This is a song about what it means to really and truly turn yourself over to what you want: to DIVE IN. I got to share it on a TV show about "Using Your Gifts" recently, and here is a little more to the story behind the song. While I was working on this song I found myself asking myself, "Are there areas where I am holding myself back? Are there ways in which I identify something I really want to come to pass, and then hover around the edges of letting it become so? And, maybe more importatly, when I look back over the course of my life at times when I really HAVE let myself DIVE IN, have I been glad I took the plunge? My answer to this last question was a strong, powerful, life-affirming YES!

TOPIC: Reaching to connect with a sibling

My Sister Amy - I jumped off this dock without a life preserver and she jumped in after me 

What follows is the story of me and my sister. Of all the songs I perform live in concert, these two "Sister Songs"--a matched set--are the most frequently requested. When I play the first song, half the room tears up. When I play the second song, the other half of the room gets all watery-eyed. (The non-teary people know better than to come to my concerts, I guess). Each of us, it seems, can relate in some way to one side or the other of this equation: siblings who grow apart--and one who maybe struggles with it more than the other.

GROWING APART
When we were young, Amy and I shared a room, a bunk bed, and many late night conversations, giggling and doing imitations of the voices (and imagined gastrointestinal releases) of all of our neighbors. We had secret glances and little pieces of shorthand. Everything she did, I wanted to do. But when we grew up, Amy and I grew into different lives. And we grew apart. She seemed okay with it. I spent a lot of years, when I stopped to think about it, feeling somewhat tortured by our apartness. I came up with no end of stories, explanations, reasons, justifications, and excuses for what it all meant. On the surface, I am not sure what it looked like, but inside of me, down below the surface where no one could see, there were a lot of approaches, and a lot of retreats. I was hurting, and I didn't know where to go with that hurt, or how to give it a voice. 

TOPIC: Adoption

THE STORY
Jackie and Kathy came to me wishing for a song to celebrate their family and to tell the story of their daughters' adoptions from Guatemala in a way that would make sense to their girls now, at their current ages (3, 6) and would also hold deeper levels of meaning that they could come to appreciate anew when they listen again to the song as adults. I learned of their trips to Guatemala, of the many ways in which their family began to take shape and turn into something real and amazing. I got to draw on my own time in Guatemala, having visited the cabin where my husband lived for two years in his "Habitat for Humanity" days. But the very crux of what makes this song feel so special to me, as the writer, came from out beyond the stories, out beyond my experience of Guatemala. It came from something Kathy said that shot right through me when she said it--it was so unadorned and obvious. It made me understand and feel on an even deeper level how much is true and the same for all children in all families, regardless of how those families came together. I turned her comments into the bridge of the song, and I love the way it makes the specificity of this story suddenly feel so universal:

We can't know all of where you've been,
Just like we can't know all of where you're going.
And it's not always easy here.
It's not always easy anywhere...

A SONG FOR ALL MOMS
I l-o-v-e to crank this song at top volume and feel it course through my veins.

I think this song is one of my proudest accomplishments.

Which is funny because I didn't even do all the work!

This song comes from someplace else, and I can sense my connection to that place, every time I play it. 

This song is dedicated to You, if you are a mom. To your Mom if you have one (everybody does!) It is also dedicated to my own mom. And, most importantly, it is dedicated to Erika Whitmore Godwin and Susan Godwin who collaborated together with me across the spans of time and, well...consciousness...to bring this song to you. 

STORY: THE SONG PROJECT TAKING SHAPE
Florrie came to me filled to overflowing with excitement about the idea of commissioning a song for her stepdaughter Virginia's wedding. Florrie had just received my Song-of-the-Month on the song "Bright Eyes"  (a father in the late stages of Lou Gehrig's Disease leaving a message for his daughter).  She was particularly moved by this song because her own husband suffers from a similar disease. We conducted a fruitful song interview, and I was on my way. But WAIT!! Florrie's level of enthusiasm about the song was so great that she wrote me the next morning to tell me that she had started hearing lyrics in a dream. She promptly typed them up and emailed them to me--careful to say "Please feel free to ignore these."

TOPIC: Birthday for cancer survivor