song: Lost & Paradise

+ the importance of wonder and getting disoriented...

another spoiler alert: go no further if you prefer listening to new songs with no prior knowledge

“When It Falls Apart” took me the longest to finish. “Lost & Paradise” took me about an hour. I hadn’t written any songs on piano for the record, and I had a short window of time, so I got my notebook in position and everything came pretty quickly. the chorus came first, and through it, I started reimagining a trip our family had been together.

we had spent some time in Joshua Tree National Park after a family tour. we watched the sunset over those Seussian trees and after lingering in the pink glow on the rocks, we decided to load into Charlemagne (our van) and press on toward our midnight stop in Arizona. everyone fell asleep except myself and the kangaroo rats.

driving at night
she’s falling asleep beside me
with that arm rest catching her loll

rearview the coast
disappears behind me
under the stars I’m losing my signal

it would be easy
to get lost and forget where I’m going

the moments are thinning when we moderns are faced with our own smallness. it’s easy to live in a city and only have that occasional experience seeing a sunrise, or a thunderstorm, or a rainbow, or the colossus of a cityscape. sometimes, we have to leave the city to find those reminders of the grandeur and intricacy of our world.

and sometimes that grandeur itself is like a great weight of existence. and you feel a strange sensation looking at the stars and wondering at your own relative diminutive size. in the scope of history—in the scope of this moment—I am—we all are—a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam…

I know this is the stuff poets like to linger on, but I think we moderns are starved for wonder. and one way to get it back is by practicing it—developing our ability to find/see beauty, to ponder our place in the cosmos, and to find ways to express gratitude while we gaze.

I felt that smallness as I drove through the desert that night.

something about that smallness feels so akin to being lost. it feels disorienting.

but it’s good to get disoriented sometimes. it helps you access the way-finding parts of you that make you ask: where am I? where am I headed? where am I wanting to go?

sometimes all that’s needed is the reminder. maybe you’re going the way you hoped.

sometimes you realize you’re headed somewhere you never meant to go. what then?

where am I wanting to go? towards what is my heart inclined? how do I reorient myself towards where I want to go?

coastal gardenias
scent of roses
and the moonglow on the marine layer

that garden paradise
where my heart is
when my eyes get dim my love remembers

it would be easy
to get lost and forget where I’m going
it would be easy
but I just can’t forget your love

the second verse and final chorus reflect the ideas that the love of God and our innate memory of paradise are things we can/do orient ourselves with. perhaps towards. perhaps away from. perhaps alongside…

we moderns don’t often have to deal with being lost or losing a signal—more likely we are inundated with signal… news / social media / information / messages / ads / emails / robocalls / etc. but I wonder, when we’re lost, how will we choose to orient and reorient ourselves?

Q: what thoughts/ideas does the song bring up for you? do these thoughts awaken any reflections about orienting? I’d love to hear from you.

my friends Jesse Proctor and Nathan Culberson also contributed on percussion and electric guitar respectively, and Luke Skaggs (who will be joining me on tour for the next couple weeks) brought in the layers of strings.

---

thanks for being here. I write weekly sharing poetry, songs, musings, thoughts on creative life, and hopefully some encouragement… send me suggestions. this song is from a new album, Shade of Indigo (vinyl/spotify). the poems are from my first collection of poetry, Snowmelt to Roots, which you can pick up at my shop, (or on Amazon). and my music is available here.

peace,

Z