Description

SONG TITLE

MY SMILE WILL ALWAYS BE BRIGHTER THAN YOUR LAWN

CATEGORY
Nature / Perspective / Human Reflection

PRIMARY EMOTION
Wonder

ALSO FITS
Curiosity / Humour / Freedom / Nature / Observation / Imagination / Resilience / Perspective

WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT

This song came from a strange combination of circumstances.
I was incarcerated when I wrote it, but my mind was somewhere completely different.
I remember looking through what I believe was a National Geographic book. What caught me first were the pictures. They were vivid, bright and colourful. There were images of the Earth, eagles, trees, landscapes and the natural world. I started reading some of the material that went along with them, and somewhere between the pictures and the words, my imagination started moving.
That is where this song came from.
When you read the lyrics, they move around quite a bit. One moment I am thinking about how enormous the world is. Then I am thinking about hunger, curiosity, emotions and the limitations of how much one person can actually experience. Then suddenly I am talking about trees, fruit, running, eagles, shoes and tight laces.
And somehow it all ends up at one of the strangest titles I have ever given a song:
“My smile will always be brighter than your Lawn.”
I still think that is funny.

THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG

There is an interesting contradiction behind this song that I appreciate even more when I look back at it.
Physically, I was incarcerated.
But I was looking at photographs of a world that seemed enormous.
That contrast gave my imagination somewhere to go.
I could look at an eagle flying high in the sky and think about what that eagle was actually doing. It might look beautiful to us, but the eagle is not necessarily flying around just to give somebody a beautiful photograph. It is searching. It is surviving.
I could look at green landscapes and think about the Earth healing and growing.
I could look at trees and think about everything they provide: shelter, shade and fruit.
Those pictures became more than pictures.
They started thoughts.
That is one reason the lyrics jump between nature and what is happening inside my own head. I wasn’t trying to write a scientific description of nature. I was allowing one thought to lead into another.
The outside world was coming to me through pages.
My imagination did the travelling.

WHY I WROTE THIS SONG

I wrote it because those photographs triggered something in me.
I wanted to capture that feeling of seeing more of the world than I could physically explore at that moment.
There is a line near the beginning that probably says it better than anything else:
“My eyes just want to see more than I can explore”
That was the feeling.
There is always something else to see. Something else to understand. Something else that catches your attention and makes you wonder about it.
The song became a mixture of those observations and whatever else was moving through my mind at the time.
I enjoyed writing this one because I wasn’t trapping myself inside one subject.
I let my mind wander.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO ME

There is something I like about the fact that this song came from incarceration but doesn’t stay there.
I could have written only about the walls around me.
Instead, I ended up writing about the Earth.
Trees.
Eagles.
Energy.
Emotion.
Beautiful places.
Survival.
And even making sure my shoes were tied tightly enough that I wouldn’t trip.
That tells me something about imagination.
Your physical surroundings can limit where your body goes.
They don’t necessarily decide where your mind goes.

WHY THIS SONG FITS MOITA

This song fits MOITA because it shows another side of how I write.
Not every song needs to begin with tragedy, anger or some major event.
Sometimes something as simple as opening a book and seeing a beautiful photograph can start the whole process.
One image creates a thought.
That thought creates another.
Before long, there is a song where an eagle can lead to survival, green can lead to healing, shoes can lead to preparation, and a lawn can somehow become the measuring stick for a smile.
That is creativity to me.
You don’t always have to know where the road is going before you start walking down it.

READ THIS FIRST

Don’t try too hard to make this song behave.
I didn’t.
There are serious thoughts inside it, especially about emotion, nature, survival and wanting to experience more of life.
But there is also playfulness.
And then there is that title.
“My Smile Will Always Be Brighter Than Your Lawn” sounds almost ridiculous when you first hear it.
That is part of why I like it.
A lawn can be green, healthy, bright and perfectly maintained.
Fine.
I still get the last word.
My smile is brighter.

 

FULL LYRICS

MY SMILE WILL ALWAYS BE BRIGHTER THEN YOUR LAWN

The country is vast in a way I’ve never seen it before
Just like hunger just wants me to take more than I can store
And my eyes just want to see more than I can explore
My brain says, but my pace is too slow
To follow my feelings, they are only waves of energy
That are brought by fear, passion, emotion, and other aspects in life

The green express the healing of the Earth
The trees give shelter and shade, but some bare fruit and brighten our days
I’m not want to stand in your way. Do what you need to do. I will not stop you
if you can run your prepared for everything under the sun
Because when Eagles fly high in the sky, it’s more than just for pleasure. It’s a way to search and survive.
Part of me feels I could be right for every breath. This is just my first step.
I don’t have a reason or maybe I just don’t want to know
If I should stand or just let it go
Either way, my smile will always be brighter than your Lawn

 

The way of the world and the vision that’s In my mind
Tells a story that captures every moment in time
My shoes are meant to fit in a way not to slip
Tight laces embrace them so I don’t trip
My brain says, but my pace is too slow
To fall my feelings, they are the only waves of energy
That are brought by fear, passion, emotions, and other aspects in life

 

The green express the healing of the Earth
The trees give shelter and shade, but some bare fruit and brighten our days
I’m not want to stand in your way. Do what you need to do. I will not stop you
if you can run your prepared for everything under the sun
Because when Eagles fly high in the sky, it’s more than just for pleasure. It’s a way to search and survive.
Part of me feels I could be right for every breath. This is just my first step.
I don’t have a reason or maybe I just don’t want to know
If I should stand or just let it go
Either way, my smile will always be brighter than your Lawn

 

it’s always beautiful to be in a beautiful place
No worries at all those feelings are meant to be gone and replaced
My brain says, but my pace is too slow
To fall my feelings, they are the only waves of energy
That are brought by fear, passion, emotions, and other aspects in life
The green express the healing of the Earth
The trees give shelter and shade, but some bare fruit and brighten our days
I’m not want to stand in your way. Do what you need to do. I will not stop you
if you can run your prepared for everything under the sun
Because when Eagles fly high in the sky, it’s more than just for pleasure. It’s a way to search and survive.
Part of me feels I could be right for every breath. This is just my first step.
I don’t have a reason or maybe I just don’t want to know
If I should stand or just let it go
Either way, my smile will always be brighter than your Lawn

 

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 1

“The country is vast in a way I’ve never seen it before”
This is where the whole journey starts for me.
I was incarcerated when I wrote this song. I believe I was looking through a National Geographic book, and what really caught me were the photographs. They were bright, colourful and full of places, animals and landscapes that were completely different from what was physically around me.
When I wrote that the country was vast in a way I had never seen before, I wasn’t pretending I was standing there looking across some enormous landscape. I was seeing it through photographs and reading about what was out there.
That was enough to get my mind moving.
There is something interesting about a photograph. You can hold an entire landscape in your hands. The photograph itself might only take up part of a page, but what you’re looking at could stretch farther than you could walk in a day.
That difference fascinated me.
I was sitting in one place looking at a world that seemed almost endless.
“Just like hunger just wants me to take more than I can store”
The more I looked, the more I wanted to see.
That’s where hunger came into it.
I wasn’t talking about being hungry for food. I was talking about that feeling you get when something catches your curiosity and suddenly what you have isn’t enough.
You want the next picture.
Then the next one.
You read something interesting and that creates another question.
You learn one thing and discover five more things you don’t know.
There is only so much a person can take in at once, but curiosity doesn’t seem to care about storage capacity. It keeps asking for more.
I think that’s one of the best things about curiosity.
You can satisfy one question and somehow become even more curious than you were before.
“And my eyes just want to see more than I can explore”
This line probably gets closest to what I was feeling when those pictures caught my attention.
The world is too big for one person to see everything.
Even if you spent your entire life travelling, there would still be places you missed. There would still be animals you never saw, people you never met, landscapes you never stood inside and things you never learned.
At the time I wrote this, that difference was even greater for me because I was incarcerated.
My eyes could look at those photographs.
My imagination could go into them.
But physically, I wasn’t going anywhere.
I don’t want to turn that into something more deliberate than it was when I wrote it. I wasn’t sitting there thinking I was creating some great metaphor about freedom.
I was looking at pictures and writing what they made me think about.
But years later, when I read the line again, I can see the contrast.
My surroundings were limited.
My curiosity wasn’t.
“My brain says, but my pace is too slow”
My mind had already gone ahead of me.
That’s something I recognize in myself.
One thought can lead to another pretty quickly. I can be thinking about a landscape and suddenly I’m thinking about an eagle. Then I’m thinking about why the eagle is flying. Then survival enters the picture. Then emotions. Then shoes. Somehow eventually we end up arguing about whose lawn is brighter.
That is pretty much this song.
My brain was moving faster than I could physically follow it.
There is also something bigger in that line that I think most people can understand.
Our minds can imagine things much faster than we can actually accomplish them.
You can imagine travelling somewhere in seconds.
Actually getting there might take years.
You can imagine changing your life tonight.
Actually changing it might take months.
You can have ten ideas before you’ve finished the first one.
The brain doesn’t always respect the speed limit of the rest of our lives.
“To follow my feelings, they are only waves of energy”
Now the journey moves from what I’m seeing into what I’m feeling.
I described feelings as waves of energy because that’s how they seemed to me.
You can’t hold fear in your hand.
You can’t put passion on a table.
You can’t physically grab an emotion and examine it.
But you certainly know when one moves through you.
Feelings can change the way we think, the way we react and sometimes even the way we see the exact same situation.
One day something can make us laugh.
Another day the same thing can irritate us.
The thing didn’t necessarily change.
We did.
“That are brought by fear, passion, emotion, and other aspects in life”
I wasn’t trying to make a complete list of every human emotion.
I was thinking about the different things that move through us and affect the way we experience life.
Fear can stop us.
Passion can push us.
Emotion can make something ordinary suddenly matter.
Then there are all the other things life throws at us that don’t fit neatly into one word.
That’s why I left it open with “other aspects in life.”
There are too many.
At this point in the song, I’ve already travelled quite a distance without physically moving anywhere.
I started with the size of the country.
Then hunger became curiosity.
My eyes wanted more than I could explore.
My brain moved faster than my pace.
Then the journey moved inside me and into emotion.
Now the song turns back toward the photographs and one of the strongest things I was seeing in them.
Green.
“The green express the healing of the Earth”
I like this line because it came from something very simple.
Colour.
I was looking at beautiful natural images and seeing all that green. Trees, plants, landscapes, life.
To me, green looked like the Earth healing.
I wasn’t trying to make a scientific statement. I wasn’t saying that every green place is healthy or that everything natural is automatically fine.
I was describing what the colour made me feel.
Green looked alive.
It looked like growth.
It looked like something had the ability to come back.
That idea of healing fit naturally with what I was seeing.
“The trees give shelter and shade, but some bare fruit and brighten our days”
Once I noticed the green, I started thinking about what was creating so much of it.
Trees are so common that we can stop noticing them.
You drive past them.
Walk underneath them.
Park beside them.
Sit in their shade.
Sometimes eat the fruit that comes from them.
Yet most of the time we don’t stop and think much about the tree itself.
In those photographs, I was stopping long enough to notice.
A tree can be beautiful without doing anything else for us.
But it does plenty.
It can provide shade.
It can provide shelter.
Some trees provide fruit.
Animals use them.
People use them.
And sometimes they simply make a place feel better because they’re there.
That is what I meant by brightening our days.
Not everything valuable has to make a big announcement about what it is doing.
Sometimes it just stands there.
“I’m not want to stand in your way. Do what you need to do. I will not stop you”
Now the lyric changes direction.
That’s something this song does a lot.
It doesn’t ask permission before moving into another thought.
For me, this line is about letting something move.
I’m not here to block you.
Do what you need to do.
Go where you need to go.
There is freedom in that thought, and looking back at it now, I can’t completely ignore the fact that I wrote those words while incarcerated.
Again, I don’t want to pretend I planned that connection.
I didn’t.
But sometimes you write something in the moment and understand another side of it years later.
There I was with limited physical freedom, writing words that basically say I’m not going to stand in your way.
I find that interesting now.
“if you can run your prepared for everything under the sun”
Movement continues.
Running means you’re able to go.
But going somewhere also means being prepared for what might be waiting.
“Everything under the sun” makes the world sound enormous again.
We started with the country being vast, and now we’re underneath the sun with everything that might come with it.
The song keeps opening outward.
Then we reach one of the images that stayed strongest for me.
The eagle.
“Because when Eagles fly high in the sky, it’s more than just for pleasure. It’s a way to search and survive.”
When we see an eagle flying high in the sky, we see beauty.
We might stop and watch it.
Somebody might photograph it.
We admire the wings, the height and the way it moves through the air.
But the eagle isn’t necessarily doing any of that for our enjoyment.
It has its own life going on.
It may be searching.
It may be looking for food.
It is surviving.
That thought interested me because the exact same moment can look completely different depending on who is experiencing it.
To us, it’s a beautiful eagle flying through a beautiful sky.
To the eagle, it’s Tuesday.
It has things to do.
I like that because it takes the photograph beyond being just a pretty picture.
It made me wonder what was actually happening inside the picture.
That is where curiosity starts becoming something more.
Instead of only saying, “That’s beautiful,” you start asking why.
Why does it fly that high?
What can it see?
What is it searching for?
Where is it going?
Suddenly the picture has become a doorway.
And that’s exactly what those pictures were doing for me when I wrote this song.

 

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 2

“Part of me feels I could be right for every breath. This is just my first step.”
After the eagle, the song comes back to me.
That happens throughout this song. I look outward at the world, then something I see turns me back toward myself.
The words “every breath” make this feel personal. Breathing is something we normally don’t think about until something makes us notice it. Most of the time it just happens.
Then I say, “This is just my first step.”
I like that because the song has already been full of movement.
My eyes want to explore.
My pace is too slow.
I talk about running.
The eagle is flying.
Now I’m taking a first step.
I wasn’t physically travelling through those landscapes, but the song certainly was.
A first step also doesn’t require knowing where the last step will be.
That’s important.
Sometimes people wait because they want to understand the entire journey before beginning it. Creativity doesn’t always work that way. Life doesn’t either.
Sometimes you take the first step because that’s the only one available.
Then you see what the second one looks like when you get there.
“I don’t have a reason or maybe I just don’t want to know”
I like the uncertainty in this line.
There are times when I want answers.
There are other times when I don’t need to tear everything apart trying to find one.
Maybe there is a reason.
Maybe I don’t know it.
Maybe I don’t want to know it.
I think we can sometimes spend too much time trying to explain every feeling we have.
Why did that bother me?
Why did that make me happy?
Why am I thinking about this?
Why did that picture stay in my mind?
Sometimes there is an answer.
Sometimes there isn’t an obvious one.
And sometimes the honest answer is that I just don’t know.
“If I should stand or just let it go”
Now I have a choice.
Stand.
Or let it go.
Those are simple words, but they describe something we deal with constantly.
When do you hold your position?
When do you stop fighting something?
When do you stay?
When do you move?
When do you keep thinking about something, and when do you finally say that’s enough?
The song doesn’t answer the question for me.
I didn’t write, “Here is what you should do.”
I left myself between the two choices.
Then I did something that still makes me laugh.
“Either way, my smile will always be brighter than your Lawn”
There it is.
The title.
After talking about the size of the world, curiosity, emotions, healing, trees, movement, survival and uncertainty, I suddenly decide that my smile is competing with somebody’s lawn.
I thought that was funny when I wrote it.
I still think it’s funny.
That’s part of me too.
I can be thinking seriously about something and still have some strange line come into my head that twists everything around.
A smile and a lawn don’t belong in the same competition.
That’s exactly why the line works for me.
How green is your lawn?
How bright is my smile?
Who is judging this contest?
Apparently I am, because I’ve already declared myself the winner.
There could be different ways somebody interprets that line. They might see optimism in it. They might see confidence. They might connect the lawn back to all the green imagery earlier in the song.
Those interpretations are fair.
But I don’t want to pretend I sat there calculating all of that before writing it.
Sometimes something just sounds funny and interesting.
This was one of those lines.
And once I had it, I wasn’t giving it back.
“The way of the world and the vision that’s In my mind
Tells a story that captures every moment in time”
Now the song starts another movement.
There is the world outside me.
Then there is the world inside my mind.
Those two things meet throughout this entire song.
I was looking at photographs of real places and real animals, but what happened after I looked at them belonged to my imagination.
That’s what pictures can do.
A camera captures a moment.
The person looking at the photograph can take that moment somewhere completely different.
I might wonder what happened five minutes before the photograph.
I might wonder what happened five minutes afterward.
I might imagine standing there.
I might notice something the photographer wasn’t even thinking about when the picture was taken.
The photograph stays still.
The mind doesn’t.
That is what was happening to me.
Those pictures were giving my mind material to work with.
“My shoes are meant to fit in a way not to slip”
Now we get to the shoes.
I have to laugh because this is exactly the kind of turn this song takes.
We have just been talking about the way of the world and capturing moments in time.
Then I’m checking whether my shoes fit.
But maybe that’s what keeps the song human.
Life isn’t one long philosophical discussion.
You can be thinking about the meaning of existence and still have to make sure you don’t fall down the stairs.
Shoes are practical.
If you’re going to move, they need to fit.
If they don’t, you’re going to have a problem.
“Tight laces embrace them so I don’t trip”
Now I’m making sure the shoes stay where they’re supposed to.
There is something almost funny about using the word “embrace” for shoelaces.
They’re holding the shoes around my feet.
They’re keeping things together.
And the purpose couldn’t be more ordinary.
Don’t trip.
Earlier I said, “This is just my first step.”
Now I’m making sure I’m prepared to take it.
I don’t know whether I consciously connected those ideas when I originally wrote them. I probably didn’t sit there planning it that carefully.
But the connection exists.
Steps.
Running.
Pace.
Shoes.
Movement keeps appearing.
Maybe that’s why these strange little lines belong more than they first appear to.
“My brain says, but my pace is too slow”
Here comes that thought again.
The brain is still ahead.
The pace is still behind.
Nothing has changed there.
But we’ve travelled farther through the song now, so the line carries more with it.
We’ve already seen how quickly my mind can move.
Country.
Hunger.
Exploration.
Emotion.
Green.
Trees.
Running.
Eagles.
Survival.
Questions.
A lawn.
The world.
Now shoes.
My pace never had a chance.
“To fall my feelings, they are the only waves of energy
That are brought by fear, passion, emotions, and other aspects in life”
The wording changes slightly from the first time, but I’m returning to the same basic thought.
Feelings move through us.
Fear can change our direction.
Passion can make us move faster.
Emotion can make us stop completely.
There are countless other things in life that affect us along the way.
The important part here isn’t trying to turn my words into a scientific theory about emotions.
That’s not what I was doing.
I was trying to describe something invisible that still has power.
You can’t see somebody’s passion floating through the air.
You see what it makes them do.
You can’t see fear itself.
You see the reaction.
The energy shows itself through us.
Then the song returns to the chorus.
“The green express the healing of the Earth
The trees give shelter and shade, but some bare fruit and brighten our days”
We already know what the green and the trees meant when they first appeared, so I don’t need to drag the reader through the same explanation again.
But the journey has changed slightly.
The first time we reached these words, they came directly out of my thoughts about feelings.
This time we’ve travelled through uncertainty, humour, the world inside my mind, my shoes and the idea of trying not to trip.
Coming back to the green almost feels like returning to the photographs after my mind wandered away from them.
That’s how I remember this song being created.
Look at something.
Think.
Wander.
Come back.
Notice something else.
Wander again.
The photographs gave me a starting point, but they never told my mind where it had to go.
“I’m not want to stand in your way. Do what you need to do. I will not stop you
if you can run your prepared for everything under the sun”
These words return too, and I don’t hear a completely different message in them.
There is still movement.
There is still permission to move.
There is still preparation.
But now the shoes have entered the song.
That makes “if you can run” feel almost connected to something that came earlier.
If you’re going to run, it probably helps to have those laces tied.
I didn’t write this song as a carefully engineered puzzle where every line was secretly connected to every other line.
I was letting my thoughts move naturally.
Sometimes natural thoughts create connections without asking us first.
“Because when Eagles fly high in the sky, it’s more than just for pleasure. It’s a way to search and survive.”
When the eagle returns, I don’t need to explain survival again.
What interests me now is that the eagle has become something familiar.
The first time it appeared, we stopped and looked at it.
Now we recognize it.
That’s what a returning image can do in a song.
The eagle almost becomes a marker telling us where we are.
We know this part of the landscape.
We have been here before.
But we aren’t exactly the same listener anymore because we’ve travelled through another part of the song before coming back.
The eagle is still flying.
It is still searching.
It is still surviving.
And my mind is still following it.

 

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 3

“Part of me feels I could be right for every breath. This is just my first step.”
When this line returns, the first step doesn’t feel quite as new anymore.
We’ve already travelled through another part of the song.
We’ve looked at the world inside my mind.
We’ve made sure my shoes fit.
We’ve tied the laces.
We’ve tried not to trip.
Then we’ve come back through the green, the trees and the eagle.
That’s what makes a repeated lyric interesting when the song has moved between appearances. The words haven’t changed, but we’ve picked up more along the way.
I still don’t want to pretend there was some carefully planned connection between every one of these lines when I wrote them. There wasn’t.
But now there is something almost funny about saying “This is just my first step” after spending time talking about shoes and laces.
Maybe the first step is a little safer this time.
“I don’t have a reason or maybe I just don’t want to know
If I should stand or just let it go”
The uncertainty returns.
I still haven’t answered it.
I think that’s appropriate.
If I had suddenly changed these words and provided some perfect answer the second time around, it would change the personality of the song.
Sometimes we don’t resolve something just because we’ve had more time to think about it.
You can come back to the same question and still say, I don’t know.
There is honesty in that.
I have never believed that every song has to solve the problem it raises.
Sometimes a song can simply recognize that the question exists.
“Either way, my smile will always be brighter than your Lawn”
And once again, whether I stand there or let it go, apparently the lawn doesn’t stand a chance.
The line makes me smile because it refuses to become serious just because the thoughts around it are serious.
I like humour that arrives that way.
It doesn’t need an announcement.
It doesn’t need somebody explaining that this is the funny part.
It just appears.
The title also keeps the song from becoming too heavy.
I was incarcerated when I wrote this, but this isn’t a song where I wanted every word to carry the weight of incarceration.
That wasn’t what inspired it.
The inspiration was colourful.
It was visual.
It was curious.
And at times it was playful.
I think the title protects that part of the song.
“it’s always beautiful to be in a beautiful place”
Now we reach a new part of the journey.
The line sounds almost too obvious.
Of course it’s beautiful to be in a beautiful place.
But I think that’s why I like it.
Not everything has to be complicated.
There are places where you can look around and simply enjoy where you are.
A forest.
A mountain.
A river.
An open landscape.
Somewhere with a huge sky.
You don’t always have to explain why it feels good.
Sometimes the place does the work.
There is another side to this line that I notice because of where I was when I wrote it.
I wasn’t actually in those beautiful places.
I was seeing them through photographs.
That matters.
A picture isn’t the same as being there. I couldn’t feel the wind. I couldn’t hear what was happening outside the frame. I couldn’t walk into the landscape.
But I could still react to it.
The image could still create a feeling.
That says something about the power of a good photograph.
Somebody can stand in one part of the world, capture one moment, and later another person somewhere completely different can look at it and be affected by it.
That is exactly what happened to me.
“No worries at all those feelings are meant to be gone and replaced”
This line moves from the beauty of the place into what that beauty can do to the mind.
There are times when a change of surroundings can change the way we feel.
That doesn’t mean problems magically disappear.
I don’t want to make that claim.
If you are dealing with something difficult, looking at a mountain doesn’t automatically solve it.
But something doesn’t have to solve everything before it has value.
A peaceful place can give you a moment.
A photograph can give you a moment.
Music can give you a moment.
Reading can give you a moment.
Sometimes a moment is enough to interrupt whatever has been running through your head.
I think that is closer to what happened with me.
Those photographs didn’t change the fact that I was incarcerated.
They didn’t open the door.
They didn’t change my circumstances.
They changed what had my attention.
For a while, I wasn’t only looking at what was around me.
I was thinking about what was out there.
“My brain says, but my pace is too slow”
Now this line comes back for the final movement.
By this point, it has almost become one of the foundations of the song.
My mind keeps moving faster than I can follow.
The first time I said it, we were just beginning the journey.
Now we’ve seen what my brain actually does when I let it wander.
It goes everywhere.
Maybe that’s why I enjoy writing.
I don’t have to physically follow every thought for the thought to become useful.
I can see an eagle in a photograph and follow it in my mind.
I can see a green landscape and start thinking about healing.
I can think about movement and suddenly end up looking down at my shoes.
I can be thinking about uncertainty and somehow invent a competition between my smile and somebody’s lawn.
That wandering is part of creativity for me.
“To fall my feelings, they are the only waves of energy
That are brought by fear, passion, emotions, and other aspects in life”
The feelings return one last time.
They have been moving underneath the whole song.
Fear.
Passion.
Emotion.
Whatever else life brings with it.
Maybe that is why the song can move so quickly from one subject to another without feeling strange to me.
Thought doesn’t always move in straight lines.
Emotion certainly doesn’t.
Something you see can remind you of something completely different.
That thought creates another thought.
Before long, you’ve travelled a long way from where you started.
Then something brings you back.
For me, the photographs kept doing that.
And the song returns one last time to the images that helped begin everything.
“The green express the healing of the Earth”
We are back at the green.
By now, I don’t need to explain what green meant to me all over again.
We’ve already stood there.
We’ve already looked at it.
What matters is that this is where the song chooses to return near the end.
After all the wandering, nature is still there.
The image that helped open the journey becomes part of what closes it.
“The trees give shelter and shade, but some bare fruit and brighten our days”
The trees are still standing there too.
I like that.
The song has moved all over the place, but the trees haven’t needed to go anywhere.
They don’t chase us through the song.
We return to them.
There is something peaceful about that.
The tree doesn’t care how complicated my thoughts became.
It is still a tree.
Still providing shade.
Still providing shelter.
Some still giving fruit.
Still adding something to the landscape.
Sometimes the ordinary things are the most dependable things in the picture.
“I’m not want to stand in your way. Do what you need to do. I will not stop you
if you can run your prepared for everything under the sun”
One last time, the song opens the road.
Go.
Move.
Do what you need to do.
Be prepared.
There is a lot underneath that sun.
I find these words especially interesting now because I know exactly where I was when I wrote them.
I was incarcerated, yet so much of the language in this song is about movement.
Running.
Exploring.
Flying.
Steps.
Pace.
Beautiful places.
I don’t think I consciously sat there and said, I’m going to write a song about movement because I can’t move freely.
That would be rewriting the story.
But I can notice it now.
Maybe the mind naturally reaches toward things it doesn’t have.
Maybe those photographs simply put movement in front of me.
Maybe both were happening.
I don’t need to force an answer.
The words are there.
The circumstances are there.
The reader can see the connection too.
“Because when Eagles fly high in the sky, it’s more than just for pleasure. It’s a way to search and survive.”
The eagle makes its final appearance.
By now, I don’t just see the beautiful bird from the photograph.
I see what originally made me think about it.
Perspective.
From where I’m sitting, the eagle looks free.
From the eagle’s perspective, it is simply living.
Searching.
Surviving.
That difference matters.
We can look at somebody or something from the outside and think we understand what we’re seeing.
Often we only understand our view of it.
The eagle never asked to become my symbol for anything.
It was just being an eagle.
I was the one looking at it and thinking.
Maybe that is one of the quiet lessons inside this whole song.
The world gives us things to look at.
What happens next depends partly on what we bring to them.

 

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 4

“Part of me feels I could be right for every breath. This is just my first step.”
This is the last time these words appear, and by now that first step has travelled a long way.
We started with me looking at a world that seemed vast.
My eyes wanted to see more than I could explore.
My brain was moving faster than my pace.
Then came emotions, green landscapes, trees, running, eagles, survival, uncertainty, shoes, tight laces and beautiful places.
Now we’re approaching the end, and I’m still talking about a first step.
I actually like that.
A first step doesn’t have to happen only once in your life.
Every time you begin something different, there is another one.
Writing a song starts with something.
Learning starts with something.
Changing direction starts with something.
Sometimes it’s a major decision.
Sometimes it’s opening a book.
That’s what happened here.
I wasn’t looking for some life-changing experience when I started looking through those pages. Something caught my attention and I followed it.
That was enough.
“I don’t have a reason or maybe I just don’t want to know”
The song still refuses to explain everything.
I think that’s one of the most honest things about it.
Looking back years later, I can see connections I probably wasn’t consciously thinking about when I wrote the words.
I can see the contrast between incarceration and all the movement in the lyrics.
I can see how often I wrote about freedom without calling it freedom.
I can see how the photographs gave my imagination somewhere to travel.
Those things are worth talking about now because they’re actually present in the song and in the circumstances surrounding it.
But I don’t want to go back and invent reasons that weren’t there.
Sometimes I wrote something because it felt right.
Sometimes I liked the thought.
Sometimes it made me laugh.
Sometimes I probably didn’t completely understand why I wrote it myself.
That’s songwriting too.
Not every lyric arrives carrying an instruction manual.
“If I should stand or just let it go”
The question remains unanswered right to the end.
Stand or let it go.
There are situations where standing your ground is exactly what you should do.
There are others where refusing to let go only keeps you trapped in the same place.
Knowing the difference isn’t always easy.
The song doesn’t pretend it is.
Maybe that’s why this line belongs beside “I don’t have a reason.”
I don’t know.
I haven’t decided.
I’m still thinking.
There is nothing wrong with leaving a question open when you don’t honestly have the answer.
I would rather leave a real question than manufacture a false conclusion.
Then the song reaches the line it has been waiting to give us one last time.
“Either way, my smile will always be brighter than your Lawn”
That’s how I leave it.
Not with the answer to every question.
Not with some grand statement about the meaning of life.
With my smile beating your lawn.
I wouldn’t change that.
There is something about the ridiculousness of the comparison that fits the way this whole song was created.
A normal thought gets twisted slightly.
Then another thought arrives.
Then another.
Some are serious.
Some are observational.
Some are personal.
Some are funny.
Together they become mine.
The title could have been something obvious about nature.
It could have been about the eagle.
It could have been about the Earth.
It could have been about exploration.
Instead I called it “My Smile Will Always Be Brighter Than Your Lawn.”
That title makes you wonder what kind of song you’re about to hear.
Then you hear it and probably still wonder where I came up with the title.
Good.
I enjoy that.
THE JOURNEY BACK TO WHERE I WAS
When I reach the final lyric, I come back to the place where this entire journey actually happened.
I was incarcerated.
That matters, but I don’t want incarceration to take over a song that wasn’t really about incarceration.
The song was created there.
It wasn’t trapped there.
That’s an important difference to me.
What inspired me was what I was looking at.
The photographs.
The colours.
The eagle.
The Earth.
The natural world.
The words I was reading.
Something on those pages made me want to write.
That’s the story.
But knowing where I was does change how I hear certain lyrics today.
“My eyes just want to see more than I can explore.”
“My pace is too slow.”
“if you can run”
“when Eagles fly high in the sky”
“This is just my first step.”
“it’s always beautiful to be in a beautiful place”
Those lines weren’t written from the middle of some beautiful open landscape.
They were written by somebody looking at one.
There is a difference.
I think that difference gives the song something I didn’t necessarily recognize when I first wrote it.
The body and imagination don’t always occupy the same size world.
My physical world at that time was small.
The world on those pages wasn’t.
Neither was the world inside my head.
WHAT THE PICTURES ACTUALLY GAVE ME
I think this is why I remember the book.
I don’t remember every detail of everything I read. I can’t tell you exactly which photograph produced which lyric.
I don’t want to pretend I can.
What stayed with me was the colour and the feeling of looking through it.
That is enough.
Sometimes inspiration doesn’t arrive as a complete story.
It arrives as a reaction.
Something catches your eye.
You stop.
You look longer.
Your brain starts working.
That’s where creativity begins.
One of those photographs might have taken somebody hours or days to capture.
Then it was printed in a book.
That book eventually ended up in front of me while I was incarcerated.
I looked at the photograph.
It created a thought.
The thought became words.
Those words became part of a song.
Now somebody else can hear the song or read these lyrics and have another thought of their own.
I like that chain.
The original photographer may never know that happened.
That’s part of what makes creativity interesting.
We don’t always know where something we create will eventually travel.
THE EAGLE KEPT FLYING
The eagle is probably the image I carry most clearly from the lyrics.
At first, I was simply thinking about what an eagle does.
It flies high.
It searches.
It survives.
But walking through the song again makes me notice another contrast.
I was looking at an animal with enormous freedom of movement while I had very little.
I don’t need to turn that into a dramatic symbol.
The contrast is strong enough without me decorating it.
The eagle could go where it needed to go.
I couldn’t.
But I could think about where it was going.
I could ask why it was flying.
I could write about it.
In that sense, curiosity allowed me to follow it.
Not physically.
Mentally.
That was enough to get the lyric onto the page.
THE GREEN KEPT GROWING
The same thing happened with the green landscapes.
I saw life.
Growth.
Healing.
Trees providing things without asking for attention.
Those thoughts came into a song written in circumstances that weren’t particularly colourful.
Yet the song itself became colourful.
That’s probably one of the things I appreciate most about it now.
It would have been easy for everything I wrote while incarcerated to be about walls, anger, frustration or confinement.
Some of my writing did come from difficult places.
But human beings aren’t one emotion all day long.
I could still see something beautiful.
I could still find something interesting.
I could still laugh at something stupid.
I could still be curious.
I could still write a line about somebody’s lawn.
That is human.
THE SHOES STILL MAKE ME LAUGH
And yes, I still have to come back to the shoes.
The song wouldn’t be the same without them.
“My shoes are meant to fit in a way not to slip
Tight laces embrace them so I don’t trip”
There is no eagle soaring through those lines.
No giant landscape.
No great mystery.
Just make sure your shoes fit and tie the damn laces.
Maybe that’s why I like them.
They pull everything back to Earth.
You can spend all day with your head travelling through enormous ideas, but eventually your feet still have to carry you.
If you’re going to take that first step, try not to trip while doing it.
I can live with that as a lesson.
WHAT I HEAR NOW
When I walk through these lyrics today, I don’t hear a song that needs to be forced into one meaning.
I hear curiosity moving.
I hear a mind bouncing between what it sees and what it thinks.
I hear somebody physically stuck in one place but interested in a world far beyond that place.
I hear nature.
I hear uncertainty.
I hear survival.
I hear humour.
Most importantly, I hear myself enjoying the process of writing.
I remember enjoying this one.
That matters.
Not every song has to hurt.
Not every song has to carry some enormous burden.
Sometimes writing should be fun.
Sometimes a strange idea deserves to survive simply because you enjoyed creating it.
This one did.
And after walking through the entire song again, I think the final line leaves me exactly where it should.
I still don’t know whether I should stand or let it go.
I still don’t need a reason for everything.
But I do know one thing.
Your lawn still hasn’t beaten my smile.

 

SECTION TWO
THE STORY
MY MIND WAS SOMEWHERE ELSE

When I think back to where this song started, the surroundings and the song almost seem like they shouldn’t belong together.
I was incarcerated.
I wasn’t standing in some huge green valley. I wasn’t underneath those trees. I wasn’t watching an eagle flying above me. I wasn’t travelling through the landscapes I was looking at.
I was looking through what I believe was a National Geographic book.
The photographs caught me.
They were vivid. Bright. Colourful. They showed a world much bigger than the one physically around me at that moment.
That was enough to get my imagination going.
I have always been curious about things. Sometimes I can look at something simple and my mind starts travelling in directions I wasn’t expecting. A picture doesn’t necessarily stay a picture for me. I start wondering about what I’m seeing.
That happened here.
The photographs gave me somewhere else to go without actually going anywhere.
THE COUNTRY IS VAST
The song opens with:
“The country is vast in a way I’ve never seen it before”
There is something important in those words because I wasn’t claiming I had personally travelled through everything I was describing.
I was discovering it through photographs and what I was reading.
That created another feeling.
There was so much to see that I couldn’t possibly take it all in.
That is where these lines came from:
“Just like hunger just wants me to take more than I can store
And my eyes just want to see more than I can explore”
I like that thought.
You can become hungry for more than food.
You can become hungry for knowledge.
For scenery.
For experience.
For understanding.
You can look at this enormous planet and realize very quickly that one lifetime isn’t enough to see everything.
I think there is something beautiful about that.
It means there is always something you haven’t seen yet.
THE BODY STAYS PUT, THE MIND TRAVELS
There is another part of this story that I don’t want to exaggerate.
I wasn’t sitting there deliberately thinking, “I’m going to use my imagination to escape incarceration.”
That would make the story sound cleaner than it really was.
I was looking at something interesting, and it gave me an idea for a song.
But looking back, there is still an obvious contrast.
My physical movement was restricted.
My imagination wasn’t.
A photograph could take me somewhere.
A sentence could take me somewhere else.
Then my own thoughts could take me even farther.
That is one of the things I enjoy about writing.
You don’t need permission for a thought to arrive.
THE GREEN
One of the strongest colours I remember from those kinds of images was green.
In the song I wrote:
“The green express the healing of the Earth”
I wasn’t trying to make some complicated scientific statement.
I was looking at the natural world and thinking about what green represents to me.
Growth.
Life.
Recovery.
Something living.
Then I moved naturally toward trees:
“The trees give shelter and shade, but some bare fruit and brighten our days”
Again, I was noticing ordinary things that are easy to take for granted.
A tree isn’t just something standing in the background of a photograph.
It can provide shade.
Shelter.
Food.
Beauty.
Habitat.
And sometimes we walk past one without giving it a second thought.
THE EAGLE ISN’T PUTTING ON A SHOW
Then came the eagle.
“Because when Eagles fly high in the sky, it’s more than just for pleasure. It’s a way to search and survive.”
That thought interested me.
From our point of view, an eagle flying across a beautiful sky can look almost perfect. Somebody photographs it and we admire the picture.
But the eagle has its own reason for being there.
It is living.
Searching.
Surviving.
The beauty we see can be part of an animal simply doing what it needs to do.
I like that difference in perspective.
What looks beautiful from a distance can have an entirely practical purpose when you understand what is actually happening.
SHOES, LACES AND NOT FALLING ON MY FACE
Then the song does something that makes me laugh.
After talking about the world, nature, emotions and eagles, suddenly I’m talking about my shoes.
“My shoes are meant to fit in a way not to slip
Tight laces embrace them so I don’t trip”
Where did that come from?
That’s the kind of thing I enjoy about this song.
My mind was moving.
I wasn’t trying to make every image sound grand or poetic.
Sometimes life comes down to something pretty simple.
If you’re going somewhere, make sure your shoes fit.
Tie your laces.
Try not to fall on your face.
There might even be a little accidental wisdom hiding inside that.
You can spend all day thinking about enormous ideas, but eventually you still have to take the next step.
THE WAVES OF ENERGY
One thought keeps returning throughout the song:
“My brain says, but my pace is too slow”
Then I move into fear, passion, emotion and what I called “waves of energy.”
That part reflects how quickly thoughts and feelings can move compared with the person experiencing them.
Your mind can race ahead.
Your imagination can travel across the world in seconds.
Your emotions can change almost instantly.
Meanwhile, physically, you’re still sitting in the same place.
In my situation when I wrote this, that contrast becomes even more interesting.
My pace really was limited.
But my thoughts weren’t moving at the same speed as my surroundings.
They were everywhere.
A BEAUTIFUL PLACE
Near the end I wrote:
“it’s always beautiful to be in a beautiful place
No worries at all those feelings are meant to be gone and replaced”
That sounds simple because it is simple.
There are places that change how we feel.
Sometimes just seeing somewhere peaceful can do something to us.
In my case, I didn’t even have to physically be there for the images to create some of that feeling.
Maybe that is part of why photographs matter.
Someone can capture one fraction of a second somewhere in the world, print it on a page, and years later somebody sitting somewhere completely different can look at it and feel something.
That feeling can become another thought.
That thought can become a lyric.
And that lyric can become a song.
THEN THERE’S THE LAWN
And after all of this, I arrive at:
“Either way, my smile will always be brighter than your Lawn”
I enjoyed writing that line.
It twists the whole thing sideways.
A smile and a lawn have absolutely no business competing with each other.
How do you even judge that contest?
That’s probably why I like it.
There is something playful about taking this beautiful green imagery running through the song and then ending up with somebody’s lawn.
You can have the greenest lawn on the street.
You can water it.
Fertilize it.
Cut it perfectly.
Make every neighbour jealous.
I’m still claiming victory.
My smile is brighter.
There doesn’t need to be some complicated explanation hiding behind every unusual line I write. Sometimes something hits me as funny, strange or memorable, and I go with it.
This was one of those times.
A SONG THAT WAS ALLOWED TO WANDER
This isn’t one of my songs where everything follows one straight storyline.
It wanders because my thoughts wandered.
The Earth leads to trees.
Trees lead to life.
An eagle leads to survival.
Emotion becomes energy.
The world becomes something I want to explore.
Then I check my shoes.
Somewhere along the way, a lawn gets involved.
I could try to clean all of that up now and pretend there was some perfect master plan behind every transition.
There wasn’t.
And I think doing that would take away some of the personality that made me enjoy writing it in the first place.
Sometimes creativity comes from allowing yourself to follow the thought instead of forcing the thought to follow you.
That’s what happened here.
I was incarcerated, looking through colourful photographs of a world outside the place where I was sitting.
Those photographs got my attention.
My curiosity took over.
And for however long I was writing this song, that book gave my imagination a much bigger place to live.

 

SECTION THREE
WHAT THE SONG OPENS UP

There is something I like about a song that starts with a photograph and ends up travelling somewhere completely different.
That is what happened here.
I wasn’t trying to teach a lesson when I started writing. I was looking at what I believe was a National Geographic book while I was incarcerated. The photographs caught my attention, and my curiosity took over.
But when I look at the finished song now, there are several ideas inside it that reach beyond those original pictures.
CURIOSITY DOESN’T NEED PERMISSION
One of the strongest things running through this song is curiosity.
“My eyes just want to see more than I can explore”
There is something almost impossible about that desire.
None of us can see everything.
The world is too large.
There are too many places, animals, people, cultures, landscapes, ideas and experiences for one person to take in during one lifetime.
But that doesn’t mean we stop looking.
Sometimes knowing there is more out there is exactly what keeps us interested.
That was especially meaningful in the circumstances where I wrote this song.
My physical world was restricted.
My curiosity wasn’t.
I could open a book and suddenly be looking at a landscape somewhere far beyond where I was sitting.
I could see an eagle and start wondering why it was flying.
I could see green landscapes and think about growth and healing.
The page gave me something to look at.
Curiosity did the rest.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEEING AND UNDERSTANDING
The eagle is a good example.
We can look at an eagle flying high in the sky and see something beautiful.
But beauty is our experience of that moment.
The eagle has another experience.
It may be searching for food.
It may be travelling.
It may be watching what is happening below.
It is living its life.
That makes me think about how often we see something without really understanding what we’re looking at.
We see the surface first.
Understanding usually requires another question.
Why?
Why is that animal behaving that way?
Why does that tree grow there?
Why does that landscape look like that?
Why did that photograph affect me?
Questions change the way we look at things.
THE WORLD OUTSIDE AND THE WORLD INSIDE
“The way of the world and the vision that’s In my mind
Tells a story that captures every moment in time”
There are really two worlds moving through this song.
There is the world I was looking at.
Then there is what happened to that world after it entered my mind.
A photograph is real in the sense that it captures something that existed in front of a camera.
But the reaction belongs to the person looking at it.
Someone else could have looked at the same page and turned it without thinking twice.
I didn’t.
Something held my attention.
Then my imagination started adding questions, thoughts and feelings.
That is where creativity becomes personal.
The inspiration can come from outside you.
What you do with it comes from inside you.
WHEN THE MIND MOVES FASTER THAN THE BODY
“My brain says, but my pace is too slow”
That line keeps returning because it fits the way the entire song moves.
The mind can be incredibly fast.
In seconds, I can think about a landscape, an eagle, survival, emotion, movement and something completely unrelated.
Physically doing things takes longer.
You can imagine climbing a mountain immediately.
Actually climbing one is another matter.
You can imagine travelling across the world while sitting in a chair.
Actually making that trip takes planning, time and money.
In my circumstances, the contrast was even stronger.
I was incarcerated.
My movement was controlled.
My thoughts weren’t operating under the same restrictions.
That doesn’t mean imagination removed the reality around me.
It didn’t.
But it gave my attention somewhere else to go.
MOVEMENT IS EVERYWHERE
When I look through these lyrics now, I notice how often movement appears.
Explore.
Pace.
Run.
Fly.
Step.
Stand.
Let go.
Shoes.
Laces.
Even the eagle is moving through the sky.
I don’t want to claim I deliberately built all of that into the song because I was incarcerated.
I don’t remember thinking that way when I wrote it.
But the pattern exists.
That makes it interesting to look at now.
Sometimes a writer discovers something in an older song that wasn’t consciously planned when the song was written.
That doesn’t mean the new observation becomes the official meaning.
It simply means there can be more inside our own writing than we recognized at the time.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE PRACTICAL
This song keeps moving between beautiful things and practical things.
There are landscapes.
Trees.
Green.
An eagle in the sky.
Then there are shoes.
I like that mixture.
Life works that way.
You can have enormous thoughts and ordinary responsibilities at exactly the same time.
You can wonder about the world while tying your shoes.
You can think about where you want your life to go while making sure you don’t trip over your own feet.
The ordinary doesn’t destroy the bigger thought.
Sometimes it keeps it grounded.
WHAT FEELINGS DO TO THE JOURNEY
I described feelings as waves of energy.
I wasn’t making a scientific claim.
I was trying to put language around something we experience but cannot physically hold.
Fear changes behaviour.
Passion changes behaviour.
Emotion changes behaviour.
Sometimes a feeling pushes us toward something.
Sometimes it makes us pull away.
Sometimes it makes us stand our ground.
Sometimes it makes us let go.
That uncertainty appears directly in the song:
“If I should stand or just let it go”
I didn’t answer it.
I still don’t think every question needs an immediate answer.
There are times when standing is right.
There are times when letting go is right.
The difficult part is knowing which moment you’re standing in.
THE VALUE OF SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
“it’s always beautiful to be in a beautiful place”
There is nothing complicated about that line.
Maybe that’s why it belongs.
Beauty can interrupt us.
A landscape can make us stop.
A photograph can hold our attention.
Music can change the atmosphere of a room.
None of those things automatically fixes whatever problems we have.
I think it’s important not to exaggerate that.
Those photographs didn’t change the fact that I was incarcerated.
But they gave me something different to think about.
That mattered.
Something doesn’t have to change your entire life before it has value.
Sometimes changing one moment is enough.
THE HUMOUR MATTERS TOO
Then there is the lawn.
I don’t want all the serious ideas around this song to make us forget that I enjoyed writing it.
“My smile will always be brighter than your Lawn”
That’s funny to me.
It was funny when I wrote it and it’s still funny now.
There is no official international competition between smiles and lawns.
At least I hope there isn’t, because somebody would probably create rules for it.
The line works because the comparison doesn’t make much sense.
It takes all that green imagery and brings it into something completely ordinary.
Your lawn.
Then I challenge it with my smile.
Apparently I wasn’t lacking confidence that day.
I like leaving some humour inside a song that also contains serious thoughts.
Human beings don’t live inside one emotion.
We can think deeply and laugh five minutes later.
Sometimes we can do both at once.
WHAT I TAKE FROM IT NOW
When I look at this song today, I don’t want to force it into one message.
For me, its strength is the movement between ideas.
It reminds me how easily curiosity can begin.
One photograph.
One question.
One thought.
Then another.
It reminds me that inspiration doesn’t always announce itself.
Sometimes you’re simply looking through a book and something catches you.
If you follow it, you don’t know where it might lead.
For me, it led through the Earth, trees, emotions, an eagle, survival, movement, shoes, beautiful places and eventually somebody’s lawn.
That’s a strange road.
But it was mine.
And that’s exactly why I kept the song.

 

SECTION FOUR
REFLECTION
WHAT STAYED WITH ME

When I look back at this song now, one of the things I appreciate most is where it came from compared with where it went.
I was incarcerated.
I could have looked only at what was immediately around me. Instead, something as simple as opening a book gave my mind somewhere completely different to go.
That doesn’t erase where I was.
It doesn’t turn incarceration into something beautiful.
It simply reminds me that the mind can sometimes reach beyond the place where the body happens to be.
Those colourful photographs caught my attention. The landscapes made me curious. The trees made me think. The eagle made me think about survival. One thought led to another until eventually I had a song.
I like that.
THE WORLD IS BIGGER THAN WHAT IS IN FRONT OF US
There is a line in this song that still stands out to me:
“My eyes just want to see more than I can explore”
I think that reaches beyond the circumstances in which I wrote it.
None of us will see everything.
None of us will understand everything.
There will always be another country we haven’t visited, another subject we haven’t studied, another animal we know almost nothing about, another culture we haven’t experienced, another book we haven’t opened and another question we haven’t thought to ask yet.
I don’t find that disappointing.
I find it exciting.
It means curiosity always has somewhere else to go.
Sometimes we become so familiar with our own little piece of the world that we forget how enormous the rest of it is.
A photograph can remind us.
A book can remind us.
A conversation can remind us.
Sometimes even a song can remind us.
LOOKING AT SOMETHING DIFFERENTLY
The eagle is probably the best example of that in this song.
We see the eagle flying and admire it.
The eagle is trying to live.
Both things can be true at exactly the same time.
That makes me wonder how often we look at something only from our own perspective.
We see the beauty.
Someone else sees the struggle.
We see the destination.
Someone else sees the work it took to get there.
We see a photograph.
The animal inside that photograph is surviving another day.
Perspective changes things.
THE SMALL THINGS STILL MATTER
Then there are my shoes.
I can’t get through a reflection on this song without giving the shoes their moment.
“Tight laces embrace them so I don’t trip”
There is something wonderfully ordinary about that line sitting beside thoughts about the Earth, emotion and eagles.
But maybe ordinary things deserve more credit.
We can think about enormous questions all day long, but eventually we still have to watch where we’re walking.
Sometimes the next step matters more than having the entire journey figured out.
Tie your shoes.
Take the step.
See where it goes.
THE FREEDOM TO BE CURIOUS
If there is something I would like a reader to carry from this song, it is curiosity.
You don’t have to understand everything you look at.
You don’t have to turn every experience into some great life lesson.
Sometimes you can simply notice something.
Ask a question.
Read about it.
Think about it.
Laugh about it.
Write about it.
Let one idea lead you toward another.
That is how this song happened.
There was no enormous plan.
There were pictures.
There were words.
There was my imagination.
Then there was a song.
That is one of the reasons this belongs inside MOITA. Not every chapter of my life or my writing has to begin with some dramatic event. Sometimes creativity begins because something catches my eye and I give myself permission to follow it.
And sometimes the strange little journey is worth keeping.
THE LAWN STILL LOSES
I can’t finish without returning to the title.
“My Smile Will Always Be Brighter Than Your Lawn.”
I still think it’s funny.
There might be deeper thoughts throughout this song about nature, survival, emotion, movement, curiosity and freedom of imagination.
But I don’t want to bury the humour underneath all of that.
Sometimes a line is allowed to be fun.
Sometimes a title is allowed to make somebody wonder what the hell they’re about to hear.
And sometimes your neighbour can spend all weekend getting that lawn absolutely perfect and still come in second place.
I’m keeping the smile.
Thank you for spending some time inside this strange little journey with me.
Maybe the next time you see an eagle, a tree, an incredible photograph, or even somebody’s suspiciously perfect lawn, you’ll stop for a second and look at it differently.
If you do, then this song has already travelled farther than I could when I wrote it.

MOITA
WHERE EVERY SONG TELLS A STORY
EVERY STORY TEACHES SOMETHING

 

SECTION FIVE
MOITA DOCUMENTARY & LEARNING CENTRE
THE WORLD BEYOND THE PAGE

This song started with something simple: I was incarcerated, looking through what I believe was a National Geographic book, and the photographs caught my attention.
That gives us a good place to begin the Learning Centre.
How much can we actually discover without physically travelling somewhere?
A lot.
Books, photographs, museums, documentaries, maps and educational collections allow us to experience pieces of the world we may never see firsthand. They are not replacements for standing in a forest, seeing an eagle overhead or visiting another country, but they can open the door.
That matters because curiosity shouldn’t depend entirely on where we happen to be standing.
Sometimes learning begins because we go somewhere.
Sometimes learning begins because somewhere comes to us.
THE POWER OF NATURE PHOTOGRAPHY
Nature photography can do more than produce beautiful pictures.
A strong photograph can make us stop and notice something we might otherwise ignore.
The shape of an eagle’s wings.
The scale of a mountain.
The colours inside a forest.
The patterns of a landscape seen from above.
The expression of an animal.
The damage to an ecosystem.
The return of vegetation to an area that has been disturbed.
Photography freezes a fraction of time, but the questions created by that fraction can continue much longer.
Where was the photograph taken?
What species am I looking at?
How does it survive?
What does it eat?
What threatens it?
What role does it play in its environment?
What happened to this landscape before the photograph?
What happened afterward?
That is when looking becomes learning.
THE WORLD INSIDE A PHOTOGRAPH
A photograph also teaches us something about perspective.
The photographer chooses where to stand.
What to include.
What to leave outside the frame.
When to press the shutter.
The viewer then brings another perspective.
Two people can look at exactly the same photograph and notice completely different things.
One sees colour.
Another notices the animal.
Another wonders about the location.
Another starts thinking about conservation.
Another simply thinks, “I would love to stand there someday.”
That is one of the reasons visual storytelling can be so powerful.
The photograph doesn’t necessarily finish the story.
Sometimes it starts one.
That is exactly what happened with this song.
THE COLOUR GREEN
“The green express the healing of the Earth”
Green appears throughout the natural world because chlorophyll, the pigment involved in photosynthesis, reflects green wavelengths of visible light more strongly than some others.
But what interested me while writing wasn’t the chemistry.
It was what green made me think about.
Life.
Growth.
Recovery.
That creates an interesting meeting between science and human interpretation.
Science can explain why a leaf appears green and how photosynthesis helps plants convert light energy into chemical energy.
A songwriter can look at that same green leaf and see healing.
One explanation doesn’t cancel the other.
They answer different questions.
Science can help explain what is happening.
Art can explore what it makes us think or feel.
WHAT TREES ACTUALLY GIVE US
“The trees give shelter and shade, but some bare fruit and brighten our days”
There is much more behind that simple lyric than I was trying to explain in the song.
Trees can provide habitat and food for wildlife. Their roots can help stabilize soil. Their leaves create shade. Through photosynthesis, trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, while storing carbon in their tissues as they grow.
For people, trees can also provide fruit, wood and other materials.
Then there is something harder to measure when you’re simply looking at a beautiful landscape.
They change the character of a place.
Imagine the same park with mature trees and then imagine it completely bare.
It doesn’t feel like the same place.
That is something worth noticing.
THE EAGLE’S VIEW
“Because when Eagles fly high in the sky, it’s more than just for pleasure. It’s a way to search and survive.”
Eagles gave me one of the central images of this song.
There are many eagle species around the world, and their behaviour varies by species and environment. Eagles use powerful vision, flight and other adaptations as part of finding food and surviving.
That makes the difference between our perspective and theirs interesting.
We might see an eagle circling high above and think:
Beautiful.
The eagle may be searching for its next opportunity to eat.
We see the spectacle.
The animal is carrying on with life.
Understanding animal behaviour doesn’t make nature less beautiful.
For me, it makes it more interesting.
Once you begin asking why an animal behaves a certain way, the photograph becomes the beginning of another education.
SURVIVAL DOESN’T ALWAYS LOOK LIKE STRUGGLE
That eagle also raises a larger question.
What does survival look like?
We often imagine survival as something dramatic.
But much of survival in nature is ordinary behaviour repeated successfully.
Finding food.
Avoiding danger.
Resting.
Protecting territory.
Reproducing.
Responding to changing weather and seasons.
Using energy carefully.
Knowing when to move and when not to.
From the outside, some of those behaviours can look effortless.
They aren’t necessarily effortless at all.
That idea applies beyond wildlife.
We rarely know everything happening underneath what we see.
THE HUMAN NEED FOR NATURE
There is another reason the photographs may have caught my attention.
Natural environments can affect how people experience a place and how they feel while spending time there. Researchers have studied relationships between exposure to green spaces and different aspects of physical and psychological well-being.
That doesn’t mean nature magically removes every problem.
A forest isn’t medicine for everything.
A beautiful photograph doesn’t erase difficult circumstances.
That certainly wasn’t what happened to me.
I was still incarcerated.
But something doesn’t have to solve your life in order to improve one moment of it.
Sometimes having something beautiful or interesting to focus on is valuable simply because, for that moment, your attention has somewhere else to go.
CURIOSITY WHEN YOUR WORLD BECOMES SMALL
This may be the most important educational idea connected with the story behind this song.
Curiosity can survive restricted circumstances.
A person doesn’t need unlimited money, unlimited travel or unlimited access to the world before learning can begin.
A library can open enormous doors.
A photograph can start research.
A map can create questions.
A book can introduce another culture.
A biography can introduce another life.
A science book can reveal worlds too small or too distant for us to see directly.
Curiosity is portable.
That is something I experienced without deliberately setting out to prove it.
I was incarcerated.
I opened a book.
Something caught my attention.
I followed it.
Eventually I had a song.
THE MIND CAN TRAVEL DIFFERENTLY
There is a difference between physically escaping somewhere and mentally engaging with something beyond your immediate environment.
I think that distinction is important.
I’m not suggesting imagination makes difficult circumstances disappear.
It doesn’t.
But reading and learning can expand what occupies the mind.
That can happen almost anywhere.
You can sit in one room and study ancient civilizations.
You can look at photographs from the deepest oceans.
You can learn about distant planets.
You can study animals living thousands of kilometres away.
You can read the thoughts of someone who lived hundreds of years before you were born.
Your physical location remains exactly where it is.
Your field of thought becomes enormous.
WHY WE CAN NEVER EXPLORE EVERYTHING
“My eyes just want to see more than I can explore”
There is a practical truth inside that line.
The world contains more places, species, cultures, ideas and knowledge than any individual could completely experience during one lifetime.
That could make someone feel overwhelmed.
I prefer another interpretation.
It means we never run out of things to discover.
You don’t need to know everything.
Nobody does.
Choose something.
Learn about it.
Then allow that knowledge to create another question.
That question may take you somewhere completely unexpected.
THE VALUE OF WANDERING
Education is often presented as though learning should follow a straight line.
Start here.
Study this.
Finish there.
Real curiosity doesn’t always behave that way.
You can begin with an eagle and end up studying vision.
Vision might lead to biology.
Biology might lead to evolution.
Evolution might lead to fossils.
Fossils might lead to geology.
Geology might make you wonder how a particular landscape formed.
Suddenly the eagle has taken you millions of years into the past.
That kind of wandering isn’t necessarily wasted time.
Connections are part of learning.
My song wandered too.
That is probably appropriate.
THE SHOES ACTUALLY HAVE SOMETHING TO TEACH
“My shoes are meant to fit in a way not to slip
Tight laces embrace them so I don’t trip”
I laughed about these lines in the main story, and I still do.
But there is a useful idea hiding there.
Large journeys are made through small actions.
You can dream about exploring the world, but eventually you have to prepare for the next step.
Sometimes we become so focused on the destination that we forget the ordinary things that make reaching it possible.
Preparation isn’t always exciting.
Neither are shoelaces.
Until you trip over one.
Then suddenly they become very important.
THE BRIGHTER LAWN QUESTION
Now we reach the serious scientific question this song has been waiting for:
Can my smile actually be brighter than your lawn?
I am not going to ruin the joke by trying to calculate it.
Some things deserve to remain safely outside the laboratory.
But the title does demonstrate something useful about language.
Unexpected comparisons get attention.
A smile and a lawn don’t normally belong in competition.
Putting them together creates an image precisely because the comparison is strange.
That is one of the tools available to songwriting.
Words don’t always have to meet where we expect them to.
Sometimes the unexpected connection is the line we remember.
WHAT THIS SONG TAUGHT ME
I didn’t open that book expecting to learn some enormous lesson.
I was interested in what I saw.
That was enough.
Looking back, I think that is important.
We sometimes treat learning as though it only counts when there is a test, certificate or qualification waiting at the end.
Learning can also happen because something fascinates you.
You don’t need another justification.
Curiosity is enough.
One picture can become one question.
One question can become an hour of reading.
That hour can change the way you see something.
And sometimes, apparently, it can become a song about an eagle, the Earth, your shoes and somebody else’s lawn.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
If this song made you curious about the natural world, there are several directions worth exploring.
National Geographic provides photography, reporting and educational material about wildlife, geography, science, cultures and the natural world.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is an excellent place to explore birds, including their behaviour, identification, habitats and conservation.
For a Canadian perspective, Parks Canada provides information about Canada’s national parks, ecosystems, wildlife, conservation and the natural and cultural landscapes protected across the country.
You don’t have to stop there.
Choose an animal from a photograph and learn how it survives.
Find out why leaves change colour.
Learn how forests recover after disturbance.
Study how birds navigate.
Explore the history of nature photography.
Learn about a national park you have never visited.
Or open a book and see where the first interesting picture takes you.
You don’t need to know where curiosity will end before you begin.
I certainly didn’t when I opened that book.
Sometimes the first step is simply looking.

MOITA