And now for the final entry in the "story behind the song" series, this time of course the final track "Where Earth & Sky Unite".

The inspiration for this one came from a frustrating experience I had on New Year's Eve last year that left me driving like mad through Brandenburg at dusk looking for a gas station to pick up some last minute supplies before everything closed for the holidays - not an easy thing to do.  I was literally in the middle of nowhere with no GPS or other way of orienting myself or getting some directions and not a soul was around.  I passed through tiny village after tiny village, all like ghost towns.  The sunlight was fading fast and at the point just before complete darkness I looked out over a field and managed to find some solace in a beautiful scene of flat land silhouetted against an icy blue sky and that crisp point that created the horizon instantly registered in my mind as the place "where earth & sky unite".

This idea kept running through my mind for weeks into the new year and I considered writing something about the actual experience that had inspired it but somehow I didn't want to dwell on the idea of driving around lost.  Instead I let the idea take its own direction and eventually found myself thinking about the beauty of nature in general and some of the most important places in nature that I have been lucky enough to see and that instilled a bit of hope in me at critical moments.  But while I was thinking about these places it occured to me that some of them don't even exist anymore - one example being the forest near my childhood home where I spent endless hours playing and exploring.  It is now gone and a subdivision has taken its place.  Sad.  And not the only place where this is happening.

I started to wonder where it would all end, how long it would be before almost all of nature was either destroyed or manipulated to the point of no return, whether the only thing left would be the memories I have of those places.  It also made me realize that I am not sure how much longer I am willing to live in a big city.  The lure of nature and calm and quiet is getting stronger for me, a fairly normal thing I guess for a small town boy who grew up next to a real forest and wetlands.

The only question is, when I am ready to get out of here, will there be anywhere left to go?