Songwriting: You Are Ocean
This song is incredibly special to me and writing it served as a strong discipline in lyrical crafting (that sticks with the metaphor of “ocean”), as well as a means in healing my relationship with the Divine after coming through a time when I couldn’t define that anymore.
The complete inspiration to write this came from a session with my Spiritual Director, Ann, back in 2018. I wrote about our conversation and my musings thereafter in this blog; interestingly, it had a profound impact on a wider audience. One reader drew a beautiful sketch of a woman in the ocean and quoted an excerpt from my blog,
”Though I held him once, it’s like he is holding me now. He’s the ocean. It’s too vast to hang onto. It’s too fluid to grasp completely. But it carries me and I can learn the rhythm. I don’t have many answers anymore and I certainly cant contain God within a box of my ideas and understanding— but I can feel His presence and how it carries me over each wave, like the ocean.”
Countless studies on development and spiritual phases (including deconstruction) discuss the necessity of simple thinking for children. There need to be limits, there needs to be black and white, boundaries, yes, no, not an in between. God needs to make sense in order for a child to grasp generosity and love from an ever-present Being. As an educator, I know that children learn by doing, through concrete concepts and hands-on activities. I wrote that old blog and years later, this song, to illustrate how it felt to lose my understanding of God and to deconstruct all the rules and boundaries I believed so easily as a child. My discussions with my journal, with God, and my spiritual director at the time all pointed a significant shift in my faith— I was leaving the place where I could walk through a simple landscape, feet on the hard ground, and trust my surroundings, and heading away from that shore, onto a vast body of water, ocean, waves, directionless.
Though that shift was very scary for me, if God is everywhere and guiding my steps, then God can guide them into greater depths of which I know nothing (ocean). Choosing to embrace floating atop the ocean, riding wave by wave, proved to be very freeing for me, though that freedom dwelt amidst an overwhelming sense of fright from a newfound lack of boundaries and solid ground that used to make me feel very safe.
When I took this song to the studio, my friends and producers all agreed that the song should crescendo musically into a sense of awe and wonder, beautiful, mysterious, troubling, and yet somehow, still able to be trusted. I have practiced, on and off, the art of contemplative prayer thanks to the readings of Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating. The idea is to observe one’s own consciousness in the presence of God for 10-30 minutes at a time and allow a supernatural healing to take place deep inside. This happens through sitting in silence, a prayer without words. There were some experiences I had myself in this practice, as well as having read about from past Spiritual parents like Merton and Keating, that led me to write the bridge of the song, about tide pulling me under, nothing making sense while a Presence simultaneously holds me. Then, I returned to an old line from Psalm 42 about “waves and breakers crashing over” the author. Growing up in worship culture, I secretly though that line was always a bit scary. In this new paradigm and framework that more traditional Christianity has helped me build amidst renovating and reconstructing my faith, I was able to sing those ancient words with gratitude because they took on new meaning for me.
Musicians who recorded sessions with me for this song brought to many “oceanic” sounds: swelling, full guitar, “wavy” piano and synth, clanking and tink-ling bells and shells on the drum kit, with a gentle beat that carried in and out. I was amazed at their genius to text paint and create to beautifully and simply, the feeling of floating in the ocean.
When I released this song, I introduced it very simply: a melody that conveys losing God and being found by God later. Land (certainty) was no longer an option for me, so out to the Ocean I went, only to find that the ever-Present God (whom I thought disappeared, whom I could no longer hold or call my own), was holding me up on waves and waves of Himself/Herself/Itself. (Sidebar: amidst my deconstruction I also lost the will to argue about God’s gender. Should an “Holy Ocean” / God-of-All have a once-for-all pronoun…?)
It is the one worship song I have been able to write and mean with all my heart, the one thing I have been able to be sure of all this time after all this fight to keep my faith (though much of it had to evolve). And for that reason, it is incredibly precious to me and a gift I was happy to give to God and to others, by sharing it.
