The Roots Underneath the Roots

The artist is not always the all-knowing architect standing above the work. Sometimes she is also the one who gets to “meet the work later.”

Songwriting has made this especially visible to me.

I can write a line believing I understand what it means, only to have life bring me back to it later and say:

“You thought you knew what you made.”

“Come look again.”

“There are roots underneath the roots.”

There is a tiny moment of alarm in that first sentence.

“What did I miss?”

“Did I get something wrong?”

“Is there something here I failed to understand?”

Then comes the invitation.

“Come look again.”

Not correction.

Not accusation.

Just a slight tipping of the ground beneath my feet.

A spark of curiosity.

“Wait.”

“What do you see that I didn’t?”

And then the roots appear.

Not because they suddenly grew there.

Because they were there all along.

When I wrote “The Voice of Longing”, I believed I understood what the protector was protecting.

The tenderness of a relationship.

The vulnerability of reaching.

The ache of wanting to be met by another person.

And all of that is there.

But recently, life brought me back to these lines:

“The protector isn’t an enemy”

“It learned its work honestly”

“It learned to brace and watch the doorway”

“It learned what wanting used to cost me”

I thought I knew what “wanting used to cost me” meant.

Then something happened.

A small interaction pressed against an old place in me and suddenly the line opened wider.

Wanting was not only romantic longing.

Wanting was also needing.

Wanting help.

Wanting someone to show up.

Wanting to be cared for without becoming an inconvenience.

Wanting to ask without receiving an emotional invoice afterward.

Wanting to trust that another person could say yes without making sure I understood what my need had cost them.

And suddenly I could see an older root system beneath the one I already knew.

There were places in my life where asking for help carried a strange double message:

“Do not ask unless you absolutely have to.”

“You should be able to manage this yourself.”

And then, somehow:

“Why didn’t you ask for help?”

Need could become dangerous.

Independence could become dangerous too.

There was no perfectly safe move.

So the protector learned its work honestly.

It learned competence.

It learned self-reliance.

It learned how to carry things.

It learned how not to become the burden.

And because it learned those things so well, there were times when it kept carrying long after the load had become impossible.

I did not consciously place all of that inside the song.

And yet...

there it was.

That is the part of making that continues to astonish me.

Sometimes something true enters the work before I possess the language to explain it.

A line arrives.

An image appears.

A gesture finds its place.

A metaphor settles into the composition.

I recognize that it belongs there, but I do not necessarily know the whole reason why.

Then life moves.

Experience catches up.

Something happens months or years later and suddenly the work becomes transparent enough for me to see another layer moving beneath it.

The meaning was not absent before.

I simply had not become the person who could recognize all of it yet.

The work was not incomplete.

“My understanding of it was still becoming.”

There is something sacred in that.

To discover that a thing I made has been quietly holding meaning for me until I was ready to recognize it.

To realize that intuition may sometimes lay down the path before consciousness knows where it leads.

To find that what looked like one root was actually branching into another beneath the soil.

And perhaps that is why this part of the song feels different to me now too:

“So I won’t send it from the room now”

“I won’t shame it for the things it knew”

“I’ll say, Thank you, you got me here”

“But there’s another voice coming through”

The protector is not the enemy.

It learned from experience.

It noticed patterns.

It kept watch.

It developed strategies that were once necessary.

The work now is not to banish it.

The work is to recognize when an old protection is answering a question that the present moment has not actually asked.

To say:

“Thank you.”

“I understand why you came.”

“And I can choose differently from here.”

Which leads directly into the bridge:

“I cannot choose what crosses back”

“Across the bridge to me”

“I cannot make another heart”

“Answer honestly”

“But I can choose what I lay down”

“Here upon my side”

When I wrote those lines, I understood them.

And now I understand them again.

Differently.

More deeply.

I cannot control whether another person meets my vulnerability with tenderness.

I cannot make someone respond with empathy.

I cannot guarantee that reaching will be returned.

I cannot control what another person carries across the bridge toward me.

But I can tend my own side.

I can recognize when fear has picked up the old armor.

I can ask for help before exhaustion turns need into resentment.

I can repair when I respond from an old wound.

I can choose not to make another person pay for something they did not cause.

I can reach.

Even when the protector remembers why reaching once felt dangerous.

Perhaps that is one of the hidden gifts of making.

We create something from the self we are today.

And somewhere inside it, without quite knowing how, we may also leave messages for the self who has not arrived yet.

A breadcrumb.

A lyric.

A symbol.

A root curling quietly beneath another root.

Waiting.

The artist does not always stand above the work knowing everything she has placed there.

Sometimes the artist makes the work.

And sometimes, much later,

“the work waits for the artist to catch up.”

Arriving gently 🕯️