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 drove home with that phrase still ringing in my ears, sat down that same evening, and by night it was a song. My sessions keep doing that to me: Bradley says something quiet and true, and a few days later it's a chorus. This is the clearest example I have of a therapist's words turning into music.
The song starts inside a familiar lie — a shadow whispering 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 something cracks: the ice breaks, and a quieter, older voice rises — and instead of arguing with the shadow, it simply claims me.
That turn is what the whole song is built around. Every other song I make is an I. This one is deliberately a we. The heart of being isn't something you achieve alone; it's the discovery that you were never alone in the dark to begin with. There were always others standing in it with you, and something ancient holding all of you at once.
I wanted it to sound as big as that feeling — warm guitars, sweeping strings, real weight underneath. The second verse is where the diaspora lives: 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. It says it has breathed with you through fire, through snow, through stone. That's the heart of being to me: the thing under everything that has never once let go of you, even when you were sure you were facing it alone.
This song belongs with the others in my catalog about holding on. My fear songs say don't be governed. My 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 was never private — it's shared.
And it resolves the way it has to: outward, into freedom and into company, never collapse. The shadow said you, alone, don't belong. The heart of being answered — we belong, together, and we always have. I made it for anyone who has ever heard that lonely whisper, so they could hear the answer too.