To celebrate my favorite time of year on Cape Cod, I have decided to create Sweet September: 12 Days of 12 Rebirth.

In this series I will be sharing a track from my recent Album 12 Rebirth, talking about its creation and also linking it to an earlier song of mine. Read more about why I am doing this at Day 1.

Day 5 Thy Will Be Done and 11 Years Later

Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

That’s me taking a deep sigh.

It truly feels like September this morning and I was awake at 5:55am and saw this amazing sunrise.

It couldn’t have been more perfect for this particular day of writing.

As I write this sharing, I can feel the energy of my mother with me.

Both of these songs are deep, personal expressions of my connection to my mother, my experience of her living, dying and the energy she holds for me now.

Mother love is an amazing thing and it is something we all share as human beings. Regardless of how we were born and how that journey with our mother as a human unfolds, we all have a mother. Another human being birthed us onto this planet through her body.

Take a moment to really take that in.

Imagine if our societal systems were based on this sacred miracle of birth. Imagine the health care system? Imagine the education system?

What would it be like if we slowed down enough to sit in the energy of when a child is born. All that possibility. All that Grace.

For some to remember our birth or our relationship with our mother, may feel like trauma. It may have been a traumatic birth or childhood or we may have been adopted or lost our mom young or had a mom who was addicted. 

For others it may have felt joyful and abundant. We may have chosen to be born into a loving and financially strong family that could support us to become all that we are with kindness, love and strength.

For most of us, it’s somewhere in between.

That’s the human journey: A messy, fabulously flawed miraculous ride. So, how do we allow ourselves to thrive – as spiritual beings in human bodies NOW?

A lot of my songs are asking these kinds of questions or reflecting on what I have learned through my unique journey.

I wrote 11 Years Later in January of 2018. May 17 of that year was the 11 year anniversary of my mom’s death and I remember waking up that first day of 2018 and feeling a wave of grief come over me. It felt almost like the first or second year after my mom had died. It shocked me and yet I knew it was an opportunity for a powerful quantum leap in my own journey here and now.

As a creative and spiritual person, I knew enough to practice not judging myself and simple feel the feelings. In that process I wrote 11 years later. It was this song that was part of the inspiration for the title 12 Rebirth and the releasing of it on May 17, the 12 year anniversary of my mom Ellen’s passing.

When I perform this song live, many have responded emotionally – almost like the naming of my love and loss and the power my mother held and keeps holding in my life and awareness, gives permission to others to also honor those they have lost. I am grateful to share this energy in a way that serves others.

The actual year my mom died, I remember returning to my apartment in Brooklyn a few days after her services. I arrived somewhat relieved to be back in my own space and yet also with a restlessness I had never experienced before. Now what do I do? I heard and felt a voice inside of me say “Sit down and write a song”. Thy Will Be Done is what came through – very fast and with very few edits.

I rarely perform it live because it feels so raw to me, but I am grateful I allowed it to come through and recorded it so it may serve others that perhaps are experiencing a similar moment.

In my experience, a lot of our culture is not fluent in the language of grief or has a whole lot of practice holding grief gently within themselves or for others. We often want to fix it or quickly move on out of fear that we may be taken over by our strong emotions.

I have found that Grief has a twin sister named Joy and that the deeper I am willing to truly experience and name my grief, the deeper levels of authentic joy can arise in my daily life, often in surprising ways. This may sound counter-intuitive to some, but I have found it to be true for me.

When I am strong enough to allow myself to be supported as I am truly present with my scariest and darkest emotions, a kind of relief, joy, maturity and strength emerges that helps serve me and everyone around with much more play, authenticity, confidence and joy.

It is my intention that these songs and all my music help people listen deeply within, open up, relax, and allow themselves to be seen, known and loved. Through this deep allowing, transformation can take place in their body and in their life.

Life is temporary. We will lose people.

Life is also amazingly beautiful and we are here to love fully even in the face of what we can not control. What a gift!

This is a picture of me and my mom on the Beara Pennisula in Ireland in 2006. One of my favorite selfie’s of all time.

As my mom would say, Rejoice Regardless!