I wrote "Equanimity" because the word deserves better than the way we usually use it. People hear it and think of detachment, of somebody who has arranged their life so that nothing can reach them anymore. That is not equanimity. That is armor, and it is a much smaller thing. What I was after is the state where everything still reaches you and you are steady anyway, which is harder and much more alive. The narrator does not step out of the storm in the first verse. He stands resolute in it. The chaos is still going on all around him. He has simply stopped being at war with it.
The story behind the song is in the third verse, and it is the verse the whole thing was built to arrive at. It would have been easy to write a song about peace that quietly required a person to already be at peace, where you only get the calm if you have nothing broken to carry. So I put the broken things in on purpose. He gathers them up and pulls them back into the light, turns sorrow into wisdom, and then finds the line I care about most, that even jagged edges form the pattern of our home. The damage is not something he transcended. It is load-bearing. That is why the bridge can move from I to we without it feeling like a trick, because once you stop needing your own history to be different than it was, other people stop being a threat to you and start being company.
Songs Across America is mostly a project about places, and this one is about the only place a person actually lives, which is inside their own attention. But I do not think the two are separate. The song reaches for stars and moonlight and tides for the same reason the rest of the catalog reaches for mountains and rivers, because feeling how small we are in that kind of company is not diminishing. It is the exact thing that makes room for us. That is the turn in the second verse, how small we seem, yet how infinite in soul we are. I hope this one finds people on the loud days. What I want them to take from it is the last thing the chorus says. Not separate but truly whole. The wholeness was never something to go find. It was what was left once the fighting stopped.
Meditative, spiritually resonant hymn with a mantra-like structure, its recurring chorus drawing the listener deeper with each repetition. Gentle, poetic, and introspective writing built on elemental imagery of light and shadow, storms and solid ground, stars and tides, creating a soundscape as centered as the state it describes.
Inner peace and acceptance, mindfulness and stillness as practice, the integration of suffering into wisdom, interconnectedness and shared humanity, the cosmic perspective on personal struggle, and wholeness as something uncovered rather than achieved.
Primary Subject:
A person quieting their mind in the middle of a loud and restless world, and the inward journey from fear and illusion toward steadiness, integration, and a sense of belonging to everything.
Mood:
Serene, contemplative, reverent, and expansive. Hushed and inward at the opening, widening into cosmic wonder, and resolving into grounded, luminous calm.
Equanimity is not detachment or the absence of pain, but steadiness in the middle of it. Peace comes from integrating our broken pieces rather than escaping them, and in ceasing to fight our own experience we discover we were never separate from the world or from each other.
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