Track 3: They Would Run, Joyous

Bonus Liner Notes (Part 4)

Image: Devon Gillott

{This is Part 4 in a series of posts I’ve been sharing about the songs on my new album, “Songs For a Quiet Day”, released August 23, 2025.}

My grandmother told me this story—casually mentioned it, really—in the kitchen of her small, white house on a warm summer day as the sweet smell of her roses wafted in through the open windows.

“What was the war like?” I’d asked her. I was eight or nine. She’d been talking to my mother about the first five years of her life in London before she and her parents and siblings immigrated to Canada and settled in the prairies. She said she didn’t remember much about the war but did remember the air-raid siren and having to hide in the bomb shelters.

Were you scared? I asked her.

She thought for a moment. “No. In fact, I remember it being fun.”

Then she told me about all the kids running outside afterward to collect torn pieces of the bombshells.

For a long time, I thought this was a story of human resilience—all those sweet kids making the best of a bad situation!—but after studying somatic healing modalities, I now see it as a story about metabolized trauma.

The current understanding of trauma emphasizes that it’s not *what* happened (threatening event or situation) but *how* the body processed what happened.

There’s an initial “charge” that comes into the body when we perceive threat. This fight/flight impulse causes our bodies to reflexively brace and enter an autonomic nervous system response that propels us into action so we can get out of danger.

This physiological charge sets off a cascade of neurobiological reactions: the heart pumps blood to our large muscle groups readying us for action. Adrenaline and cortisol rush through our system, making us quick and alert. Digestion slows. Breathing becomes more shallow. The brain regions responsible for hyper-focus and motivation experience increased neural activity, while non-essential regions, like those responsible for curiosity, connection and narrative memory, experience decreased activity. Once the threat has been escaped or fought off, our bodies release the charge and return to homeostasis—a state of balance and well-being. The adrenaline and cortisol is flushed from our system. Our breath deepens and settles. The event recedes from the present into the past.

Trauma happens when this charge isn’t able to be released. What trauma pioneers like Dr. Peter Levine have brought to light is that the physical expression of this charge is essential to recovery. The cycle of activation needs to complete in order for the body to regulate. Without completion, the charge stays stuck in the body as a freeze response and what should have become “that happened and now it’s over,” becomes a physiological reliving of the incident, the past continuously imposing itself on the present.

Somatic trauma modalities (my training is in Focalizing) offer tools for relating to the felt-sense of a long-held experience in the body so that the unexpressed charge can physically express and metabolize.

But if this can somehow happen at the time of the incident . . .

Which brings me back to my grandmother’s story.

I’m picturing the air raid over London, circa 1915. There’s the blare of the alarm; each family member startles. Forks and knives are dropped mid-mouthful at a dinner table. Laundry just pulled from the line is left in a crumpled heap in the basket. Bread dough just placed in a hot oven is abandoned, half-baked, in the now-cooling oven.

The children are hustled out of the house. Ducking inside the bomb shelter, their bodies tense at the whine of approaching planes, then the sound of bombs exploding in the city streets. Everyone waits, braced and tight. Finally, the explosions quiet. Finally, the whir of the plane engines grows faint and recedes into the distance. Everyone is frozen in place.

And then the parents nod and the children rush out of the shelter into the empty roads. They are running, moving their bodies, flailing their limbs, skipping, racing each other, releasing all that stored charge as they collect torn pieces of the bombshells. As they move, they express, they laugh, they return to homeostasis, to well-being.

75 years later, my grandmother can tell the story, not from the shadow of trauma, but from a felt-sense of: “that happened and then it was over”.

And, of course, I can’t know this for sure, but I suspect it had something to do with the running.

~

THEY WOULD RUN, JOYOUS

My grandmother told me a story:
That when she was a five-year old child
In London during World War 1
Alarms would sound
& families would go together
Into the bomb shelters
To wait for the air raids to pass over
And after the planes were gone
The children would run, joyous
Out into the city streets
To gather the shards of the bomb shells
As if they were birthday party favours
Or candy pieces thrown during a parade