Unfettered Grace

The day before my birthday this year I had a moment to do some journaling. Some of you may note that we haven’t been very active on this website for a looooong time. That’s for a lot of reasons, all of which push in the opposite direction to journalling moments.

Despite the struggle to find quiet moments, this day, I found a welcomed lull in my schedule. As I journaled about some hard things around my own brokenness, I realised I was about to write a poem. I literally wrote down one word that I was feeling “grasping” and I knew this would be a poem. After three words I was sure; it’s a poem. I had to edit a little as I wrote, but apart from that it poured out of me.

I didn’t know where it was going, because I didn’t know what was in my heart or what my thoughts or emotions were. As they tumbled out onto the page I began to see what was inside. It feels different when your emotions are on a page, outside of your body. I tried to end the poem several times, but more words came. In the end I came back to the core of what I believe, “I am loved” and “fully known”. So where does that leave me? It leaves me wanting to accept, and particularly in this case, “walk with unfettered grace”. (unfettered: Free from restraint, unchained, unshackled, liberated – with thanks to Wordweb)

In the following few days I changed a couple of words. I then happened to write a short piece of music. While I considered what I should form the piece of music into, I wondered if the poem and the piece were really communicating the same idea. I figured we would try to put the poem to music. Because I can’t easily play the guitar and read a poem (and because I have some laryngitis) I got my dearly beloved to read it while I semi-improvised a piece of music. Like the poem had no “end goal” but formed as I interacted with my own emotions, the end result of the recording was not what either of us planned. It is more like how Tanya and I interacted that gave the result. This is a “one take” song – no rehearsal (not that I am against rehearsing; it’s just not what this moment was about). For the observant amongst you, I finished the piece with an Asus2 chord in the video. As we listened back it felt wrong – too resolved. I overdubbed the last chord to an Esus4, which felt more in line with the complex results of giving grace to others.

This is our first: pdf-Word-audio recording-video post. We hope you find the result uplifting.

Tech note: Ian plays his Guild acoustic, Tanya is reading. We added the recorded sound onto the iPhone video recording because we played with headphones. We recording into our Tascam US 16×8 using Logic X into a Mac computer.

(Ian 10/04/2022)