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We like to hide. That’s the truth. We released an album into the world, it got momentum and then we got shy. Danny and I released our most beloved album of music to date in the Fall of 2021. The recording of Seeing Stars (the album) and the filming of Seeing Stars (the video)were our ways of living out Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ words, "Grief must be witnessed to be healed."
Deer and Coyote started out as two long haired hippies making music and love since 2011. As a celebration of our 10th Wedding Anniversary, we wanted to gift you these original songs. Inspired by our true love story, our thirst for adventure, and our own personal grief. Danny and I have been on a decade long journey with infertility and we have created this vulnerable masterpiece to share our souls with you, dear listener.
At the start of 2020, all the years of adventuring, home-building, and waiting finally caught up to me. With all these sudden pandemic cancelations I was forced to face the distracted and muddy years of grief. Like the tracker that it is, music took the opportunity to hunt me down and there was nowhere to hide. For months I started waking up at all hours of the night with songs. I kept having a reoccurring dream that I had shaved off my hair and this vision of a pilgrimage. I looked up Webster’s definition of a pilgrimage and read that it was “A journey to a sacred place”. I knew I found myself on that journey. So I surrendered to that strange dream. I shaved 10 years of hair growth, not knowing it would be the key in my grief journey.
Infertility feels like this constant linear grief, instead of a grief that moves outward from a point in history, like the ever-expanding universe. My grief instead was moving in reverse from death towards life. The moment I shaved my head became my moment in history that I could move away from. And after trying for almost a decade to put into words the obscure and often silent grief of infertility, I was woken up one night with the lyrics to the song ‘Seeing Stars’.
That moment always brings me back to treasured words from Jerry Sittser that say, “The quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing after the setting sun, but to head east, plunging into the darkness until one comes to the sunrise.” I channelled my journey into an album of songs for my own catharsis. A collection of pieces from the last 20 years, forged in the fires of grief and hope to become this tender offering.
May you feel the beautiful weight of time invested.
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Photography by the amazing Kenta Kikuchi.
© ℗ Deer and Coyote All Rights Reserved 2021