The video for this song may be viewed in this post: The fractal and lyric video for “Mountain Rose”.
Love
It’s not difficult to find love songs to listen to. If I flip through radio stations or streaming playlists, I’m likely to find dozens immediately. In my song series, there’s been one very clear love song and a few that hint at other kinds of love.
And it’s not hard to imagine how love is so inspiring. Falling in love changes the chemical reactions in human bodies. In turn, this triggers imagination and the vividness of sights and sounds. I experience these as beauty.
Beauty
For me, beauty in so many of its forms shows up as a significant inspiration. How can I define beauty? I see or experience something and quickly label it beautiful. But what does that mean?
Most often, beauty is a word I use when I connect with awe. (I’ve written about awe previously in both prose and poetry so I’ll spare you a repeat.) As you can probably imagine from your own experience, I’ve connected with awe in many of my relationships. The trick is to rein in the projections that this can stir up. Otherwise, the beauty becomes all about some other person or thing. Ironically, the deepest, awesome appreciation of beauty that I can ever experience is not about someone else.
Mountain Rose
Clearly, this eighth song started out as a love song about someone else. However, over the years it’s become clear to me (through many revisions of both the lyrics and the music) that “Mountain Rose” is an ode to all of the inspirations of beauty and love. The song started out as “Desert Rose”. When I changed relationships, it became “Mountain Rose” and shifted musically (from 4/4 to 5/4 time signature). Then, as I continued to expand my understanding, it became about anything beautiful that can “bloom” in the face of hardship, struggle, and survival.
Today, I send this ode out to all of you who survive even with the challenges of your life:
you are beautiful.