From The Notebook - Breathe

A New Song Demo

Photo by Tomáš Malík on Unsplash

“All my songs are written from a place of spiritual yearning, because that is the place that I permanently inhabit. To me, personally, this place feels charged, creative and full of potential.” - Nick Cave

Hi Folks

I’ve been continuing to write regularly with my good friend and amazing songwriter, John McCutcheon. A couple of weeks ago John’s partner, celebrated author/storyteller, Carmen Agra Deedy, shared a link to a beautiful online posting about the sacred breath. In Jewish tradition the name of the sacred is not to be spoken and is denoted with a written word with no vowels, “YHWH”. The post suggested because there are no vowels in YHWH, the sound it would make would not be a spoken word, but similar to the sound of breathing in and out. John and I found something so lovely in that idea, that the sound we make from our very first breath until our last is imbued with spirit and mystery.

So this is a demo of the song we wrote together, envisioning how each and every breath we take speaks the name of something luminous and true, something sacred and intimately part of the breath that sustains us.

A baby’s “I am”
The elder’s “At last”
The unknowable future
The unchangeable past
Each sent on their way
The beginning and end
From the primal “Aha!”
To the final “Amen!”

From the first taking in
To the last letting go
The very first word
Any one of us knows
From the moment of birth
To the hour of death
It is the name on every
Every breath.