WAIT
Before you read this post, please listen to the song before I explain where it came from. It is raw, it is unfinished, it is real, each track is one-take, so turn your headphones up (the track might be quiet) and hopefully you enjoy this humble offering.
Hey y'all, Hannah here again.
I previously wrote a post called "Why Music?" and if you have not read that yet, please do, it explains a bit more of my heart behind music and why I personally create it. Here's the link, http://www.allthingsnewsisters.com/blog/2016/4/27/why-music
Here on All Things New we've been diving into pain, loss, grief, depression, and really just the trials of life and we've done that through the mediums of video and text/print but today we are going to continue on that journey with a different medium, music. For those of you who read my earlier post about music, you know that music is my therapy, my sanity, a guide that helps me hold onto hope, and helps me experience life in a more fulfilling way. When I write music I pull from experiences others have been through, I've been through, or prayers that turn into songs, or occasionally experiences directly from my imagination. That's what music is, an expression, a movement, an outcry of people who usually have few other ways of being able to communicate effectively or openly. This song I'm sharing with y'all today is no exception, it comes from a place of experience and sympathy.
"Not This June" is an original that I (Hannah Porter) wrote in bits and pieces over the past few months as I have been dealing with new loss, old loss from over a decade ago, as well as watching grieving friends and family be hurt or frustrated with 'well-intentioned' but non-understanding comments and actions. In today's society, most everything is fast-paced and immediate and we expect everything around us to also be at the same pace. Oftentimes this bleeds into how we judge our own journey of healing as well as how we view others' paths of healing. We give them a handful of months to mourn and then we expect them to have moved on, because, after all, our lives have, so shouldn't theirs? Often this is unintentional but our own initial reaction rather than letting it be okay to not be 'there' (healed) yet. Think about it from the other perspective, maybe they just lost someone very close to or dear to them, or maybe they've been going through really hard situations, the cards of encouragement and meals were great for the first 3 weeks...then they started to taper off over the next 3 months and then stopped altogether. Their life just completely shifted, whatever happened to them means there is no "back to normal", it's only a different kind of life and 'normal' from here on out and they can't move forward from that in a year, let alone 3 months.
The title comes from the reality that June and July, in particular, are pretty rough months for loss and anniversaries for myself and also for my family. I hope this song can encourage you where you're at, whatever you've been through or are going through. If you're anything like me, sometimes music helps me feel emotions I couldn't or wouldn't allow myself to feel on my own. May this also encourage you to have your eyes open to those around you who may be dealing with hard situations and how you, I, and we can represent hope and more importantly, be the living proof of a loving God to them, right where they are at. This song is not the end, it represents one leg of the journey on dealing with pain, loss, hurt, etc. We cannot stay in this space, but we cannot and should not ignore it either. We cannot tell others how they should grieve or when they should be done, but we can be there, we can listen, we can help bring hope for the future.
Please listen to the song again with this post in mind.
-Hannah