I’ve felt an aching nostalgia for home lately.
A homesickness I’ve never experienced before.
A yearning for less responsibility and more rest.
A yearning to make peace with the people I left behind.
A yearning for my little self who needs to be revisited by my older, wiser, more compassionate self.
A yearning for the fresh smell of earth as I drink my morning tea on the front porch.
Home.
I close my eyes and I envision myself surrounded by the trees that sway softly and root strongly into the earth. Those trees are the same ones I grew up climbing. I hear the sweet singing of birds. These birds are different from the city birds I hear when I walk down the street. Don’t get me wrong, I love the cheerful sound of birds wherever I can get them, but there’s something special about the birds I knew back home.
Their song is sweet and pure and joyous. Their song evokes a bliss and gratitude within my heart. Oh, the sweet sound!
Of course any emotion I feel deeply inside is best expressed through music. The little hiatus I’d taken from songwriting after finishing my previous album fizzled to an end as these feelings of homesickness began to arise within me. It’s as if my heart was speaking to me:
“Hello, we have some more healing to do. It’s time you bring out the guitar.”
I didn’t fully understand this yearning for a place that felt strangely unfamiliar even though I’d known it all my life. A place that reminded me of hurt and chaos. A place I tried to escape for a long time. I knew writing would help me to process what I was feeling.
”A guitar. Writing on a guitar?” I thought to myself. It had been YEARS since I wrote on my guitar. I picture my 12 year old self sitting on the edge of my bed playing the guitar (which, might I add, was perpetually flat). I’d written on the piano for my two previous albums but something inside me was calling for the guitar. So I listened.
Picking up the guitar, my fingers find the chords that feel right. These lyrics flow out:
”We’re going back to the days we didn’t know where we’d go on this life-long road
We’re going back to the days we didn’t care, hands in the air, we were flying free
We’re going back, going back to the roots we left to find ourselves
Now we find ourselves on the road back to our roots.”
A-ha.
Reconnection.
I need to reconnect with the little girl inside me who is carefree and happy and light… and I feel in my heart the desire to go home and make peace with the loved ones I haven’t loved so well over the years. I feel a place of acceptance in my soul. People don’t always change and it’s not in our control to make them…but I can change. I can accept and make peace within myself. And with this, I can learn to love them more deeply.
I’m so thrilled to be recording this digital EP in September. A collection of 4 songs reuniting me with my younger self and reconnecting with my roots…and finding acceptance and forgiveness for a place that hasn’t felt like home in awhile.
And finally it is starting to feel like it again.
Home.