Carried Away

The Winged Horse and The Sword

When I was writing the song Carried Away I was thinking about all the distractions that keep us from doing our soul’s work.

Getting wrapped up in things and people and habits and even thought patterns and limiting beliefs that aren’t what we are here for. Getting distracted instead of doing the important work of knowing and understanding ourselves and loving ourselves and living from that place.

I was also thinking about how my dad used to tell us stories about Pegasus when my sisters and I were little. He had dyslexia and when he was tired even short books could be challenging so he would tell elaborate tales in the style of oral traditions, his limitation an opportunity to create magic at our bedtime.

So, many years after his death, after the initial shock and grieving and time passing changing the devastation to hurt to loss, the horse with wings and sad eyes came to me in a dream and promised to carry me away from the pain and grief and suffering I was experiencing again in my waking life. But the only way to the other side is through. It’s so tempting to dwell in the distractions. Before I recorded this song, I cut the the third verse where the horse would sing,

“I can fly you to a tunnel far away. It’s the darkest one , I know you want to stay. Anything that’s worth it is not easy to do, if you want it all then the only way is through”.

Later I read in Peter Levine’s “Waking the Tiger : Healing Trauma” that the winged horse symbolizes transformation through embodiment. The horse and the sword together are symbols for the resources traumatized people discover in the process of vanquishing their own Medusas. I was singing about wanting to get carried away but the song was my horse and the singing my sword. Transformation through embodiment.

So much of the album “a different kind of progress” was about creating new myths and imagining, about my transformation and healing through song, through love. The progress I don’t think we talk about or acknowledge or celebrate enough. The album was a fantastical imagining of what it might feel like to be the hero of my own life.