The White Rose
Sometimes songs are not written.
Sometimes they simply grow quietly out of whatever season you happen to be living through.
This one came out of heat, sickness, insects, fever, separation, and white roses blooming beside my house at exactly the wrong — or perhaps right — moment.
Back in mid-April, Gerard disappeared off into the Brazilian jungle searching for clarity. (He had previously attended the União do Vegetal (UDV) – a Brazilian-origin Christian Spiritist religion centered on spiritual growth through the sacramental use of Hoasca tea in Gainesville – and was invited by a connection from this group to go to Brazil.) Whilst there he participated in Ayahuasca ceremonies, jungle tribes, smoke, medicine tea, visions, and whatever else came with that world. When he finally returned to Florida a week later, he looked utterly broken down.
His skin had turned dark brown from the sun, but what shocked me most were the hundreds of tiny black bites covering his arms and legs. The jungle had literally eaten him alive.
At first they looked like ordinary insect bites.
Then they became sores.
Pus-filled wounds spreading across his skin until for a few days he could barely walk at all.
The entire thing felt surreal — like someone returning from another world carrying its marks back with them.
Not long afterward, Florida heat started becoming unbearable inside the campervan. Even with AC units and fans running constantly, the humidity wrapped around everything like a wet blanket. Day after day I felt weaker and sicker until eventually I gave up and came back into the house itself just to recover properly.
Shortly after that, Gerard quietly exited again.
No arguments. No dramatic ending. Just distance opening where tension used to live.
Then came the fever.
Not ordinary heat sickness either. Something heavier. Fever drifting through me for a couple of days. Exhaustion. Weakness. One of those strange illnesses where you almost feel detached from your own body.
And right in the middle of that, I suddenly received a text out of the blue from Gerard:
“Are you ok?”
Which honestly felt strange considering the silence beforehand.
A few days later, love bug season arrived in Florida.
Except something bizarre started happening.
My house was being swarmed.
Not the neighborhood. (Cos I checked all nearby houses ->)
Not nearby houses. Mine.
The back door. The windows. My car. Every morning and evening I was hosing hundreds of them away. Through the cat flap they fell into the back room by the dozens, sometimes hundreds, piling silently across the floor.
At first I couldn’t understand it.
Then I noticed the smell.
Outside the back door, the white rose bush was in full bloom. Was it attracting them?
That was the moment the idea for “The White Rose” came to me.
The white rose blooming quietly beside the doorway while black wings gathered around it in the suffocating summer heat.
Beauty and decay occupying the same space.
Life and death sharing one room.
And beneath all of it sat this strange biblical undertone that I couldn’t shake — flowers fading, flesh returning to dust, flies consuming what is mortal, yet something fragrant still surviving inside the corruption.
That became the heart of The White Rose.
Not really a song about roses.
Not even really about insects.
But about the strange seasons of life where everything seems to exist together at once:
beauty,
rot,
mercy,
fever,
memory,
death,
silence,
hope.
The imagery became even stronger once I created the hourglass artwork — the red rose suspended in the upper chamber while its roots remain hidden below as sand slowly falls between them. Time feeding both bloom and burial simultaneously.
In many ways, that image became the song.
Because eventually all flesh fades.
1 Peter 1:22-25 — “Love one another intensely from the heart. For you have been given a new birth, not by corruptible, but by incorruptible seed, through the word of the living and enduring God. For ‘all flesh is like grass, and all its glory is like a blossom of the field; the grass withers, and the flower falls off, but the saying of Jehovah endures forever.’ And this ‘saying’ is the good news that was declared to you.”
Everyone carries wounds from somewhere.
Some from jungles.
Some from relationships.
Some from memory.
Some from wandering too far looking for answers.
And yet sometimes, even in those exhausted seasons, something unexpectedly beautiful still blooms beside the door.
LOVE
And a promise of everlasting life.
Song Lyrics
[Verse 1]
The white rose blooms beside the door
The wings gather by the floor
Heat hangs heavy in the air
And fever drifts like whispered prayer
The garden groans beneath the sun
Flesh returns to dust undone
Yet still the white flowers sing
Of another coming King
[Chorus]
Rose of Sharon
White among the dying fields
Rose of Sharon
Fragrant where corruption feeds
Though the flies consume the flesh
And the summer burns the land
Still your beauty rises softly
Like mercy through the sand
[Verse 2]
The wounds of wandering slowly spread
The jungle marked both soul and skin
Smoke and visions fade like rain
But some things still remain within
At the doorway hundreds fall
Tiny wings against the wall
Love circling white perfume
Life and death within one room
[Bridge]
For all flesh is fading grass
And beauty like the flower will pass
Yet truth remains when kingdoms fall
A quiet voice beyond it all
[Chorus]
Rose of Sharon
White among the dying fields
Rose of Sharon
Fragrant where corruption feeds
Though the flies consume the flesh
And the summer burns the land
Still your beauty rises softly
Like mercy through the sand
[Chorus]
Rose of Sharon
White among the dying fields
Rose of Sharon
Fragrant where corruption feeds
Though the flies consume the flesh
And the summer burns the land
Still your beauty rises softly
Like mercy through the sand
