Thinkin’ About the Trees

I don’t how you determine whether a person, a place, or a thing is “anointed.” I’ve heard the word used, even used it myself, but its meaning is a hard thing to put your finger on. Different people, I’m sure, have different ways of explaining it.

The last few years, I have noticed that certain places and certain people are especially inspiring to me. And I am beginning to wonder if the inspiration is more than circumstance. Might it instead have something to do with an anointing? Maybe. I mean, by no effort of my own, when I am with these people or in these places, I find myself in an abnormally creative or generative headspace. Conversations or things that happen more easily give way to thoughts of deeper realities, as if God has an easier time getting my attention and stirring within me new ideas and ambitions, as if the Spirit’s voice is a little clearer and His nudges a little harder to ignore. It doesn’t seem far-fetched, then, to consider such people and places “anointed,” does it?

One such person is my friend Taylor. It was his telling of the story of his high school youth minister that inspired one of the earlier 52 songs, God of Death to Life. And I know there is at least one more song coming down the pipeline that Taylor’s experience inspired. That will make three, because this week’s song was also sparked by a conversation Taylor and I had; this one just a couple months ago. I think that might mean Taylor has some sort of anointing. Or, more probably, that our friendship does.

Either way, I called Taylor this past November. I had some time after class and was in a particularly existential, even depressed, mood. It happens sometimes. But this mood had been lasting for weeks. I felt rudderless and unsteady. I had been questioning, well, pretty much everything. I called Taylor under the guise of wanting to “catch up.” In reality, it was more like deep calling to deep.

I sat on my back deck and looked at the forest of trees just behind the creek at the bottom of the hill in our backyard. Taylor and I discussed life and art and relationships and getting older and raising kids and holding out hope in the face of so much unknown. This song started that afternoon on the back porch as I looked at the trees; it finished a few days later.

I can usually pinpoint what I mean with each line of songs I write. With this one, however, there are a number of lines that I am pretty sure mean more than just one thing. Some I suspect might mean more than I even know. There is definite ambiguity.

Am I the tree? Are parents the tree? Is the tree a song, a work created? Is life the tree? Or maybe death is? I don’t know. Maybe all of the above?

What I do know is that writing this song was therapeutic. I know it helped calm some of my existential unease with the passage of time and the uncertainty of whether all the collected efforts of a single life, in the end, matter all that much. I also know that I am thankful for my friendship with the guy that inspired it, anointed or not.

Credits

Words & Music: Bill Wolf