‘Waterfall’ — A Journey of Connection, flowing into September.

Waterfall — A Journey of Connection, flowing into September

Some creative work arrives quietly.

It doesn’t necessarily begin with the intention of becoming a song, or even knowing what it wants to say. Sometimes it grows through conversations, experiences and moments that have been sitting somewhere in the background for years.

‘Waterfall’ is one of those pieces.

I have a dear friend who has been part of our family journey for more than ten years. He is an incredibly talented pianist and artist, and someone who has travelled extensively and explored his own spiritual quest, including time in Bali, Indonesia.

He once told me something that stayed with me:

“In Bali they make you look at yourself.”

The shadow as well as the light.

That sentence says a great deal to me.

We have had many conversations over the years about Spirit, consciousness, the divine and what it means to be human. They have never been conversations where we necessarily arrived at answers. More often, they have opened another question.

He has also told me about his experiences sailing.

On one occasion, he described being on a completely calm ocean, sitting on the edge of a wave beneath the constellations. Beyond him was what he described as oblivion — but oblivion in a good sense. There was no fear in it. Just the quietude of the waters, the rhythms of life and the immense space beyond us.

I have never forgotten that image.

We have also talked about the state of the natural world and the changes taking place around us. At one point he wondered whether it might already be too late for humanity, and whether the turning point had to be now. He believed the animals might adapt first to whatever ecological changes were coming.

I don’t know whether he was right.

But I understand the question.

I think many of us feel, in different ways, that something about the balance of the world is changing.

For me, there is always a tension between the natural world and the human world we have constructed around ourselves. I value connection, conversation and the opportunity to learn from others, while also recognising the importance of independent thought and allowing ideas the space to develop in their own way.

I am open to learning, to different perspectives and to questioning what I encounter. I simply don’t believe that learning has to be confined to tradition, convention or a single established way of seeing the world.

Perhaps that is why my own creative journey has taken the shape it has.

I came to much of my work through observation, experimentation and a willingness to follow something before I fully understood where it was leading. Nature, spirituality, human experience, photography, poetry and now composition have gradually become connected.

And ‘Waterfall’ grew out of that connection.

It began as words, the whispers of a poem, gradually finding their way towards a lyric for a song.Then I started listening to those words against musical references.

That changed the writing.

A phrase that seemed complete on the page suddenly felt as though it wanted to go somewhere else. A melody revealed another possibility. A word carried a different weight when it was sung. I began to expand the poem through listening, rather than simply deciding beforehand what the finished lyric should be.

The song slowly revealed itself.

That process felt strangely natural.

And perhaps that is why the idea of a vessel found its way into the lyric.

Because Waterfall has become a vessel of connection.

Not physical intimacy in the conventional sense, but something much harder to describe: a connection between people, between experience and memory, between the visible and the unseen, between one life and the possibility of something beyond it.

There is a line in the song:

the vessel of the divine

I didn’t set out to write that as an explanation. It simply became the language that felt right.

There is also ‘reaching man’.

For me, that speaks to the human journey — difficult at times, searching at times, spiritual at times. The journey towards truth, towards understanding ourselves, and perhaps towards understanding what we cannot yet understand.

My friend has been part of many of those conversations.

But he has also been part of something much simpler and perhaps more important.

He encouraged me not to give up on my art.

That stays with a person.

Sometimes someone doesn’t have to create the work with you to become part of its story. Conversations, perspectives, encouragement and shared experiences can travel quietly into creative work.

You may not recognise it at the time.

Then, years later, something emerges.

A poem.

A melody.

A waterfall.

And suddenly you realise that perhaps all those conversations were already somewhere inside it.

My friend can be seen playing the piano so beautifully on my YouTube channel, and in some ways that feels fitting.

Because this song isn’t really about one moment.

It is about a journey.

A journey through friendship, nature, spirit, consciousness, humanity, time and the strange spaces between what we know and what we simply feel.

I don’t have an answer to where any of it leads.

I don’t think we are necessarily meant to.

Perhaps we are each moving through this universal space in our own way, learning, questioning, changing and becoming.

And perhaps sometimes, if we are fortunate, another person walks alongside us for part of that journey.

For me, ‘Waterfall’ is one small record of that connection.

A vessel carrying something forward.

And then, like water, letting it go.

Waterfall can be viewed here, including the lyrics, and through my Songbay.co profile, where you can explore more of my original lyric work. https://songbay.co/view-lyric/235631008/


A note on the collection

‘Waterfall‘ is one of the remaining pieces in this collection as Blubellwood Blog continues to refine This House — a piece currently on hold for creative reasons.

Sometimes a piece simply needs more time before it finds its final form.