Cotton Candy Sky
I wrote “Cotton Candy Sky” during a songwriting challenge I did last January. I remember what I felt at the time, but I couldn’t remember the specific things that were in my head as I was writing it, so today, I looked up the date I wrote it (January 11th), and tried to get a handle on what was happening in the news cycle that week.
On January 10th, 2025, the Palisades fires were raging in California, fueled by the Santa Ana winds, and Donald Trump just received a lenient sentence regarding his 34 felonies. This decision came just ten days before he was sworn in for his second term.
Photo by Matt Crummy (in Switzerland!)
Disempowerment
Donald Trump, as a character, tends to elicit a feeling of disempowerment inside of me. Off the top of my head, I can identify three reasons for this: 1) he reminds me of bullies and people of low integrity I’ve known personally, 2) for the life of me, I have yet to find an actually compelling argument for him from his supporters, but what I see instead reads to me like hypnotic devotion that’s beyond reason, and 3) it is so hard to see scandal after scandal, day after day, year after year — any one of which would have been a death sentence for the career of any other US politician — yet he continues on, unscathed, often claiming that he’s the victim.
Normally, I would be more vague about political matters, but I happened to release this song on a week where it feels like we’ve hit new lows in his administration: the government is shut down, people who rely on SNAP benefits are left scrambling as they’ll have to go without, and Trump destroyed a whole wing of the White House to build a ballroom that no one asked for (thanks to funding from his ultra-rich friends). Couple that with the fact that Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica this week with one of the strongest landfalls ever in the Atlantic basin. Once again, I feel powerless to hold the powerful in check in my own country, and I definitely feel powerless against the forces of nature.
I understand that there are people who disagree with me about Trump. But whether or not you align with my perspective of him, I imagine you can relate to the feeling itself: disempowerment. Feeling like you’re too small to affect change, no matter how hard you try; like the powers that be are simply too big and too powerful.
“Oh this morning I saw with my eye a cotton candy sky, conquering the night. “It’s a miracle,” said I, but beauty doesn’t lie. Today it testifies.””
That sunrise, though…
But on January 11, 2025, I dropped our youngest son off at school, and as I was driving east to get home, I saw a gorgeous sunrise. It was the kind of beauty that forces the thoughts swirling around in your head come to a screeching halt. As I sat down to write this post today, I may not have remembered the exact things that filled me with such a sense of disempowerment back in January, but I vividly remember how that sunrise made me feel. It spoke a sermon to my soul.
Yes, I live in a country where Donald Trump is once again the president. And yes, I live on a planet that has natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes (and tornados and earthquakes and floods and volcanic eruptions and…), but I also live on a planet that has an atmosphere that enables life to exist in the first place. Not only that, but this planet’s atmosphere bends lightwaves from the sun… doing that whole thing that scientists call Rayleigh scattering, which gives us a blue sky most of the time, but when the sun is low on the horizon, we see a broader spectrum of colors. I can't give you a TED talk on the physics of lightwaves (much as I wish I could), but I can do my best to translate the beauty of these lightwaves into sound waves and words… and you can listen to that attempt now, everywhere you stream music. ;-)
Hope has a good track record
Whenever a large natural disaster is in the news (so, like every other week), I think about all that is lost. I gasped as I watched aerial footage of Jamaica earlier this morning, seeing building after building torn apart and stripped down to the studs. I thought about those houses, the families who live there. Their pets, their treasured photo albums, their possessions of sentimental value. To think of one family losing everything like this is a lot to take in, but to think of entire communities… it’s hard to fathom. This is exactly how I felt in early January as I saw reports from California. Here I am in Iowa, untouched by these particular disasters; I wish I could keep them from happening.
“We’ve been beaten down by these winds before
We have heard them rush and roar
And when loss and push us overboard
We know hope can push through even more”
Photo by Matt Crummy
But even if humanity manages to walk ourselves back from the edge of the nine climate tipping points, we’ll still live on a planet that has natural disasters. The silver lining here is that the human race has endured many devastations, and yet, we have always continued on. The Palisades are no longer on fire, and as I’m writing this, Hurricane Melissa is losing steam and is expected to hit Bermuda at Category 1 or 2 intensity. Storms only last for a little while, and then people either rebuild or find a new place to live and thrive.
The same is true for human inflicted disasters, dictators, and wannabe dictators alike. As Ghandi puts it: “Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible, But in the end, they always fall. Always.” He wrote this in his autobiography in 1929, and of course there was an even worse murderous tyrant who rose — and fell! — after that.
“Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”
None of these things should be taken as an excuse to do nothing in the face of injustice, or to live in denial. It’s just helpful to remember that hope has a good track record. Life will go on, because so far, it always has. And there is goodness to come — even if it’s something as small as a beautiful sunrise with a cotton candy sky.
