In today’s episode of Healing from Within your host, Sheryl Glick interviews Alex Woodard (http://www.alexwoodard.com/), songwriter/author of For The Sender (Love Is Not A Feeling). Alex tells the story of his own journey from Southern California to the wide open skies of Southern Idaho, as he relates true stories of love, hardship and loss expressed in the letters he is given by people he meets and the songs he is inspired to write for each letter reflecting an understanding of what love really is and how we may continue to love even if we are not able to still be with the people we love.
Sheryl expresses, that listeners of Healing from Within are aware of, that the voices, words and music that talk to the highest part of our inner soul being is a way of remembering our true nature and the possibilities for courageous and mindful living from within, empowering us to realize our talents and inner wisdom for a fulfilling human conscious life experience.
In Alex’s book, For The Sender, Sheryl and Alex discuss several of the letters Alex received showing the indomitable spirit that may find its way to surviving and thriving in the most challenging of circumstance: such as a man carrying his dying friend home over the rocks, a boy taking a bullet for his classmates, a father with brain cancer who champions his son’s dream, and a misunderstood horse who helps an autistic child fly and feel free from the restrictions of his disease. Sheryl and Alex will also explore the nature of true love, healing and relating to our own developmental needs, to the world, and to others.
Alex himself was inspired to write a letter to his dog, a black Labrador Retriever after she died and was able to share the love and joy that he had experienced in their time together much like the letters he received from people who were able to see the beauty coming out of the wreckage of their own tragedies. The song written for these feelings was “Stand By Me”. Alex writes “This project unearths something in the rich dirt of my dreams that loves to write.” However, needing to earn a living made Alex think about the what-ifs and how would he be able to earn a living while continuing to write songs about letters of love. Several coincidences aid Alex in moving past his concern of earning a living and he is motivated and driven to continue writing these songs for the letter writers. Several musicians from his past miraculously appear and are able to assist him. Alex is aware of his slowly diminishing group of songwriter friends as they take on new responsibilities and lifestyles built on family and a new era ahead. So much change in Alex’s life makes him realize that like nature, our lives move through undeniable changes as our soul matures and our experiences offer us opportunities to experience love in its many facets.
After recording the song Bullet, written in response to the letter by Scarlett Lewis for her son Jesse who was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Alex realizes how much this mother misses the physical side of Jesse but what she really loves about him is something that hasn’t gone anywhere and can’t be taken away. Alex is reminded of his high school physics teacher who talked about the law of energy and how it could never be destroyed only transferred. Alex refers to the whatever there is in an individual that never goes away and realizes it is the Soul.
In response to that thought, Alex has written, “A light rain drifts down from the darkening sky outside as I sink into the couch, all kinds of drained from recording Bullet. A semi-lucid haze somewhere between being awake and asleep settles around me and I look out the window at the trails of water trickling down the glass. My mind starts to wander and I land on the thought that there’s nothing I can do to stop the rain. I can’t hold it back or change it or fix it and if I could I’d be disrupting a cycle that has run for ages,
