This is song number 17. To listen to it, please click here: Heat of Love
THE HEAT OF LOVE
Breaking boundaries
Running free
Loving friends
And company
Always pushing
From the start
To give expression to
Your beating heart
Deep inside
Perhaps you knew
The years of laughter
Would be few
From peak to peak
You tried to go
On a bridge
Of falling snow
Clouds below
And sky above
Living on
The heat of love
It looked so easy
To live that way
To fill each moment
Of every day
With songs and games
And joy and tears
And not to run away
From hopes and fears
But not too many
Live like you did
You looked life in the eye
You never hid
I won’t forget
The grace you showed
As you walked along
The rocky road
From peak to peak
You tried to go
On a bridge
Of falling snow
Clouds below
And sky above
Living on
The heat of love
I remember
You know I do
All the adventure
Of being with you
And every song that
You used to play
From sk8er boi
To True Love Way
So I’ll keep walking
All along
The watchtower
Singing ‘Redemption Song’
From peak to peak
You tried to go
On a bridge
Of falling snow
Clouds below
And sky above
Living on
The heat of love
So I’ll keep walking
All along
The watchtower
Singing ‘Redemption Song’
The road to God knows where ... Brendan O'Brien 
Hello Brendano. I have not listened to your song yet. I am still at the stage of reading the words and thinking about them. I still haven’t finished reading yet. You know me; not very good at instantly being able to put words and music together
There is a very strong sense that it is Sean who is giving you strength. Sean is almost taking on the rôle of father here. Love and strength go backwards and forwards endlessly, and beyond too. Time as we know it; time in the sense of ordered generations, clocks and calendars and sand-timers can be seen as a rather primitive and artificial human construct in many ways. With simple words, you show that there are other sources of strength beyond.
You have mentioned before at conversation level that you and Pauline feel that Sean knew on some other level that his life on this earth would be short. You believe that this may be why he filled it with as much joy and company as possible. There is a message there from Sean to us all, I think. It is a very old message, but one we need to be reminded of.
I like the title ‘THE HEAT OF LOVE’. You are right to use capital letters and you are right to use the word ‘heat’. Love is far more than mere ‘warmth’. It is heat, and because of it we are never cold. It can also burn us. It solders deep messages of an intemporal sort into our souls and our bodies.
I like the photograph too. The very new baby held by the children is still red and carrying the stamp of the heat of the birth of love in a very mortal way. Our spiritual lives can never be separated from flesh. We are part of both worlds and it seems to me that Sean is giving you the strength of the sense of a timeless heart in this our world, the world his physical heart made him leave.
Yes, it is very much about redemption. And Bob Marley sang that idea well, I agree.
Thanks again for this. The five children in the photo are all first cousins or siblings.
We do feel that Sean is giving us strength. There’s a song by Adele called ‘Someone Like You’ … it’s a song about lost love, but something about the mood of it reminds me of Sean. There is a line that goes ‘for me, it isn’t over’. This is how Pauline and I feel about Sean … for us, it isn’t over. We often discuss how we are feeling and discover that we have independently been thinking the same thing … this is what we were both thinking last night (it isn’t over). The relationship with Sean is different, but not finished. It is timeless, as you say.
For his anniversary we put a notice in the local paper, as people do, with a photo, and a short poem that I wrote and posted on this blog … the lines ‘One blood, one love …/For ever flowing out/And flowing in’ are similar to what you say about love and strength endlessly going backwards and forwards, outside time.
https://brendano7.com/2011/01/09/poem-for-sean-2-%e2%80%a6-twelve-weeks-on/
Hello Cymbeline … thanks for this. I am just going to bed; will respond properly tomorrow.
I have found the courage to listen to the song now.
It is beautiful.
Although I am a very shy woman, it made me want to give my voice in return.
I nearly telephoned you again!
Thank goodness for sensible restraint!
Thanks very much, Cymbeline. I’m glad you like it. A simple little tune … I had the chords and tune for a good while before I came up with words that seemed right.
Do feel free to phone if you like.
I suspect that you are the measure of many people’s dreams.
The child on the far left looks so much like my nephew in Wales that it is uncanny.
I like the set of probably unread white books, and the unused porcelain behind glass.
Civilization staring at you and keeping you under control.
He is 17 now, and was here last weekend, playing his guitar. Very talented.
The room is Pauline’s parents’ sitting room. We had to be on guard constantly to prevent the children from wrecking it (not always successfully).
I think the books are actually a radiator.
Snazzy radiator. I must have been PROJECTING then. We have a whole white encyclopaedia set. It is French and it is called Universalis and has rarely been opened. I paid a fortune for it every month. I didn’t care about having a washing machine, you just had to have an encyclopaedia, and even more so if you had just arrived in France. I was very conscious of showing that I was not an illiterate immigrant.
I remember the stress of having children and porcelain in the same room together. My sister once broke a whole set of porcelain horses in my grandmother’s house at Christmas. Christmas became taut. There was the stuff on the mantelpiece, the stuff on the shelves, and the stuff behind glass.
I have some of my grandmothers’ porcelain now. Figurines with exquisite details. Terribly old-fashioned but I love them and care about them because of my grandmothers.
re the worry about being seen as an illiterate immigrant. I soon found out that I wrote better French than the vast majority of French people and knew far more about their literature than they did.
But I am not French and will never be French. My accent is quite good but it remains very obviously British.