Beautiful Journey

This journey has had a slower start than I would have liked, but I've noticed that the scenery is so much more lovely at a walk than at a gallop.  In a few days my baby daughter and I will be traveling to Salt Lake City, Utah.  She'll be spending the trip giving some baby love (and man does she give good baby love!) to loads of family members that are just dying to meet her.  I will be coming and going throughout our 9-day trip, spending much of my time there writing music.

What a privilege this is!  I am so excited!  Utah is a really magical place.  I think I would like to go on a car tour of the canyons and (weather permitting) even some of the mountain areas that can be reached by car.  There's a particular song I need to finish that I started when Shane and my heart moved back to Utah without me.  I languished over him and these lyrics were borne out of my pain:

My heart is breaking in Utah

Though my feet have never trodden there

And I wander Zion's lovely hills

In my mind I smell the mountain air

Sweet as a baby's breath

I smell the mountain air

The song has a really lovely, haunting melody and anyone that's ever heard it has loved it.  Shane and I have resolved our painful issues, married, lived in Utah for a number of years and have now moved away.  I'm hoping that a tour of Utah's lovely scenery will bring back some of those feelings - the sorrow and the hope - that kept me going all those years ago.

I also get the joy of watching my daughter fall in love with her cousins, aunts and uncles (and vice versa).  I always relish those first days together and first pictures.  Jill has renewed my belief in pre-mortal memories.  She lived with my parents for the first 13 months of her life and was naturally extremely close to them.  When she was 16 months old Nana and Papa visited us from Utah and met her for the first time.  To my utter delight, Jill met them as if she had known them for years and was overjoyed to meet them again!  She even refused to leave Nana's arms to come to Mommy - unheard of for her!  During that short visit the love and bond I witnessed between my daughter and her Nana and Papa was absolutely every bit as deep, cemented and real as her relationship with Grandma and Grandpa.  I swear this on everything I know: babies remember heaven!  We knew one another before we were born, because we were there, too.

This is going to be a wonderful trip.