Songs for holding one another

In hard times, remember the lullaby

Greetings,

This message is for anyone who is frightened today; it’s for everyone who is torn up; it’s for you if you’re just getting by, or you maybe don’t even know how exactly you feel right now. I was considering what to offer you in this moment where so many people are sensing the Earth drop out from under their feet, and I wished, simply, I could hold you.

The best way I could think of that might offer you that embrace, from this distance and through this medium, was to invite you to explore the experience of the lullaby with me. Lullaby is probably the oldest form of song, and its the first we hear when we enter this world. At the start of our lives, being sung to is one and the same thing as receiving comfort and nourishment from a caring parent, and by extension, the world. A lullaby is an embrace. Every time a lullaby is sung, the universal mother speaks.

Robert Gemmell Hutchison - The Lullaby

Paid subscribers get the audio version of this post below, along with a playlist of lullabies I hope will soften and soothe the heart.

Lullabies are for hope

Writer Katherine Rundell observed recently in an audio essay series on children’s literature for the BBC, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wonder, that “When you write for a child you write for someone in the process of becoming who they will be.” Lullabies are a way of downloading the infinite, almost unbearable hope that we adults feel for the future of the children we love. Though I myself am not a parent, those parents I know have made it clear that the recurring awareness that one cannot completely protect one’s child from suffering is possibly the single most difficult feature of loving them.

And what can counterbalance the tormenting awareness of our beloved’s inevitable pain? It’s the dreaming anyway, the dauntless prayer that their path may nevertheless be easy, that their eyes will remain bright, that they will often and everywhere flourish. Because everything is still possible. Just as babies experience our soothing-song as love itself, the prayer it carries is a brave invocation and imbibement of a future of gentleness and peace. Our hope feeds us as much as those for whom we hope.

The Wexford Lullaby, here sung by English folk singer Jackie Oates, is a mighty blessing for a child whose life will range far, even though their someday departure will leave their parent grieving. It is based on the medieval melody of the Wexford carol, with new — yet somehow timeless— lyrics written by John Renbourne just 26 years ago.

For you shall run in meadows green,
And sport with otters all in the stream,
And you shall chase the dapple deer,
And swim with salmon in the waters clear.

To pluck the small birds from the sky,
On the tail of the South Wind you shall fly,
And take the high hills for your home,
Blood of my blood, bone of my bone.

Lullabies are for adults

The child addressed in the Wexford lullaby would have no notion of this song’s lyrical meaning aside from the sense they might derive from the changing pace of their parents’ heart, the strength of their grip, and the tone of their voice. They wouldn’t see those otters in the stream or small birds in the sky, but they would feel the vibration of the adult’s emotion when they sang of those sights. Such is the case with every lullaby — the warm rumble of sound is for the baby, but the words, essentially, are for the caretaker, most often a mother. The fact that that mother may be worried, weary, lonely, angry or bored is reflected in the wide range of subjects and tones encompassed in the lyrics of lullabies.

Often lullabies have been a place for expressions that might not otherwise be shared in adult company. In the Sandgate Nursing Song, the singer intersperses cooing lines of admiration for the child and its father with commentary on her private suffering as the wife of an emotionally volatile man:

Though you’re the first, you’re not the last,

I mean to have my bairns fast,

When this happy time is past

I still will love me Johnny.

When daddy’s drunk he’ll take a knife,

And threaten sore to take me life,

Who wouldn’t be a keelman’s wife,

And have a man like Johnny?¹

The 7th century Welsh lullaby Dinogad’s Smock sings to a child wrapped in spotted martin fur, listing all of the animals the child’s father was once able to hunt — when he was alive. The song is both a lullaby and a lament for lost love. The mother sings to the child with the sting of knowing she will not again sing to the father:

When your father used to go to the mountain,

he would bring back a roebuck, a wild pig, a stag,

a speckled grouse from the mountain,

a fish from the waterfall of Derwennydd.

Lullabies invite a tender kind of witnessing less common in other sorts of songs, perhaps because they have never been only for babies. They offer comfort to the singer as much as the listener, and the fact that listener won’t understand only invites awareness to the fact that the lullaby’s audience includes the unseen, whether that unseen presence is a god, the ancestors, or the singer’s own vulnerable inner child.

Lullabies are for all of us

If you’re not familiar with the devastatingly sentimental book Love you Forever by the Canadian children’s author Robert Munsch, allow me to catch you up. This book makes literally every adult cry — and children seem to like it too. Munsch’s book peeks in at a mother and child’s relationship as she gathers her son in her arms at different stages in his life, singing him a song of eternal love:

I’ll love you forever,

I’ll like you for always,

as long as I’m living

my baby you’ll be.

When he is young

Then one day when she is too old to cradle him, we see him return home to cradle her and sing the same lullaby again, with the slightest change:

When she is old

I didn’t fully understand the impact of this book when I was a child. But the last few years I have had more experiences than ever before of holding other adults in my arms while they weep, and now I struggle to even write about Love you Forever without falling apart a little. A few weeks ago I found myself gathering up my own terminally ill uncle in his hospital bed while he grieved his wife who died decades ago, expressing the wish he could have offered her more love while she was here. You might be surprised by who needs to be held tight in your arms one day, and why.

The Iavnana

In the autumn of 2018, while traveling in the nation of Georgia, I learned that one of the most common types of Georgian folk song, which exists in dozens of varieties from every region, is the kind that contains variations on the syllables “i-av-na-na.” They are lullabies, in essence, but they’re also healing and prayer songs for people of any age. Anytime I heard these songs sung by Georgian singers around the supra table or by the fire on that visit, I found goosebumps rising all over my body. Listen to this recording, or this one, and see what happens inside your being. “Nana,” it has been theorized, was the name of the pagan mother goddess. And these songs don’t just feel ancient, they are clearly a direct link to the source of love itself. If they move you too, please enjoy this whole album in a quiet moment sometime soon.

I find embracing others one of the most moving experiences of my human life, and one that I’m beginning to increasingly notice connects me with a sense of perspective beyond this lifetime. Embracing and witnessing one another are sacred acts. Likewise, being willing to be held and witnessed is a gift of immeasurable sacredness.

I mean that. Please let people hold you.

A lullaby can be anything, sung softly and close to the body. Please, sing your lullabies into these days of falling darkness. Whether you find yourself alone or with others, sing your lullabies to bear witness and be witnessed. Let the gods and the ancestors and your own wise child-self see and hold you, dear one. Allow the dream and the prayer to flow soft and rich with peace, no matter the circumstance. Let the sky yawn wide and the vision sparkle, even if its only for this moment, and in this room. Where else does life open into eternity but this very place?

I’m here with you.

The song is ours.

Love,

Danica

Paid Subscribers please scroll down for the playlist and audio recording below.

This weekend Daniel Allison and I are offering the third in our series of seasonal pagan creativity workshops! Sign up to join us this Sunday.