"The song rejoices in a dance of new life as it emerges from the darkness." (Daniel Gallie on "Coming Home" & Aubade)
Daniel Gallie listens for the melody that lies within the heart of every good poem, the voice in music that moves the heart, and the harmony of their union when they dance as one. With morning comes the gift of the day in which each moment opens itself to be mined fully, to gift its meaning, its pleasure, and its love as blessings for us to love in return all that has been received and all that has yet to be given. The dawn is metaphor for the coming spring, the entry into life, and the renewed commitment to make this world a welcoming one to those who wish to come home to the person they were always meant to be.
His song "Coming Home" features in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VII: Aubade. Here is how it came to life...
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Our lives are composed of cycles within cycles. Each morning, dawn parts with night and ushers in the light of a new day just as each year the grip of winter relaxes when the equinox beckons life to begin anew. These recurring cycles gift us with the opportunity of a new beginning, to renew our commitment to offer ourselves to the world, to imbue the day and the season with the warmth and light of our love in order to create that home which shelters and nurtures the collective we. The covenant of dawn and of spring calls us to joyous celebration and consecration of our sacred journey in this place and in this time, the one true blessing we have been given so that we, in turn, may give of ourselves to our one and only world in gratitude for all we have received. “Coming Home” rejoices in this dance of new life as it emerges from the darkness.
With dawn, we shake off the slumber of the night and literally reenter into conscious life. Dawn is also metaphor for new beginnings, the leaving behind of false goals, blind alleys, and empty values once thought so essential to our fulfilment. Dawn dispels the doubt of the night and lights our journey toward our authentic self to become the true one we always were. Dawn is the chance to shed the skin of yesterday and to “Come Home” to that “you” who is the gift of and to the world.
Aubade can be thought of as an aspect of Janus, the Roman god of the doorway, which is to say, transitions. His doubled face simultaneously embodies for us the movement of leaving behind our past and entering into our future. The lyrical nature of “Coming Home” sings the joy of emergent life, the life that we were always meant to live. It sings of discovery and of recognition. There is a playfulness between the clarinet and the oboe that celebrates the joy we feel when returning to the comforting shelter that is ourself. But also within the music is an aching wistfulness that reminds us of the many and necessary sacrifices that were made on our journey. Aubade represents that sacred path that both invites and challenges us to “Come Home” to the truth that we are.
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Daniel Gallie’s “Coming Home”, along with twenty other pieces by contributors and three columns by the Half Mystic team, are compiled in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VII: Aubade, a resurrection out of dusk, a lovesong to the living. When the aubade issue speaks of hope, it does so with every knowledge of death as an old friend. When it speaks of hope it means baptism, reawakening, beginning. It means something sober yet mellifluous still, with a steady faith in how sunrise inevitably proves despair wrong. Issue VII knows it is impossible to sing & be afraid at the same time—& it knows too that the devil cannot stand mockery. It is available for preorder now.