Somewhere Better
I found the heart of life on a sandy coast
When the tide was low and the wind was blowing in our eyes
There were lanterns glowing up and down the shore
A thousand places where darkness was cast out
And my grandfather knew this place and what he was looking for
The dull roar of the ocean our constant companion
And dull too were my hands but my heart was a lantern burning in the fog
Yeah, I found the heart of life but I left a part of me behind
I found the heart of life in a river town
Somehow taken by all the roads that winded in the hills
Though the ties that bind are hard to quantify,
What I know is the lonely were welcome
Taken kindly in by those with wider hearts than I
Though the valley was flooding
Still deep fruit was budding
Like the apple and plum trees
Our hard ground becoming open to it all
I found the heart of life but I left a part of me,
Yeah, I found the heart of life but I left a part of me
Bridge:
These memories are gold, the places I love best
But they burn me like a coal, they’re more than I can hold
Sharpened arrows in my chest,
Oh, they’re sharpened arrows in my chest
Pointing somewhere better
I found the heart of life on a clear-eyed plain
Where the lakes and trees are glimmering in light
But there’s still a better part,
Oh there’s still a better part to find
Song notes:
“These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.” Heb. 11:13-16
This final song is both very personal to me and my experiences (real places and people that have been formative in my life in all their simplicity and beauty) and also, I think, pretty universal in describing the bittersweet experience of life. I’ll leave you with these two well-known quotes from C.S. Lewis that describe it beautifully.
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory