To Your Knees

I was in the kitchen hand washing dishes and a song came on. I didn’t stop what I was doing physically but my mind entered molasses. Everything slowed. The pace of my heart changed and I felt closer to the ground.

What songs bring you to your knees? With joy. With sadness. With triumph. With defeat. Sometimes I get lost in months, perhaps even years without being reminded of the power of song, of music, of the grace that’s heartbeat lives in melody. Recently I was moved to a place by a song that reminded me of the handful of the other grandiose feelings I had in correlation to a few other songs. 

The songs that come to mind for me are; Lightning Crashes by Live, Beige by Yoke Lore, Bees by The Ballroom Thieves, and Spirit Bird by Xavier Rudd. No two songs give me the same feeling - they are truly, drastically, vast and deep. They have each had the capacity to move me to a place where everything else in the world holds. Time, responsibility, the needs of the externals. They find themselves on repeat and I find myself in release. 

It’s not even the words of these songs but the way the melodies support them in tandem. The undeniable truth unfolds.

Lightning Crashes by Live - This is the song that was playing the very moment I brought my first child into the world. After 42 hours of labor and the fear of severe interventions through the final hours, the words were not lost on me. 

“Lightning crashes A new mother cries This moment she's been waiting for

The angel opens her eyes Pale blue colored iris presents the circle

And puts the glory out to hide, hide

Oh, now feel it comin' back again

Like a rollin' thunder chasing the wind

Forces pullin' from the center of the Earth again

I can feel it

I can feel it”

Forces pulling from the center of the Earth again. What had happened, what we had just been through, was a force of nature, a phenomenon that humans will never fully comprehend but will spend a lifetime trying to. This song cracked me open and gave me the nod from God and the Universe that all was on time, all was as it was to be. On the other side of pain was complete grace. The beauty and the answers to questions I never fully rounded out. 

Beige by Yoke Lore - I fell in the deepest, boldest and most true love of my life with this song on in the background. Tears fill my eyes when it comes on and I can hardly live it out to the end. I think of the raw joy. The laughter. The mindless understanding. The GIFT. That was the truest and most profound form of love I have ever known outside of motherhood. And this song plays and I imagine us driving somewhere in a car, maybe the windows down, maybe a tiny hand on my finger and the steering wheel under hers.

“Let me go under your skin

Let me find the demons that drive those heavenly limbs

Let me go under your skin

Let me find the demons that drive those heavenly limbs

You know you're beautiful

But that ain't half the gold treasure in your soul what you got 'cause I want it all

With your fingers in my mouth, I fail to see your faults

So please don't let me fall

So please don't let me fall”.

And it was the demons that severed us. How I would have given anything to crawl in that skin and heal them, or at the very least, understand and hold them. Ironic that when all was said and done, all I could feel was in fact beige. And sometimes I still do. This song evolves into every season of that love - that love that never dies. Just shapeshifts into what the greatest good calls for. 

Bees by The Ballroom Thieves - This was my wedding song. Looking back at the words, the concepts of this song, I note the depiction of addict and codependent. Living on hope, hope for a savior. Attaching to it with such force that any of the dysfunction is nearly unidentifiable.

“​​And the words she aches to hear pour through my canyon

And they're singing in the caverns of my limbs

And though I do my best to try to understand them

They only follow me like vultures in the end”.

We tried. We tried, we tried, we tried. And I walked away knowing that no matter the amount of trying, I would never be able to contrive a truth out of our life built on reactivity. Lack of dignity. The most beautiful moments, a beautiful melody, soft in the voice. But the understanding that no matter how hard we tried, it wasn’t right and we killed ourselves coping with vices in the process. Living on hopes and trying to avoid the realities. This song is valiant efforts and ultimate failure. Loss. In its own right, a gift. 

Spirit Bird by Xavier Rudd - this song found me when I came back to myself. Not in a triumphant way. In an honest way. Messy, grimey even. I laid on my yoga mat in savasana and the tears rolled down my cheeks. Not from longing or disappointment even, but solely the raw understanding of misalignment externals while knowing the truth internally. The edges of my heart wrapped around the words. The relativity in my own life deafening anything outside of the tune.

“Give it time, and we wonder why, do what we can, laugh, and we cry

And we sleep in your dust because we've seen this all before

Culture fades with tears and grace

Leaving us stunned hollow with shame

We have seen this all, seen this all before”

It is life. It is love. It is culture. It is the cycle of life. It is beauty. It is the permission to feel deeply and still come home to yourself in spite of the messiness. All fades eventually. It’s truth never dies but the pain may become dull. 

Music has the ability to connect us to the deepest parts of ourselves - the joy, the sorrow, the love, the loss, the triumphs, and the failures that shape our human experience. The songs that move us to our knees serve as powerful anchors, reminding us of the raw truth of life's journey, the wonder in all of it.

Though the melodies and lyrics may evoke vastly different emotions, they all share a common thread – the capacity to crack us open and allow us to feel deeply, to embrace the full spectrum of our existence. In those moments of connection, we find solace, release, and ultimately, a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

So let the music move you, let it transport you to those sacred spaces within. It’s in those moments that we truly learn what it means to be alive, to love, to grieve, and to grow. Embrace the songs that bring you to your knees, they are the anthems of your soul, guiding you toward a more authentic, vibrant way of being.

Let’s be Spotify friends; hit it.