Tomorrow’s Light
Music arrives like starlight, crossing time and distance to reach those it illuminates. In recent history, music’s light has been enhanced by magic machines that capture music, and allow us to newly experience it by simply pushing “play.” As vital as recorded music is in most of our lives, it’s now hard to imagine a world without that ease.
Yet music itself still comes from a deeper place, before it can be captured and shared. Many musicians have expressed to me their feeling that songs pass through them, rather than originating within them. It’s as if songs are already traveling that greater ether with the starlight, until someone’s open enough to become a vessel for them, then bring them to light to share.
As a lyricist, I too have often felt that my lyrics already existed, long before it was my moment to greet them. It’s almost like knowing now that the love of my life was born, grew up, and lived a full life into adulthood before I knew she existed; let alone was finally ready to meet and skillfully love her.
Even as a listener, music can have that depth and distance of travel. Sometimes, the music that moves us most was written many years or even centuries before. The comfort and inspiration within melody and harmony may take ages before it arrives and is fully received.
I’ve come to celebrate the time and distance it may take for song, starlight, or love to arrive, rather than greet it with impatience. It’s particularly of comfort when it seems there are lengthy challenges to survive, and it’s hard to see beyond them to a time on the other side.
At the moment, a song about exactly that has arrived to give me comfort in that eventual but inevitable arrival. The lyric for that song, “Tomorrow’s Light,” passed through me almost a decade ago, early in a deep winter. My mother’s caregiving needs were then accelerating towards the end of her life, and the other challenges that faced me felt potentially debilitating, if not life threatening.
I needed pure nature in which to breathe into this. So I laced on my boots, then headed out into the deep falling snow, for a meditative walk in the forests by my home. Soon I was greeted by a simple rhyme I heard in the air: “Bound to be a long healing/If healing ever comes around/Hard to see through days and trees/What this storm is, coming down.”
I kept walking, watching and listening, wondering what other lyrical light might follow. I could sense and trust its imminent presence, in the same way I trust tonight’s invisible starlight in the brilliance of today’s noon.
The next verse soon arrived: “But tomorrow’s light’s already traveling/From some distance I can’t fathom/Be careful what you think you know/This moment, that’s my only wisdom.” I heard it, listened, walked through through the oak woodlands to the next meadow. The falling snow was silent enough to let the lyric continue to pass clearly through me, as a chorus, a mantra.
“Bound to be a long healing/But tomorrow’s light will come around/Tomorrow’s light’s already traveling/No one here can stop it now.” I felt the inevitability of better times, thinking of how my aging mother had survived the death of her mother in childhood, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, World War II, her sister’s suicide, her father’s alcoholic death, and many other personal challenges, finding peace and happiness in her long, rich life. In the music of her own life, I felt as much comfort as in the arriving lyric. I felt able to surrender to trust in the eventual future. And in that trust, I felt the rest of the lyric arrive through the distance.
“I surrender to the daylight/I surrender to the storms/I surrender, come what might/Love and trouble take their forms.” In the brilliant silence that only deep snowfall brings to the forest, I could hear and feel the repeated inner echo of that universal truth of starlight, music, love, and time. Over and over the one line refilled me:
“Tomorrow’s light’s already traveling. Tomorrow’s light’s already traveling. Tomorrow’s light…”
But I’m only a lyricist, not a musician. Melody is not my gift. It takes collaboration for music passing through me to come to tangible fruition. The lyric ended up in my book Grateful by Nature. My mother ended up passing away in the pandemic. Brutally isolated times then visited me before the music for “Tomorrow’s Light” arrived—not through me, but through the exceptional grace of Massachusetts songwriter, hospice chaplain, filmmaker, and mental health advocate Meg Hutchinson. She heard the melody in the ether, captured and recorded it, then passed it along via those magic machines. Yet life shifted again before we could begin to record the companion album to Grateful by Nature—still in gestation—so she passed it along too. “Tomorrow’s Light” kept traveling, passing next through the gorgeous voice of Halie Loren (one of the world’s finest vocalists in jazz and beyond), and the healing hands of classically-trained pianist Laura DuBois (founder of Connecting from the Heart, a nonprofit project for bringing healing music and meditation to those in need). Eventually, yet suddenly, the song came into full light not in some tomorrow, but in the moment of a particular today. Halie and Laura performed it live for the very first time, still almost as spontaneous as rehearsed, as part of a gathering of spirit and gratitude.
Again, through the magic of those magic machines, we can now share that moment with you, as another moment of arriving starlight. Another moment of comfort and celebration. Another reminder that every dark time is only temporary. That new starlight, music, and love is already on its way to guide us through the night. Even if you only find this a hundred years after we share it with you, your moment will have then arrived to listen, enjoy, and celebrate.