Be the Lark – Loss and Change

I didn’t know when I wrote this song called “Be the Lark” that the losses and changes to which the song refers, would come in the particular form that they did.

When I wrote the song, I was coming out of a time of deep sadness in which I saw that our country was experiencing great divisions, and that these divisions had also run clear throughout my life, separating me from people that I loved and called my closest friends. This song was to guide and lift myself from grief. The words of the song have seemed almost prescient however, in the intervening months. From out of nowhere it seemed, just as I was beginning to release my first single “Take Me to Church”  from my new collection of recordings done in Nashville, I began to experience mystifying back trouble, so severe as to literally stop me in my tracks! 

Envying the Lark

I have always envied the birds for their ability to fly, but now I’m thinking that birds may envy human beings for our ability to simply sit! I have not been able to sit for the past two months, so I know firsthand how much I’ve missed. Oh the beautiful thoughts that form as we sit! 

The past two months have been a riddle, a riddle that my body would have to suffer, before my mind could make sense of the symptoms. I so look forward to living a normal life of movement and work! It is a strange thing to get up in the morning only to get horizontal again for most of the day.

Yet the words of the song have been a consolation to me during this time because in the last verse of the song, I sing of how important it is to simply be in the experience that you are having, in the moment that you are in, no matter if it is difficult, lifting yourself “on the lark’s ascending wing”.

Lift Ourselves

But how do we do this? How do we lift ourselves on the lark’s ascending wing?

Well, the truth is that we don’t really lift ourselves. Something or someone helps us along at our darkest hour.

For me, that is none other than the Holy Spirit of God. The truth is that I often forget to turn to Him and it is now that I feel the need more than at any other time! It makes it so much easier when I remember that He holds everything, me and you, and the lark, in his hands. It is this faith itself that is the gift allowing me to move forward.

I hope you enjoy this song, and can find springtime meaning in it for your own one wild and precious life!

Click here to listen/download

BE THE LARK
The world has so many choices
So many voices, so much to say
So many singers, so many dancers
I wonder when I will have my day

Sometimes I just can’t understand why
the world happens as it does
Why the road bends, and the loss descends
And you can’t see your way to the end

My friends they up and left me,
without so much as a glance behind
They put up walls instead of bridges,
and to the star of our love went blind
How to be here and stay, when I just want to go the other way
How to hear a new calling, calling me by name

And as I ask I hear the answer,
I hear the answer – a feeling within
It says open, open to the now that lives
on the lark’s ascending wing

It says, Open to the times you’re living in
Open to the moment that you’re in,
Cast your resistance to the wind

Be the lark as you lift yourself above
Be the lark as you lift your world on the wings of love