SpreeSeason

Words cannot do justice to the loveliness of this photograph, of an actual place in time(!), so I have sense enough not to try. One must allow the eyes to simply linger and feast.
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I wanted to use this photo for the cover image of my single “World Alive” but was unable to reach the photographer. Maybe it’s just as well: the “moment” perhaps was always too precious — sanctified, if you ask me — to end up as a thumbnail for a pop tune.
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The image always stirs in me that vague sense of what C.S.Lewis (in his book Surprised by Joy) called yearning or longing.
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As an introvert, and as a romantic-realist (born of an evangelical worldview), I love that feeling. My own music tends toward melodies, chord changes and chord voicings that stir that feeling in me, with many of my songs constituting the soundtrack for some world I wish to live in, a world that’s not here right now; it’s on the … other side. As a songwriter I try always to capture such a “moment” so that for a split second, it feels like I almost—but never quite—get a glimpse of the other side. All my songwriting heroes tell of the essentially the same quest.
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A long time ago I was playing one of my songs on a cheap little Casio synth for a coworker, and I glance up just as the guy was getting a tear in his eye. He was having a “moment,” and I knew to leave him to it as discreetly as I could. Later he told me that it (something of what he heard--who knows what) reminded him of “this girl.” (And they say that guys aren’t sentimental and romantic. Oh, but we are: we have all just been conditioned from childhood to conceal and deny the fact.)
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And this photo -- entitled “Harpe de lumiere” by Georges Noblet, of a park in France as water sprinklers produced that rainbow effect -- always seems to me as a “moment” God was having.
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Appointed Mr. Noblet to capture it so as to give those “with eyes to see” a glimpse of a world on the other side, where exists the fount of all Beauty, a world many of us down here expect one day to enjoy to the full.

Somebody asked me what was the best compliment I ever got.
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My mom and dad choose these birthday cards for me. Now, parents are kinda supposed to say I love you, right? But the pre-printed sentiments outside and in the cards they choose for me always imply that they, like, like me, for the person I became.
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That always feels like the highest compliment I could ever get.