The Story of The Beautiful Not Yet

I think one of the things I love most about this song is that it was co-written with a wonderful young songwriter, Chloe Grace.  You can check out her music on Spotify here. Her beautiful voice can be heard on the recorded version in the video.

This song works on three different levels.  It is a celebration of regeneration in the natural world, it’s an acknowledgement of personal new beginnings and an affirmation of our work as a human family toward a better kinder world. 

The Beautiful Not Yet was written in the springtime when the very first shoots and buds were barely appearing.  At the end of a long winter the hills of Southern Indiana are a million shades of beige, last year’s leaves on the forest floor. And yet the sky was clear and the air was clean.  You could almost feel the energy of all the growing things moving just below the surface.  It was not the usual scene that landscape photographers would capture.  But there was such beauty in that clear unencumbered light, and it was a great joy and delight to walk among the waking woods.

On a personally level the song grew out of a combination of Chloe’s and my own experience.  Chloe was in her early 20’s and heading out in a couple of months to live in England and study theater and acting at the renowned Guild Hall. It would be a summer of creating her own new album, Lift Off . It was a creative “in-between ”place before this next adventure.  It was exciting and unknown, and it seemed to me that everything had brought her to that moment and the moment was good.  I was a generation older and pondering my own time of “in-between.”  I was in the beginning of the difficult process of healing a physical illness and unresolved trauma.  Every ending is a beginning and every beginning holds a possibility.  But like that expectant moment in springtime, neither Chloe or I could see the full expression of summer let alone the harvest of autumn.  But I think we both could feel it, feel the potential of things to come, a great unknown which contained some fears, but also the possibility of experience that would change us profoundly.  We were in the beautiful not yet and we were singing.

Culturally, politically and as a human family we also abide in the beautiful not yet.  The renowned non-violent conflict resolution scholar and advocate, John Paul Lederach, said that justice and peace are the horizon we walk toward, and because we do not reach a horizon line our walk must be more an orientation for our lives rather than a destination.   In these uneasy times when so much feels broken, I live and work for a better kinder world, creating a renewable and sustainable hope through daily acts of love made visible.  And although I cannot see the full expression of peace, love, truth and justice in the here and now, I can catch glimpses of that full expression in the daily actions of others like myself, in the faces of children and in the fruit that comes from the trees that courageous and faithful ancestors planted. 

So here we are in the beautiful not yet.  I’m learning to love what is joyous and delightful and renewing in the here and now, while living with the better world as an orientation for my life, celebrating the still unseen but coming possibility.

For those interested I will be performing the full album of The Beautiful Not Yet on January 23, 2022 7pm in a very special online concert on Mandolin. You can get more details about the show by clicking here