Landslide & It's Meaning

The other day I was listening to my favorite song "Landslide" by Stevie Knicks. I never grow tired of this song. I was on the way to Bear Lake and I love to turn up the volume as I drive. I was belting out the tune when my cute daughter Des, ask me about the meaning behind the words we were singing.

I told her what I'd read and heard, how the song is basically about Stevie Nicks growing up and learning to make her own decisions in life, it's about her relationship with her father.

Stevie wrote "Landslide" back in 1975, two months before she joined Fleetwood Mac. At that time she was living with Lindsey Buckingham (who would become the guitarist in Fleetwood Mac) they were trying to make it in the music business, but they were very, very poor and were being reluctantly supported by Stevie's parents.

Finally, her father gave her an ultimatum - he said he'd support them for six more months, and if they hadn't made it by then, Stevie would have to get a real job and learn the hard way. Some tough love advice, I guess.

So, at the time Stevie wrote Landslide, she was about a month into that six-month window, and she didn't know what to do. Part of her was afraid to strike out in the world without her father's help, part of her knew she had to let him go and become independent, and part of her was afraid of what would happen in the unknown.

So, I guess you can say the song is partly about her father, but it's mainly about herself and coming to understand herself better as she grew older.

As for the images of her reflection in the snow and the landslide, the snow, the mountains - that all comes from being in Aspen, Colorado, when she wrote the song. She was surrounded by those images. In the song, they represent the precariousness of her situation in life. As she puts it, "I realized everything could tumble." In other words, she knew if she didn't make the right decisions, she could lose everything.

After explaining all of this to my daughter, I told her the meaning behind the song for me. When I listen to the words "I've built my life around you." I think of my children and how hard it is on me when they take wings of their own, when they take flight, when they move on with lives of their very own. It has forced me to think about what I will do with my own life when they are all gone. What will I work on personally when my time is not completely focused on them, because like the song says, I have built my whole life around all eight of them!

I hear the words "Take my love and take it down. I climbed a mountain and I turned around. And I saw my reflection in a snow covered hill, and a landslide brought me down." Relationships with people we love are at times difficult and intense. Learning to love ourselves is no easy feat either. We spend so much time and energy coming to new places in these relationships, only to have things spin out of our control. Things happen in life; painful things that sweep us away, like a landslide.

And when she sings, "Oh mirror in the sky, what is love? Can the child in my heart rise above? Can I sail through the changing ocean tide? Can I handle the season's of my life?" For me, these questions strike deep at the heart. I learned a dysfunctional way of thinking as a child and I have fought that thinking pattern my whole life. And like that out of control feeling of being swept away by the very earth beneath one's feet, so often I have struggled to get my thoughts planted firmly on any kind of solid ground.

The image God holds of me is not the image I often times hold of myself. How I long to look up to my Father in Heaven and see my true countenance reflected in Him. So often I have wished I could see myself in His mirror. Can my heart rise above all of the pain I sometimes feel in the battle to overcome myself? No one really has any comprehension of the inward wars I have fought or how painful those struggles have been. Those battles have been different in each season of my life and it always takes an enormous amount of efforting to work through the major obstacles dysfunctional thinking brings.

However, it's true,"Time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I'm getting older too." So here I am in this pattern of learning and growing and finding out who I am and what I'm really made of. Some days I feel bold in my thoughts and abilities. Then there are those times I feel quite weak, and so often overcoming that feeling of weakness feels like climbing a mountain. And like the song expresses, when my doubts come creeping back in, often overtaking me, when things in life fly at me, and I react poorly, surely it feels like I'm tumbling down again in a land slide.

As Des and I rode along, I hit replay on the Ipod one more time. Every time I sing this song I feel like I'm getting stronger. Together Des and I sang loud. I cherish these times in the car when it's just me and my kids, driving and singing all the way to a place where I feel peace. I love driving up that mountain on the way to my place in Bear Lake. It's a reflective drive. I've driven it in every kind of weather. It's symbolic to me. I'm 52 now and I'm definitely getting bolder in life. Each day the longer I live the more I see what's really important and I have learned if I hold on to the fundamental principles my Father in Heaven has given me, I can ride out any slide.