The Trip To Over

Something is enforced everyday. Either something that I suspect to be true is confirmed, or something that I thought was the case is proved not to be. I completed a song a few weeks ago that I have been working on for the last 3 years. It started with a title: My Trip To Over. It was a companion piece to another song idea that started at the same time: My Era Of Unknowns. Lyrics came, sat, waited, got up, and left. Some decided to come back, and resigned themselves to rot in my notebooks. After My Era Of Unknowns took on an unexpected new life and a completely new direction over last summer, I felt this urgency that My Trip To Over must get finished. A couple weeks ago this nursery tune popped out of one of my practice sessions, and fit some of the lyrics perfectly. From there the rest came together so easily. I added a few lyrics and moved a few words around to fit the syllabic structure, but the idea is in keeping with the same vision that I initially had. Along our walk on this earth we are confronted by distractions. The verses represent the distractions and temptations that I have confronted in my own experience. But the chorus is a simple surrender to God, entreating Him to reset my vision to its proper place. As I find my own ventures failing to produce personal fulfillment, I am brought back time and again to the ultimate and only real source of comfort. I will trip. I will fail. That is inevitable. But thankfully, He is always there to steady me.

Last night I was reading some chapters in Isaiah, and I ran across one of those verses that seem to hit you in the face when you need it the most.

The last sentence in Isaiah 7:9 says:
If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all.

I was also reading a book by Anne Lamott on the writing process entitled Bird by Bird. There is a paragraph within that made me close the book and use it to repeatedly beat the arm of the chair I was sitting in. Especially after my Bible reading, it was a little too close to exactly what I am going through right now.

“E.L. Doctorow once said that ‘writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

The Trip To Over

Cap and gown and tassel turned,
Freedom bound, the books can burn.
They tell me that my competence,
Determines my sustenance.

Hold me now,
I need your love,
As I trip all the way to over.
Hold me now,
I need your love,
On my trip to over.

So, I run to the stage where masses flock,
To worship all of their false gods.
But I don’t want to see the backs of heads.
I want to see faces instead. (repeat chorus)

Is it so hard to find a mate,
With whom you can procreate,
And then dissipate back into dust,
Someone you can know and trust? (repeat chorus)

I fell in nostalgia’s gaping past,
Where half a dozen millstones crashed.
Fickle phrasing, fragile frame,
Song and writer are the same.

I made a recording of this song the other week which my brother Ben produced. It can be heard here: www.myspace.com/grantwithington

And really……..everyone MUST listen to one of the most phenomenal songs that I have heard in a year. She Will Have Her Way by Neil Finn off of his album Try Whistling This. Please listen to this song! Phew, it is so good!