“Humans are new here. Above us, the galaxies dance toward infinity. Under our feet is ancient earth. We are beautifully molded from this clay. Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older than us.” - John O’Donohue (taken from Anam Cara)
There is a Quaking Aspen tree in Utah that is around 80,000 years old. This tree looks like a forest of Aspen, but they all grow from one shared underground root system that continuously clones itself. It is the oldest tree in the world.
When I think about my lifetime, it is quicker than the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of earth’s existence. I am a branch of those that came before me and the root to those that will come into this world after me. What does this all mean?
So often we are plagued with the questions: ‘What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? What am I doing here?” These thoughts can create an existential crisis and make us feel lost unworthy. How beautiful then, to consider that we are from this earth. That we are one with her. From her we came and at some moment we will return to her. The cycle continues and the circle is closed.
After the 2015 terrorist attack in Paris, I sat down on my front porch (at the time I was living in the Catskill Mountains in New York State) and I could only think, we must get back to nature. How far we humans have gone away from the solace of the forest, the therapy of the fresh river waters, the inhalation of clean air and feeling the earth in our hands and dirtying our nails. It was here when I penned the words to my song, Light the Fire.
Perhaps nature is the answer, a retraction back into our primal selves. Enjoying the simplicity of what our earth offers to us. Our days are filled with man-made machines, rooms surrounded by walls, and fabricated ways of moving. What if we called into the natural world to help and save us, to make us sane and balanced?
As John O’Donohue says, ‘…We are beautifully molded from this clay….’ We are a part of this earth. The Quaking Aspen lives within us as much as we live within her.
Light the fire
Light the way
I watch the sunrise everyday, now
What is here and what is near
What goes by and what we fear, now.
Look at the clouds up in the sky.
Everyday they go so quickly by.
Gently now, well don’t you cry,
Be here now.
Open up your dreaming heart.
Do you know where you got your start, now?
Chances are you’re not from here,
let’s fly over the ocean my dear now.
We’ll find it in a photograph,
in the lines of a handwritten paragraph.
When have your hands last felt the soil?
Oh be kind now.
I want to hear your stories.
I want to tell you mine.
How we all have seen plenty,
but still hold our heads high.
Light the fire.
Light the way.
I watch the sunrise everyday, now.
What is here and what is near
What goes by and what we fear, now.
Light the fire.
Light the way.
I watch the sunrise everyday, now.
Everyday now.
Everyday now.
