Hey you, lucky number 13! Today, we celebrate a whole trip around the sun for LAUREL and for this creative and spiritual journey we embarked on. I want to share this joy with you, my little tribe of inquiring minds, for supporting this path and for supporting me. I thank you.
Since this is a special edition of the LAUREL Monthly Soundlust, concurring with our one-year anniversary, “Roots” invokes the very essence of this journal’s inspiration and taps into the things that keep me, well, rooted in this journey.
Expansion of life
Spending a lot of time in nature, in the company of plants, has made me not only a witness to its greatness, but a living and breathing part of it. I’ve watched nature come to life, expand, then turn into stillness and quietude, from flowers blooming, to trees rising strong, from seedlings breaking their shells, to entire landscapes changing their colors from season to season. I’ve even watched some die, only to be reborn again.
That entire universe of things made me better understand our own human nature, our processes, our challenges, our essence, and the way we are able to expand our lives, regardless of spatial boundaries, regardless of how long it takes.
The trees are some wondrous things. Their roots are the strongest and most durable part of their structure. Even when their trunks are cut off, the roots seem to have a memory of their own. They have an entire system of links and synapses, just like a human brain, that draws their nutrients from both the underground and the surface. They work on processes that, in time, help them grow back, help them grow new leaves, and reproduce.
We have our roots, our legacies, our history, our conscience entrenched within ourselves, and no matter how long and how far we travel, it’s our spirit and energy that will be our footprint.
Roots are generally described, from a symbolic point of view, as something that holds you down, in one place, but we forget how forests are born, how seeds are flown over spaces; so if we take this comparison / analogy into consideration, we can see how being rooted has little to do with space, but with our essence.
And here, we learn such an important lesson about trees and their lives: they might grow their roots in a certain place, but their seeds are spread around endless spaces by the wind, by the busy-buzzing pollinators, creating new roots somewhere else.
It’s the same with us, humans. We have our roots, our legacies, our history, our conscience entrenched within ourselves, and no matter how long and how far we travel, it’s our spirit and energy that will be our footprint, the seed to make a difference.
Sounds of Roots
For this edition, I wanted to bring together some of the songs that inspired me throughout this year of writing for LAUREL and curating playlists for you, some songs that I’ve previously shared in other soundlusts, but also some songs that contribute to this ever growing journey. There are songs that are / have been a part of this little tree of life growing right here, songs about resilience, becoming, love.
As I might have already described, when putting together a new music collection, I love paying attention to the lyrical part of a song, to its message, to its inspiration, but also to the rhythm and its overall vibe.
Lately, I’ve been drawn to the energy of Pink’s new sounds, one of them being her mother-daughter duo, in “Cover me in sunshine”, a beautiful ode to simplicity and joy of life, created during a worldwide chaos, spreading a little hope to us all.
Ben Howard’s “Old pine” seemed only natural to be featured again, as these lyrics are very much scribbled in this journal essence:
We grow, grow, steady as the morning
We grow, grow, older still
We grow, grow, happy as a new dawn
We grow, grow, older still
We grow, grow, steady as the flowers
We grow, grow, older still
We grow, grow, happy as a new dawn
We grow, grow, older still. [Ben Howard – Old pine]
You’ll also find old pals of the Monthly Soundlust in this celebratory 13th edition, like “Light of Love” from Florence & The Machine; songs from the very first LAUREL soundlust, like“Working on a dream” from the one and only Mr. Bruce Springsteen, or “I’m still here”, from Femke.
There’s also the beautiful soundtrack from the motion picture “The Greatest Showman” – “A million dreams”, first featured in Foundations, the 5th Monthly Soundlust.
Nonetheless, while we celebrate the beauty of life and nature, we must also remind ourselves about the enormous responsibility that lies in our actions over the health of our world, like Michael Jackson’s epicly depicted in “Earth song”, also featured in Roots.
This inner journey of ours is no longer independent from the outside world. Every gain in our emotional learning is a chance for us to replicate that into a better social and environmental behavior.
We – all living creatures and species – are interconnected. We might find inspiration in nature, but nature is found in each one of us.
Tree roots remind us to look into the things that are essential to us, elements that helped us grow and become who we are, and also the constant source of our life’s expansion.
Without further ado, I hope you enjoy this playlist. Also, I hope that you’ll dedicate a few moments to yourself, thinking about your personal journey, celebrate it, see what still drives you, get in touch with what makes you YOU.
