This is part of my Songbook series…unfinished tracks right out of my songbook, as they’re written, to document the journey from concept to album track in my next CD.
This tune is in response to a series of conversations, revelations and otherwise concerning acceptance of GLBT individuals and couples, especially after reading this article and seeing some of the responses to that article in this video. Nobody deserves to be met with scorn for loving who they love. I wasn’t questioned or judged when I married Jenn so why should my friend John have had to fight for his right to marry Michael?
Do we have the courage to love each other without condition? If so, do we have the abundance of spirit to encourage others to do so as well?
This song isn’t about activism. It’s about my personal reaction to this issue and others like it. I did not always support GLBT rights. It took a lot of soul searching for me to break from what I had been taught growing up in a certain religious environment. In the end, with this and other societal issues, I found that if I opened my heart and quieted my mind I could no longer hold onto prejudice as I once had. The two conflicting ideas that there is a God of universal love whom we are supposed to emulate and that we are supposed to also make spiritual, emotional, societal, or actual war on people who do not fit our ever-changing definitions and requirements for individuals to be worthy of acceptance…those two ideas cannot exist in the same space; one of them had to go.
Also, it is about the seemingly (but not actually) disparate worry that I had before my son, Dylan, was born. I worried that, again, my heart could not contain enough to love him the same way I love the rest of my family. I worried that he would merely occupy a portion of a finite quantity, but the surprising thing is how very wrong I was. When he was born he didn’t shove others out of the way, I just grew to accommodate him. I ended up being more; more grateful, more happy, more loving, more hopeful and I realized then the infinite capacity of the human heart to love without condition…it is a choice to do so, or not. We may not agree with everyone all the time, but in those quiet, honest moments when we are still in mind, body and spirit I think we can all discover our innate capacity to hold the entire world inside, and in those fleeting moments we begin to understand how great God’s love must be and how much work we have yet to do.
Here are the lyrics:
We all know life
a bit differently because
what we find depends on how we see
So the choice
between hate and love
isn’t in the stars, it’s left up to us
Ch: When my heart is open wide
and there is stillness in my mind
I ignore those words that would weigh another’s worth
and can hold the world inside
The heart is a curious place
The more it’s filled the more room it makes
and There’s a light behind our eyes
If we look just right
we can see them shine.
CH
