Here in this Sweetheartland there’s a woman with a husband and three sons. There’s a house getting renovations, there are cars in the driveway and kid stuff on the schedule. There are miles and miles logged between her front door and wherever she’s off to next and, by tonight, there’ll be a Christmas tree standing in the corner of her living room.
Here in this Sweetheartland, the woman is wondering if she’s arrived at the end of something or has she just gotten started on a chapter she’s never lived before. I guess both. I guess it’s always both, right?
I made two full length records in the span of five weeks. The first day of the first recording session was November 4th. The last day for me in the studio for record number two was December 9th. Looking back, I’m glad I went into it blind because had I known what it would ask of me, I might’ve changed my mind.
Living something bigger will ask more of you. It will ask more of you, but not in the way that makes you have to add more stuff to your calendar. Not in the way that makes you more exhausted or drained. No. Living something bigger and clearer will ask more of you, as in your identity. As in your edges. You might close your eyes right now and imagine yourself expanded and visualize where your edges are. How far in any given direction will you go? And I mean, you, yourself, your being, your mind, your emotions, your capacity. How big and wide and open are you willing to be?
Now, imagine you’re being asked to live something bigger and different. Imagine you’re invited to expand your identity. That’s what I feel like. I’m not becoming someone different. It feels like I’m being asked to expand and extend beyond where I thought my edges once were. It’s like the good Lord gently saying, “No, Hope, you are now not at liberty to close the door on feelings you don’t want to feel. No, I’m sorry, my dear, but you’ve come too far to indulge in fear from now on. I am now asking you to live in and through the moments when you feel like you’re breaking into a thousand pieces. The moments when you are afraid, when you feel like you can’t do it, when you feel alone, or small. You are going to feel all that and and more and then, at the end of the day, you don’t have permission to go back to where your old edges used to be. You will lay your head down right there in the open exposed expanse and you will live there now and, I promise, it will start to feel like home. But not yet.”
Here in this Sweetheartland I have so so much. A loving husband, amazing funny beautiful, gentle, loving children, great friends, a great community, a lovely little mess of a house all of which have my heart and my mark and here I am in the same living room with the cluttered coffee tables and shoes strewn about but it feel different. It feels bigger, quieter, expanded, unfinished.
There I was in the studio singing my guts out. There I was in the studio feeling like a phony, but also feeling like every move I made up until that moment was pointing to that very thing that I chose. I chose that studio. I chose those guys. I chose to be in that moment that felt so out of my league all in an attempt to get closer to that thing. Closer to the real me? I confess I don’t exactly know who that is at the moment. Closer to my calling? I’ve never been sure if this is vanity or vocation. Closer to the edges? Yeah probably.
The record is called, “Sweetheartland.” That title sounds more comforting than the record really is, in fact. Here in this Sweetheartland, there is a home and there is love and there is history and there are roots. There are kids and a yard and there’s that woman again. A woman like me.
And in one instant she’s holding on to these good gifts of every day. And in the other she’s desperately trying to run. But you know what running is? Running is actually a sign of unexpanded edges. Running might as well be drinking might as well be eating might as well be a cell phone might as well be hiding. It might as well be screaming, “I can be this, but if you ask me to be bigger than this, I cannot. I will not.”
But here in this Sweetheartland I am living something bigger, expanding my capacity to feel everything, to stop resisting and hiding from the parts of life that I’ve put beyond my edges. No. The doors are wide open, the rim of the canyon is getting wider and I’m allowing it all to play out. That’s what I’m being asked to do. That’s what we’re all asked to do if we’re being lead to live bigger, and clearer and brighter. It’s the growth of a lifetime that, from the get go, doesn’t look pretty. But, come spring, this Sweetheartland will be a field of flowers that goes on forever.