How a single flower opened the door to a lifelong dialogue between self and world.
In the early pages of The Echo and the Voice, a moment unfolds quietly: a young girl steps onto a stage and reads a poem aloud. Her words—borrowed from Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips”—drift through the room, brushing against a young boy’s memory like the wind over snow. That boy is Jonas Wilder, and this is the moment where his Voice—his deep, inner response to the world—first begins to stir.
The poem she reads is heavy, hushed, and haunting. But Jonas hears something else. He doesn’t yet understand the pain beneath her words—but he knows what tulips mean to him. They’re not symbols of intrusion or sorrow. They’re alive. They’re defiant. They push up through frozen dirt like little rebels in full color, unapologetically blooming where the world still sleeps. Jonas feels it in his bones—and so, like any boy who listens more than he speaks, he reaches for a pencil and starts to write.
That moment became the origin of “Tulips Don’t Wait”—the first original song in the novel and the earliest creative act Jonas makes that isn’t reactive, but expressive. What makes this song special is not just the lyric, but the process that shaped it. Because Jonas is only seven years old when he writes it, the song had to be:
- Childlike, but not childish
- Simple, but not simplistic
- Playful, yet carrying the seed of deeper truths
We approached it like a found object: something scrawled on a napkin in a moment of quiet revelation. The challenge was balancing age-appropriate language with the emotional depth Jonas carries—his natural connection to the world around him, and his instinct to relate not to things, but with them.
It blinked and said, “Can you hear me?”
I giggled and said, “Yes, my dear-y.
With those lines, Jonas’s gift came into view: he doesn’t just observe beauty—he enters into relationship with it. This isn’t fantasy; it’s a subtle act of sentient recognition. The world speaks, and Jonas answers—not with analysis, but with affection. That single exchange carries the essence of the entire book: the journey from silence to self-expression, from cultural echoes to inner voice.
Later refinements grounded the chorus more clearly in Jonas’s sensory world. The line:
They poke their heads through the frozen side
felt abstract—too vertical, too vague. So we replaced it with something truer to the earth he knows:
They pop right up from the cold outside
Simple. Accurate. Joyfully defiant.
The result is a song that sounds like something a seven-year-old might write, but means something timeless. “Tulips Don’t Wait” isn’t just a lyric. It’s the moment Jonas first chooses his own meaning—his own metaphor—over someone else’s.
It’s the beginning of a life that won’t wait to bloom.
Every song starts with a whisper. Every voice begins by listening.
If you felt that spark in Jonas’s story, I invite you to subscribe and stay close as we keep listening together.