Through Darkness Light Shall Break

As is the case with many of my pieces, the title didn’t come to me until the piece was almost complete. Throughout the entire time I was composing the piece I knew what kind of emotions I wanted to convey but I just couldn’t figure out how to put my thoughts into words for a title. The title finally came to me as I was driving to school one day and saw a mom and her son sitting on a bench waiting for the bus, and as she handed him a doughnut his face lit up with joy. Just a few hundred feet down the road a father zipped up his young daughter’s backpack while she cheerfully awaited the school bus holding what looked to be a birthday balloon. I felt as if I was in one of those slow-motion movie scenes that happens at the end when everything is finally right again. I don’t know what it was about that day that made me take notice of these events, but it got me thinking about the fact that even with all of the horrible events that happen in the world and we see on the news, there is still an immense amount of good that often goes unnoticed in the world around us. This piece is meant to celebrate all of the positive things in our lives, and to remind us that it is those moments that we should define ourselves by and not the negative ones. 

Photo taken at Torrey Pines Gilderport, San Diego CA

by Kristine Llanderal