Only This

I don’t want to roll through the best days of my life in Neutral gear. Sometimes I notice it, throw it into Second and roll start from an empty battery, and then in a snap — we’re back, baby!

Other days it all rolls to a stop, a house full of beautiful people packs up for the night and I go to bed starving for connection, missing my friends and thinking about how nice it would be to really get together some time.

Gratitude. Appreciation. Openness. Trust. Honesty. Presence. Present-ness.

When I slip from these values, it all falls apart. Nothing is enough. I have no friends. My bank balance will never look assuring. Everyone else has got their shit together and I’m living here completely alone and it’s clear I’m long overdue to wither and die unnoticed and unwatered.

There’s only one place to be. One time to be. One mouth to speak from at a time. There’s a polyphonic grift being forced on us by our culture, that only cares if we work hard and celebrate life in ways that trickles money upwards. Food. Alcohol. Venue. Media. Hotel. Microtransactions. We may have presence if we pay the fee. Anything else, the joy will be teased as attainable if we hold it down long enough at the job, pull savings together for the product, or sign our body into servitude to the office industrial complex for a fucking $30,000 car.

I was having a breakdown about my bank balance under a big tree when my friend Gabi (a brilliant folk musician with her band Gailla) texted me and then we called to chat about how I was feeling. I said I can see structurally all the things making me miserable, she told me we can know that but still feel however we are. We talked about songwriting and how wonderful our friends are. We laughed about how cool it was to hang out and record folk songs the other night together with Rosie, how fun a night that was. I started to remember not being fully connected to the joy of that night, I’d been feeling a bit distant and I was still getting to know most people there.

I realised quietly that I’d been lacking appreciation for my life. There’s many things I’ve been getting to experience that seemed impossible a few years ago, and are now happening on a whim. There are friends I’m immeasurably thankful to know but get so caught up in my own head that I don’t tell them what they mean to me. 

We are made of each other. I’m lit by the light emanating from your eyes. We are equipped with tiny pilot lights ready to ignite the darkest days for ourselves and our loved ones and there’s nowhere I want to be but here forever.

I wrote this song while I was writing a song every day for two weeks, and it ended up becoming part of my 2024 album ‘Sunshine Special’.