While my review of Amber Rubarth's Wildflowers in the Graveyard should be all you need to buy the album, I've had an inkling I would be blogging on the potency of certain lyrics. Though I have multiple tracks that I enjoy on repeat, it is the opening title track that has the most to say to me right now. I won't even pretend that Rubarth's lyrics mean what I've added to them. I'm just running with interpretive powers.

Rubarth describes the album as "a slow exploration of nature's cycles of life, death, and rebirth." The imagery is rarely direct. Sometimes it's barely recognizable until you have spent significant time on it. As Wittgenstein said:

If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in doing so, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.

In the last two years, I've had my own time to think "deeply about death" and discover it's "new images"—at the same time, other images got shattered. Youthful perceptions of "being an adult" or "being a parent" cracked under the dreadful question of why any of this even matters. Trope answers revealed themselves to be neither important nor consistent. And now I find an image of myself in Rubarth's lyrics:

all the answers I’ve been hoping to find are written in the water.

The imagery of water evinces for me a casual flowing of truth amidst a consistent medium. Not that there are no answers, but they are obscured in the midst of something changing. In such a manner, a new finding of answers imperceptively began in me years ago. Not because what was once true ceased to be, but that its simple, ontological truthfulness imparted no perceptible impact on the way I lived.

Time looking at death acted as a gut check to the natural apathy that develops from perceiving our future as some destination we'll just eventually arrive at with happiness. I found my answers moving in the water. New and old things I had learned re-impressed themselves on me. As Wittgenstein said I found "new linguistic fields." Certain necessities balanced seemingly on thin air as the interrupting inevitability of death cut the cable reflecting Rubarth's poetry:

my whole life I’ve been working hard at changing, but now I’m just sinking in.

Sinking into the reality of cycles of life and death—some short and some long—restored my confidence in the necessity of the church calendar. These cyclical patterns demonstrated and exemplified the life of Christ and the church. Christ and His death stay in constant motion in this life.

The only thing that grounds "all the answers I’ve been hoping to find" is the cross of my Christ on the cross for my sins and the sins of my children. I am now "just sinking in" to the grace of Christ conquering the current cyclical cacophony of death and life.