Here is the second of the two paired singles - All Will Be Well. This song has been around since 2016, and was originally recorded with Greg Pauza on our "Brightbird" album in duo format. Since then, the song has continued to grow and take shape, first with Neat with a Twist's production "Coming Home," and then in this last year singing with the Gawler Family Band.

The lyrics of the song trace all the way back to the 14th century mystic/theologian Julian of Norwich - the author of the "Revelations of Divine Love" - the first surviving book in the English language written by a female author. Julian of Norwich was an anchoress, meaning she chose to spend most of her life in a small cell attached to the side of a church. She lived through a time of tremendous suffering and conflict in her own country, and her revelations, or "showings," of divine love only came at the end of long and nearly-fatal illness.

Despite the fire and brimstone, hell and damnation we may associate with Christianity in the Middle Ages, the divinity revealed to Julian was not an almighty, judging, wrathful ruler, but a loving God, queerly as much our Mother as Father. Further, this God does not damn us for our sins, but rather waits compassionately for us to grow and develop into our highest selves - love. She writes, "For I saw no wrath except on man's side, and He forgives that in us, for wrath is nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and to love." Rather than wrathful cosmic judge of righteousness, Julian's God is made of love - waiting patiently for us to come back to who we really are.

It is this steadfast belief in the goodness of creator and created that allowed Julian to write, despite the tremendous suffering of her times, that "all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."
What a gift. And yet, how true do those words ring so many centuries later, in the wake of a global pandemic, national political upheaval, sustained race-based brutalizations, and the growing techno-ecological devastation of our planet?

Julian's words remind us that the challenges we face come from an illusion of lovelessness. Lovelessness grown mad with desire for power, status, wealth, fame, resources, all the rest. In our disconnection from ourselves, each other, and the Earth, we grab blindly for what can fill the emptiness that only love can fill. And this lovelessness is not by accident - it is a product of the capitalist society that would have us endlessly work and consume to fill that space. Conveniently, this society also produces the illusions of superior and inferior races to placate the felt (but not spoken) internal poverty of whiteness run amuck. To borrow directly from Ibram X. Kendi, these conjoined twins of racism and capitalism were born together, and will one day die together.

And their death knell will be that of love. The deep, chosen love of bell hooks', "All About Love," the love of Hannah Arendt's Amo: volo ut sis - "I love you, I will that you be." Within the self suffused with love, there is no longer a need for endless acquisition and consumption, no need for wealth or fame, no need for being "better" than, no need to look outside the self for that which we can only give to ourselves - with the long, slow work of breathing love into all the places that have inhabited its absence.

Catherine Keller writes in her Cloud of the Impossible, "If the separateness of our lives is a sham, then the work of our civilization to produce us as discrete subjects vying to emulate, master, know, and consume external objects succeeds only through its systemic repression of that site of active relationship." The site of active relationship is the site of true, deep love; of ourselves, of each other, of the earth, of the cosmos we have been born into and will one day leave. And we will one day find that everything other than that has been a sham, designed to keep us place to keep this Great Society on the move.

And that is the only way I can understand how "all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." That we are invariably drawn back towards the love we were born out of, and will always be. That this love is ever-present, within us and around us, to offer to ourselves, each other, to this beautiful, magical world. That we must not despair at the bleakness within creation, for their is no evil other than a lack of love yet to be healed.

This is the prayer at the heart of the song, and all I have to give to you.