen.
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