"Heart of Being / Серце Буття"
This is the song where the loneliest voice in me finally gets an answer.
It's my second song, and it didn't come from me alone. I'd just started therapy. In one of our sessions my therapist, Bradley, said a phrase that stopped me — the heart of awareness, the heart of being — the still place underneath all the noise, the part of you that was never actually in danger. I went home and wrote a song about it. My sessions keep doing that to me: Bradley says something quiet and true, and a few days later it's a chorus. This one is the clearest example I have of a therapist's words turning into music.
Heart of Being — *Серце Буття* — starts inside a familiar lie. A shadow whispers that you don't belong here, that this place isn't yours, that you wear no crown. Anyone who has moved between countries knows that voice. It speaks in your own accent. The first verse is me standing inside it — and then feeling something crack:
I had a shadow, and its whisper held me down,
That this place is not yours, that you wear no crown.
But somewhere inside me the ice began to break,
And my own quiet voice said: it's your turn to speak.
In Ukrainian the turn lands on two words — Твій хід, "your move," "your turn":
Та десь у груді ламавсь той лід,
І тихий мій голос сказав: Твій хід.
(But somewhere in my chest the ice was breaking, / and my quiet voice said: your move.)
That's where the song pivots. The ice breaks, and instead of the shadow, a different voice rises — older, steadier — and it doesn't argue. It claims me. Every other song I make is an I. This one is deliberately a we:
Heart of being — it's our fire, our flame,
Living in me, in you — our blood the same.
I am not alone. You are not alone. We are one heart.
Серце Буття — це наш вогонь, наш жар,
Я не сама. Ти не сама. Ми — одне серце.
(Heart of being — it's our fire, our heat. / I'm not alone. You're not alone. We are one heart.)
I wanted this one to sound big — warm guitars, sweeping strings, real weight underneath — because the feeling it's chasing is big. It's the discovery that you were never actually alone in the dark; there were always others standing in it with you, and something ancient holding all of you at once. The diaspora lives in the second verse: standing between worlds, between what was said and what still smolders, not sure the night will let you through — and the heart knowing before you do.
The bridge is the emotional center, and I made it almost a whisper. The instruments drop away and an old voice speaks directly — the voice of the ground itself, of everyone who came before:
(Woman, can you hear me? I have heard your call.)
(I am your bones, I am ancient ground, your soul, your all.)
(You are not alone. You have never been alone.)
(I have breathed with you — through fire, through snow, through stone.)
In Ukrainian that voice calls me Жінко — woman — and says я дихала з тобою: I have breathed with you, through fire, through snow. That's the heart of being — the thing under everything that has never once let go of you, even when you were sure you were facing it alone.
This song lives among the ones in my catalog about holding on. The fear songs say don't be governed. The holding-on songs say don't disappear. Heart of Being gives those a reason — you can hold on because you are not alone. The grip is bearable when you know other hands are gripping too, and something older is holding all of them. The strength isn't private. It's shared. Our fire, our flame, our blood the same.
And it resolves the way it must — outward, into freedom and into company, never collapse. By the final chorus the I has fully become a we:
We are not alone. We have never been alone. We are one heart.
We came here together — and a star will hold us where we are.
Ми не самі. Ми ніколи не були самі. Ми — одне серце.
(We are not alone. We have never been alone. We are one heart.)
The shadow said you, alone, don't belong. The heart of being answered: we belong, together, and we always have. I made it so anyone who has ever heard that lonely whisper can hear the answer too — in whichever of my two languages is already theirs.