Beneath The Gate

Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

My oldest daughter was adopted from China. When we adopted her they handed us a very slim file filled with a lot of official looking stamps and signatures but not much information. But there was a police document that said that she was found beneath the Tax Bureau Gate on the morning of September 26, 1997. It was explained to us that these abandoned children are often left outside a government building in the hopes that they will be found quickly by someone responsible enough to contact the authorities.

A large chunk of the Miles From Our Home album was about wading through the adoption process and the frustrations of knowing that your child is out there, but red tape and thousands of miles sit between you and her. A large part of Open was about finding oneself in a whole new world filled with love, hope, fear and mystery: the terrifying world of parenthood. As we got closer to adopting and meeting our daughter, my wife and I would often look up at the moon and wonder if she, too, would be gazing at the same moon tonight, half a world away.

My daughter goes off to college this year, she is a rock climber who competes at the national level, she just finished a 52 day canoe trip above the Arctic circle, she is a wonder. The trajectory of a single life is an astonishing thing.