Shifts and changes continue, in politics, in social life, in world events and in personal lives.

Music continues to offer ways to connect and to create through these changes. The natural word does too, whether that is the angle of light down a city street, the turn of a leaf falling in a forest, or a skein of stars across a night sky.

At times, musicians turn to images and ideas from nature to think and talk about ideas of connection and reflection in changing times.

In his song Westlin Winds, Robert Burns does this.

He looks at the sometimes hard interactions of people and the natural world at first. Then for most of the lines in the song, he turns to the quiet joys of nature and sharing a night time walk with a lover.

Robert Burns lived in Scotland in the late eighteenth century. He is Scotland’s national poet, who is honored especially each year on his birthday, 25 January.

This version of Westlin Winds is from Matt and Shannon Heaton. You will most often find the Massachusetts-based husband and wife duo playing and composing music from Ireland’s traditions. They are well acquainted with music from other Celtic lands, too, as this song from Robert Burns shows.

You will find the song on Matt and Shannon Heaton’s album Whirring Wings.

Start With a Stone finds songwriters Carrie Newcomer and John McCutcheon drawing on ideas and images of nature to talk about choosing values and getting back to basics, which they do in poetic terms. You will find Carrie Newcomer singing the song on her album called A Great Wild Mercy.

You could say that there is another sort of back to basics in the song If I Had a Hammer. Pete Seeger and Lee Hays wrote the song in the 1940s. It became a hit when Peter, Paul, and Mary recorded it on their first, self-titled album, in 1962.

For some of the changes in politics going on just now, it seems an appropriate time to listen to the song. It is also a way to remember Peter Yarrow, the man on the right in this video. He passed away a few days ago.

Emily Smith comes from southwestern Scotland -- the same area where Robert Burns lived, in fact. In Winter Song, she draws on images and ideas of changes in nature across the winter season to remind of nature’s beauty, and to remind as well of resilience and hope.

You will find the song on two of Emily’s albums, Too Long Away and Songs for Christmas.

Carrickfinn is a place in the far west of County Donegal, a county which is itself in the far northwest of the island of Ireland.

Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh is a world-class fiddle player, singer, and composer, and founding member of the band Altan. She learned her first music lessons in her family as she grew up in Donegal.

Several years back, Mairead’s father, from whom she’d learned many of those early music lessons, passed away. Her friends Enda Cullen and Ian Smith wrote the song Far Beyond Carrickfinn for her at that time.

It offers gentle and loving remembrance. You will find the song recorded on Altan’s album The Windening Gyre.

There are several lines in the song that I have been thinking about recently.

In her remarks at Howard University, Kamala Harris spoke of the saying that it is only when the sky is darkest that one sees the stars.

May the stars light your way
as your journey begins

Mairead sings.

Beyond the context of the song, these may be good words for these shifting times.

Thank you for staying with us through this journey. Below, you'll find a link that will take you to an article which has a bit more backstory on the series. It also has links to a number of the stories, including ones called Listening for Community, Music for Winter's Changes, and The Geography of Hope.

Music for Shifting Times

Kerry Dexter is Music Editor at Wandering Educators. 

You may find more of Kerry's work in National Geographic Traveler, Strings, Perceptive Travel, Journey to Scotland, Irish Fireside, and other places, as well as at her own site, Music Road. You can also read her work at Along the Music Road on Substack. 

Word photo: Alandsmann, CC via Pixabay, adapted by Wandering Educators