the place i've never found

song session 1

this song explores the place in a woman that feels 
undiscovered, 
untouched, 
especially by God, or by a man. 
and expresses the craving for both. 
preferably at the same time.

---

Can we go the long way round?

Do things we can say without a sound

Get up close to me and lay down

In the place I’ve never found

I need you around

Our bodies can let our secrets out

and say things we cannot say out loud

Like “I don’t want to go without”

The place I’ve never found

I need you around

Do your hands already know me

In the places God made Holy?

I want you to hold me

It gets so lonely

I need you around

I need you around

---

I need you around

I’m learning how to be in need. I’m learning to rely on others. I’m finally understanding that my needs are what create and sustain enduring Love. We all need to be needed. It is our deepest needs that draw us to one another…and hold us together, though we are duped into believing our strengths are what make us attractive. In a world that glorifies self-sufficiency and hyper-independence, the choice to be in need is radical. Specifically on my mind as a 40+ woman, is something I’ve always needed that my younger self wouldn’t dare admit…

I want and need to be held by a man. Deeply. On every level. Letting go in the arms of a man is both a craving and constant battle within me…

which leads to the second theme in the song…

There’s a place i’ve never found

Let’s call it true, deep, resounding surrender in the arms of a man… to let myself melt, disappear, forget my name… and that’s just where it begins… because of course there is a far deeper place within me… one that I am learning l don’t even want to get to without a man… and that place is union in body and soul with God.

In his arms

“‘You are loved with an everlasting love,’ that’s what the Bible says, ‘and underneath are the everlasting arms.’” Elisabeth Elliot

My dad often retold the story of my birth. That he held me first, before my mum. He described how I was swaddled and handed to him, my eyes fixed on his gaze. He recounted having me in his arms, walking in circles of disbelief at my arrival. I walked in similar circles of disbelief on the day of his departure.

That day was Thursday the 21st of March 2024, 40 years and 2 weeks from my birth. I had no idea how to process the words I was hearing on the other end of the phone when the news came. We had been estranged for 8 years and I had been in a protracted grieving process throughout. Learning how to grieve the living was something I thought I was just starting to get a handle on when grieving his death took over. I stood in the pouring rain, holding my phone, unaware that I was soaked to my skin. I had just returned from Edinburgh by train and now everything was going in slow motion. I knew my husband and children were on their way to get me, expecting to meet the same person that left them 3 days prior. But she was gone forever.

I got into the car and cried the most physically painful tears of my life while the children watched someone they’d never seen before. I watched my new life flash by the car window on our drive back home, wondering if anything would ever feel like home to me. I couldn't stay still. Everything was moving around me and my mind had become a clutter of questions, that I now realised would never be answered. He was gone, and not for the first time, but now it was forever.

He was the first man I shared my songs with. The first man who supported my early attempts at a singing career. The first man who shared prose and songs with me. The first man to write me poetry. The first man to show me what love was, and was not. The first man to leave my life.

I stopped writing songs completely when our relationship broke down. It silenced me in ways i’m only starting to unpack now in his death. I lost my voice. I lost heart. I lost faith. And on the day of his death without warning those three things suddenly came pouring back into my life.

I was a cradle Catholic. Baptised within weeks of my birth. At 12 I was fully confirmed into the church and for the following 28 years I never practiced the faith again. On the day he died my come to Jesus moment was irreversibly sealed. I found myself on a frantic call to a priest I didn't know, asking for prayers for my dad. It all felt too late now, but I walked back into our favourite childhood church, on the evening of his death and experienced a sudden and complete reversion to the Catholic Faith. The songs I will share here, you might say, come from the place i’ve never found but hope to encounter.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the song. If you have questions that you wish me to speak to it would be my pleasure to connect in the comments.

**this song was recorded in my sitting room, with the fire roaring, on a misty February day, from my little pink cottage**

Warmest, Clare