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When I See You Fly; Celebrating Youth and Their Accomplishments

December 20, 2018 No Comment

Ultimately, what my children or my students do is their accomplishment, not mine. I can encourage, model, and suggest ideas, but I can’t and shouldn’t claim their success as mine. What I can do is celebrate that success and be happy for them.

Our children, our students, our mentees, need to know and feel that what they have done is a result of their efforts. To claim or point out a parental or educator role in that success is in some way to try to take it from them, to diminish their efforts – and that detracts from and discourages young people and other students from making those efforts. We are all better off when our young people and the lifelong learners among us are celebrated and acknowledged, because that pushes our whole society forward with their innovations and energy.

I originally wrote ‘When I See You Fly’ to celebrate my own kids, but I wanted it to be applicable to celebrate anyone’s accomplishments and growth. The first time I used it was for a video for our middle son’s grade 6 graduation party, along with slides featuring his classmates. That video was never made public, as a result of general privacy concerns. I made another video for my YouTube channel featuring our 3 boys, where the photos in the slides went with the lyrics of the song. This latest recording is music only. I wanted it to be available for others to use in the same way that I used it to celebrate our boys – for their personal celebration videos and occasions.

Here are the lyrics;

You’re so much more than just potential
Long ago, you burst out of your eggshell
And in the intervening hours
You were like that superhero
Learning to control the powers
Of the suit that you were building

Everyone has their moments
Of flapping, of falling, of faltering
The strongest winds may be blowing
Against you so hard, you’re not sure you can keep going

But the moments do pass
I see you take off, see you lift off
You are darting and gliding way up high

And when I see you fly, I fly
You’re soaring through the skies
My spirits also rise
As you’re free among the clouds
I want you to know
That even though I’m here below
When I see you fly, I fly

It’s not about keeping you on the ground
And not just to know that you are safe and sound
I’d love to see the treasure that you found
You stop, and then away you bound

And when I see you fly, I fly
You’re soaring through the skies
My spirits also rise
As you’re free among the clouds
I want you to know
That even though I’m here below
When I see you fly, I fly

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Express-sing the Inbetweens

December 15, 2018 No Comment

Sure, celebrating big moments & mourning big losses really is important. But every moment is worth our awareness, and all of life should be lived fully.

Songs often are about our high points and our low points. Part of what I hope to do is express those emotions that are in between the extremes.

There’s a risk of confusing action or drama for meaning. Sometimes I think I get bored and try to find a way to make a fresh storyline for my life. I don’t think I’m alone in that… in our fast-paced world, we develop a taste for drama like wild predators develop a taste for blood. Action and the high and low emotions help us to avoid or forget our true anxieties and existential concerns.

So what I want to do is bring out the middle colours of emotion – like doubt, hope, concern, caring, anxiety, dissatisfaction, contentment. Maybe if we can more fully express the range of our emotions, we can avoid leaping from one extreme to another too. Maybe we can more fully live our lives in the day-to-day, and feel alive doing it – or at least have a greater acceptance of ourselves and our emotions because we are more able to name our experience.

My songs ‘I Don’t Know What I Want’ and ‘When I’m Dissatisfied’ are two of those in which I try to express some of those midpoints; indecision, regret, and discontent that seems to arise for no reason.

The lyrics for those 2 songs follow. First, “I Don’t Know What I Want

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Decades Later, One Cry Still Echoes

December 11, 2018 No Comment

As the (not especially good) director of a caravan day camp in Northern Manitoba one summer, I made the decision to switch over our program entirely from a wilderness skills based camp to an arts camp, since there were a lot of forest fires and we weren’t able to continue with the hiking and campfire-building program that had been the basis of our success for a number of decades. To be fair (to myself), the forest fires were actually significant enough to strand us for a portion of a week, and the air and sky were a greyish-orange because of them.

I had written the first version of the song ‘One Cry Echoes’ while in Northern Manitoba, partly expressing a longing for relational connection, and partly reflecting my sense of the landscape around me.

A First Nations band near The Pas, Manitoba, had a talent night the weekend we were there, open to all. I decided that participating in the talent night was right up the alley of a group that wanted to engage with local communities and had a fresh focus as an arts program, so some of us went there. We got a friendly reception, and I sang my song. I didn’t win any prizes – which was only right, because there was a lot of talent there, and winning prizes wasn’t the point for us. But I was encouraged that one young man sought me out to tell me that he really appreciated my song. So if any of you folks wish that I would really just stop… well, blame him – because his encouragement was part of what kept me going.

Anyway, there was something about the way I paced my lyrics in the original that didn’t seem quite right. I tried changing the words, tried changing how I played the guitar, but nothing was ever quite satisfying. Years went by. Then finally, last year, I decided to try changing the melody and the whole musical structure of the song. Now, finally, it feels right to me. So I recorded it and put it out there.

That’s the story of “One Cry Echoes

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I Lie To You Sometimes; The Song

December 1, 2018 No Comment

Truth. Trust. Fear. Vulnerability. Those are a tough mix to work with. That’s what ‘I Lie To You Sometimes’ is about.

The song is like a kind of confession – a partial confession. It isn’t a perfect expression of vulnerability and trust – in fact, it lays a bit too much of the onus for relationship on the other. But our confessions are seldom whole, and I for one am not always fully fearless and open about expressing the times when I am not ‘fine’. And really, the lies this song is talking about are those sorts of lies – the ‘little’ lies about being okay when in actual fact okay-ness is not quite settled. It’s about not having important and open conversations, and just letting the comfortable status quo rule the day, and then in the long run paying the price of feeling misunderstood and alone.

By the end of the song, the ‘voice’ of the song is starting to reach out, although not fully taking ownership of fault in the stagnation of the relationship and moving to full emotional honesty and availability. There’s still a kind of self-protective emotional blame game involved.

In real life we aren’t perfect. A song doesn’t have to reflect perfection and resolution. If a person is alive, a person is in process – and a song should reflect that reality. I feel that we have a tendency in our time to rush to a kind of false resolution, to not allow a real emotional process to occur. I may, for example, know how I ‘should’ feel, and therefore try to claim that ideal state of being instead of allowing my emotions to really get worked out. Our general sense of being ‘busy’ and wanting to be ‘efficient’ may work into this trap as well.

The difficulty with rushing to a false emotional resolution is that the real process can get undermined and go unconscious, so that I might in some ways act out the emotions that I still feel but am denying. That can’t be healthy – there has to be some middle ground. In being committed to honest relationships, we give ourselves – and our significant others – the opportunity to really go through those internal processes, and honestly arrive at real resolutions in a more natural timeline.

Here are my lyrics;

I lie to you sometimes
try to hide the things inside
try to slide atop the tide
yeah, and take you for a ride

Don’t want you looking at my soul
You might see that I’m not whole
Might find ashes, might find coal
where you thought you would find gold

I lie to you sometimes
– no looking at my soul!
I lie to you sometimes
I lie to you sometimes
…sometimes

I lie to you
try to hide the things insdie
try to slide atop the tide
yeah, and take you for a ride

It seems easier this way
seems like everything’s okay
and we talk about the weather
’cause there’s nothing else to say

Don’t get sad, and don’t get close
’cause that’s what I hate the most
makes me uneasy and morose
makes me take a double dose

Makes me deal with the pain
makes me have to start again
– does that mean things will get better
or will sunshine turn to rain?

I lie to you sometimes
– no looking at my soul!
I lie to you sometimes
I lie to you sometimes
… you know

I lie to you
please don’t believe the words I say
because the greatest price I pay
is when you smile and walk away

I lie to you sometimes
Please don’t believe the words I say
because the greatest price I pay

… is when you smile and walk away

(The chorus here is supposed to be like an emotional pivot point, at each repetition leading to a direction of greater self-awareness and taking some more ownership for honesty and a healthy relationship, even with risk)

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