Welcome back to Music In Conversation, where we’re exploring the theme of ROOTS. This month, our storyteller, Amelia Hardy, reminds us that some loves don’t end because the love runs out, but because something else gets in the way. “Our Sun Is Always Rising” comes from one of those loves. 

Where Does the Love Go?

That kind of love doesn’t disappear – it relocates. As E. E. Cummings writes,

“nowhere is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which

grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)”

There’s something about a love like this that feels vast, all-encompassing and impossible to ignore. Its roots grow quietly beneath the surface, shaping how we see the world above. In Amelia’s story, the love she found settled in. It became something rooted and enduring, despite not having a “future” in her above-ground reality.

At the Root: What Stands in the Way

But what made this love especially difficult for Amelia to carry wasn’t the loss of love in its physical form, but what stood in the way of it staying. At the root of that divide: faith.

“We fell in love so quickly / but it wasn’t enough for him / God was his foundation / and Jesus couldn’t be mine.” 

Her song opens with these lines – a gut-wrenching introduction. Their connection was immediate, easy, the most natural thing in the world. But underneath all that goodness was this quiet cracking and slow crumbling of foundational difference. It was too hard to meet each other where they were. If they’d forced it, it wouldn’t have been honest, and that may have undone the goodness altogether. Slowly, the two realized that love, on its own, wasn’t enough.

What stayed with me wasn’t just the loss, but the feeling of what could have been. There’s a version of them that might have existed in a different world – one without timelines, and without the need to choose between love and belief.

The Cloud

“I’d sit on a cloud with you / legs hanging over the edge”…

“Where I picture us now / time doesn’t exist / our sun is always rising.” 

We’re transported here to an imagined world where peacefulness takes the form of forever. There’s a kind of emotional stillness on the cloud – a safeness that feels deeply familiar. It’s the kind of place we all retreat to at times, whether we realize it or not.

This could be what E. E. Cummings is getting at when he writes,

“and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant 

and whatever a sun will always sing is you”

The people we love don’t usually leave us for good – they make homes in new places. They find their way into the moon, the sun, in the quiet, glowing places we return to when we need them. 

Something else that struck me in my sessions with Amelia was the ease with which she returned to the cloud. I felt like a place she knew well – somewhere she had returned to again and again. It became clear that her song wasn’t about the tragedy of an ended relationship, but the strength she built to continue after it. 

Amelia reminds us to return to our own clouds more often– to take comfort in the imagined, to let our busy minds soften. To choose, even briefly, a world where time loosens its grip. Perhaps something in us can always rest at the root.

What’s your version of Amelia’s cloud? How have you managed losing something you love? Share your story with us by emailing Hazel at [email protected].