On music, meaning, and finding our way through stony ground

I’ve often thought that many lyricists are our modern-day poets.

They take what is almost impossible to say — grief, longing, love, despair, hope, redemption — and somehow hand it back to us in a way we can feel. Sometimes a song finds us before we have found the words for ourselves.

In years gone by, I was often caught in excruciating, and at times soul-destroying, cycles of anxiety and depression. The kind that has you running and hiding — hiding under beds, running to other states, running to other versions of yourself, running to other states of mind.

And if you have experienced either of these conditions, I probably do not need to explain that further. Sometimes it is a painful thing to try to explain something that, in the moment, feels ultimately unable to be explained.

It is the inability, at that particular point in time, to manage the vagaries of life. The moment overwhelm sets in. The moment the ordinary becomes too much. The moment the world keeps moving, but something inside you simply cannot.

Most of us will find ourselves in that place at some point.

What matters, I think, is not that we arrive there.

What matters is what happens next.

I remember my 42nd birthday. One of a few birthdays in my life that seemed to arrive with a strange existential thundercloud attached to it. What is it about birthdays? They can be beautiful, of course, but they can also become these little annual checkpoints where the soul whispers, “So… are we living truthfully yet?”

On this particular morning, I was not able to look the world in the eye.

I was lost. I wanted to hide. I wanted to stay under the covers and disappear from the day.

I literally could not get out of bed.

And on paper, I was in a fairly good position at the time — to some eyes anyway. I was working as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company — hahaha, yes, really. I had a beautiful son. I had a partner who loved me.

All good, right?

Except no.

Just no.

I had lost myself from an existential perspective.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. More like a slow leakage of self. A gradual drifting away from what was true, what was meaningful, what was mine.

I was living in a way that was not reflective of my deeper self, and in doing so, I had placed myself in the wrong environment and surrounded myself with the wrong social group. Not because anyone was necessarily bad or wrong, but because the fit was wrong. The frequency was wrong. The soil was wrong.

And part of my depression, I think, came from the fact that this was not the first time.

I had placed myself in right and wrong situations many, many times before that. As capable as I was, my anxiety would slowly unravel the situation. It would slowly unpick the person I had set myself up to be.

By then I was heading toward a sizeable list of something like 30-plus jobs.

Which does beg the question: what is the true cost of anxiety?

But that is another story.

On that beautiful November morning, when I was unable to move my mind or my heart, my 11-year-old son walked into the room with a small handmade card.

It was not fancy. It was not pretty in the polished, bought-from-a-shop kind of way.

But it was perfect.

Because he had made it himself.

On the card he had drawn, in lead pencil, a flower growing out of a rock base. Then he said the words from a U2 song he knew I played often at that time — the line about the heart being like a bloom, finding its way up through stony ground.

My son is not silly, despite all of his attempts over the years to make me think he is, and he knew it was a favourite.

But I still wonder how he found his way to those words on that morning.

How did he know?

How did he know that what I needed was not advice, not fixing, not a pep talk, not “come on Mum, get up.”

I needed an image.

A flower.

A rock.

A reminder that life can still rise through the hardest places.

Whatever moved through him that day, it helped me find a little courage in my heart. Not a grand, cinematic kind of courage. Not the “leap out of bed and change your life by lunchtime” kind.

Just enough.

Enough to see that the darkness that had descended was not the whole truth.

Enough to remember that something in me still wanted to live, grow, create, love, and become.

And sometimes enough is everything.

In those days, working as a sales rep, I was on the road a lot. I spent hours driving from town to town, and music became one of the ways I stayed connected to myself. The songs I listened to in the car would inspire me, lift me, hold me, and sometimes quietly put me back together.

That has really been the way of things for most of my life.

Music has been one of my saving graces.

I once read that Edgar Cayce said music should be part of every soul’s journey if we are to progress. That has always made deep sense to me. Music bypasses the busy mind. It does not ask us to explain ourselves. It simply arrives somewhere in the body and says, “Here. Feel this. You are still here.”

So here’s to the great musos who really do light our paths along the way.

My coffee table dream book

At some point along the journey, I started to make a list of songs with the hope that one day I might create a beautiful, visually inspiring coffee table book.

The idea was simple.

Take a song — the words, the music, the feeling — and give it to someone who had experienced a dark night of the soul. Ask them to listen with their heart, and then interpret the song visually.

How do you imagine these words?

What colours arrive?

What images rise?

What emotions, memories, or possibilities are stirred in the deepest part of you?

Then I imagined placing the visual artwork beside a reflection on the song in a gorgeous, sleek, colourful book. The kind of book someone could pick up slowly. Sit with. Contemplate. Let it work on them gently.

A book of words, music, image and soul.

A book for healing.

Over the years, I have developed quite a list. Songs that remind us to look for beauty. Songs that help us see one another with more compassionate eyes. Songs that invite us to dance, to laugh, to grieve, to forgive, to rise, or simply to keep going.

Some are magnificent.

Some are gentle.

All are healing.

And I think that is one of the great gifts of art. It does not always remove the pain, but it can create a little space around it. It can remind us there is more to the story than the moment we are trapped inside.

That morning with my son’s card did not magically solve my life. Of course it didn’t.

But it gave me a symbol.

And symbols matter.

They give the soul something to hold onto when the mind is tired. They help us orient when logic cannot reach us. They remind us that meaning can still break through, even in the hard places.

Perhaps that is why I still love that image so much.

The heart as a bloom.

The stony ground.

The impossible little shoot of life rising anyway.

Because maybe healing is not always about becoming untouched by pain.

Maybe it is about discovering that something in us can still grow through it.

So here’s to the poets, the musicians, the artists, the children with handmade cards, and the mysterious grace that sometimes arrives through them.

And to those who have helped light the path along the way — it had to be your intention.

So if we ever meet, the drinks are on me.

#givetheguruabourbon #musicforthesoul #higherlove #anxietyaspiritualquest #So(u)lution Therapy