In the wood, I’ve been listening to the sound of falling leaves, acorns landing with soft thuds, the sharp bark of deer, birds calling through the trees, and the low rustle of wind through branches. These are the sounds that usually fill my days there.
But every so often, I’ve stepped back into the world beyond, just long enough to play a song. And the one that has followed me through the week holding space at a Vision Quest is The Fate of Ophelia by Taylor Swift.
Not the kind of music people expect a woman in her late sixties to have on repeat, yet it’s been circling in my head for days. I don’t even know if it’s the words that draw me in. It’s more the feeling of it, the way the melody moves, the pauses, the gradual swell and release.
There’s something haunting about it, but not sad. It begins quietly, like sound travelling through water, then builds with an undercurrent of pulse and lift, a sense of tension that never fully resolves.
Each time I listen, I feel it through my body rather than my mind. I don’t sing along; I just let it move through me.
I’ve realised that this is often how I connect with music now.
I don’t listen to follow the lyrics or to keep up with what’s current. I listen for what stirs. For what makes something inside me shift. Some songs do it in the first few bars, others creep up over time. This one feels like a deep breath, that moment when you rise to the surface after being under for a while.
How we listen changes
In youth, music often defines who we are. It’s what we share, what we identify with, what we use to stake our claim in the world. Later, it becomes something else entirely. Or it does to me.
I start to hear the spaces between sounds. I notice tone, depth, texture. I feel the rhythm rather than dance to it.
With age, does the way we listen becomes quieter, more interior? For me, music becomes less about belonging and more about being.
Sometimes it connects us back to younger versions of ourselves, the teenager who played albums in a darkened room, or the woman who sang along while driving with the windows down. But often it meets us right where we are now: layered, reflective, still open to being moved.
It reminds me that even as the body slows, emotion doesn’t. We may no longer chase the noise of youth, but we’re still porous to beauty. Maybe even more so. We hear what others miss because we’ve learned how to listen for what matters.
Resonance beyond words
I think that’s what this song does for me. It’s built around contrast – fragility and strength, descent and rescue, water and light. You can hear it in the structure: the still beginning, the growing pulse, the final lift that feels like surfacing. It’s the sound of surviving something, even if you can’t name what that something is.
And that, I think, is why it resonates. The older we get, the more we recognise ourselves in those shapes; the falling, the surfacing, the quiet after. Music like this speaks to the deep part of us that has lived through things and still keeps rising.
It doesn’t matter that Taylor Swift and I are from different generations. Emotion has no age. The chords still travel through the same nervous system, the same pulse of being alive.
Music as meaning
In later life, meaning often comes not from what’s new but from how we receive things.
We read more slowly, we notice light differently, we listen with more space around the sound.
Music becomes a form of reflection: a mirror that doesn’t ask us to analyse, only to feel.
When I sit at my woodland basecamp, the sounds of the forest mix with whatever’s playing in my head. Birdsong meets bassline. The track fades, but the rhythm stays. The same pulse that runs through branches, rivers, and people. Sometimes I hum a fragment and it feels less like remembering a song and more like remembering a part of myself.
Perhaps that’s what music gives us as we age: a reminder that we are still responsive, still capable of wonder. It keeps us connected to vitality, even when life has become quieter.
The songs that stay
We can’t always explain why a certain song finds us. Sometimes it’s simply that the emotional landscape fits our own. Sometimes it’s timing, a song arriving when we need to be reminded that we still feel.
The Fate of Ophelia isn’t from my era, but it found me anyway.
And that, in itself, feels important. It’s proof that we don’t have to stay within the soundtrack of our past. We can keep discovering new sounds, new feelings, new ways to be moved.
