I am still thinking about giving and taking and how that relates to economy. I am still thinking about how what I do relates to money. Here is Wayne Muller on “Enough is Enough”:

Technorati Tags: economy, giving, taking, work

OK. So I am free. Now what? I want someone to tell me what to do. I am afraid of making a mistake. But that doesn’t help. I have my own senses to rely upon. What is beauty? What is my inclination? How can I do all of this without ideation? This is where I guess I need to go quiet. My mind is limited by my thought processes. But maybe my mind is bigger than my thought processes. Or my thoughts.

Some things feel good. Some things don’t. Are these feelings based on ideation? Not always. If I really get clear, patterns emerge which seem to be more than just my conception. Or maybe not. I do my best. We all do our best. Like following the notes of music that come. But why do they come the way they do? I don’t know. Is it me or is it something beyond me? I don’t have any way of knowing.

Technorati Tags: creative process, fluidity

Many months ago when I first performed “Bursting” for my friend, I came to the line that says, “Lines and measurements, gridlock to life”, and I saw him flinch. He is an artist. Line and measurement are intrinsic to art, and for that matter I suppose, any moment in this life we are in.

Whether I choose to admit it or accept it or not, I am in this life. I am in this body which is in this skin sitting on this very chair. I do spend my time in certain ways which certainly can be looked at from a myriad of perspectives, but I can’t get away from the fact that perspectives exist and whether you look from this angle or that, you are limited within a point of view.

At least until I get beyond the fear of it all and let the waves carry me. But how do I explain that to myself or anyone else? I don’t know what that means.

Forget that. Love. Focus on the love and it doesn’t matter. The love carries you through the lines and definitions carrying you from limitation to expansion on more and more beautiful waves of experience.

Again, I don’t know what that means. But I won’t try too hard to figure it out.

I have had a real disdain for business. For vocations. But I only have had disdain for vocations because I think of them as business. The exchange of money. I think of it as being a grasping, greedy, cut-throat activity where people are looking at each other as adversaries in the pursuit of survival. An activity which turns people toward hatred and fear. This has been my extremely limiting belief.

I think that this is a point of view that many people share, though. But I have hope that it is changing. I think that it is changing in me. I have always wanted to focus on love. But somehow, putting love into that which makes money has seemed like throwing light into a limitless well to me. Like the light disappears and is wasted. Most of the time, I guess I still believe that. I am just beginning to question that.

It has seemed to me like so many things which are of inestimable value are not valued at all economically. Like home and hearth. Like friendship. Like love. But to start to put a dollar sign on these things turns them into commodities. You shouldn’t have to pay for any of these things. But sometimes I think that these are the things that I truly do have to offer, and because I want to focus my energies on them, I am going to starve. I have been told repeatedly that this is not the case. But I just don’t get it yet.

I wrote earlier about a job that I took on for the past month. It has been one of the hardest and most fulfilling things I have done in my life. I love it. But it doesn’t pay enough to live on. So how do I create or find that which will actually pay my bills and yet be something that can carry all of that love and life that I have to offer?

Maybe as I widen my view and begin to not just accept, but love the lines, variations and spectrums within my own life, life may support me more. To love and accept the light, I need to love and accept each color in the spectrum. To become a part of the flow I need to fall and rise and fall again.

Technorati Tags: art, love, Selling out

“I’m so tired, I haven’t slept a wink
I’m so tired, my mind is on the blink
I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink
No,no,no.”

I love the Beatles.

And I am so tired. But gratified. But I wonder whether I can keep this up. I asked for this, friends. I asked for work to keep myself afloat that would mean something. And I tell you, I have found it.

I’m filling in for a teacher at a school for kids with “emotional issues”. I am finding myself more the student than the teacher. But trust is developing, I believe. I’m also still running the business that I have run for the past eight years. But then how to do the music? How to keep up with my practices? I guess I’ll just have to figure it out. People do.

Earlier, I mentioned what I believe is the cause of my distress. I since changed the post. It is easy to blame someone else for your own pain. It seems really natural to do so. But when it comes right down to it, what I experience in my world has everything to do with what I do in my life, what I choose to believe, and whether I own up to the choices that I make.

I am so lucky to be where I am now. I have some ideas about what I want to do which excite me. I love the friends that I am surrounded by. Connections with people are very important to me. I want to help other people find connections too. Music is so basic to me, that may be an avenue which I use, but making a living is really tough through art. My impression is that it may be harder still when you stay true to your heart in the art, but I may be wrong about that. I really don’t know much about it. I just see the glitz and surface sheen of so much of what seems to be financially successful. That may be just a perception I have.

I have been thinking for a while that I may use my music through special education: music therapy, I guess. But wouldn’t it be nice if music and other art could be used as an educational avenue in some local cooperative effort.

Technorati Tags: abuse, future

Ervin Laszlo is a systems philosopher and a concert pianist. He began with a focus on music and spread that focus to develop theories of interconnectedness on all levels. I hope it is OK that I simply place his words and image here so that you can all get a taste of this individual who presents a direction that could increase our chances of surviving and flourishing. The following is one of his messages about the challenges we face and the direction we could follow:

“In the first decade of the 21st century we face the choice between living in the last decade of an unsustainable, crisis-prone civilization, or in the first of a new and more peaceful world.

The world we have created is changing under our feet. On New Year’s eve the Russians celebrated in the former Red Square without a trace of ice and snow; in January New Yorkers walked in Central Park in shirtsleeves; the center of Greenland is taken up by an unfrozen lake the size of Lake Michigan, Lake Superior and Lake Eyrie combined, and there is hardly any of the legendary snow left on top of Kilimandjaro.

The climate is just one of many changes under way. Connected with climate change are a host of other processes that are just as prone to change as the ecology: economic, social, and political. In more respects than one, continuing to tread the path we have been treading up till now takes us to a dangerous tipping point.

Interestingly and importantly, also our map of the world is changing: science, too, is in the midst of a paradigm-shift. Understanding the emerging paradigm is important—it shows that the changes we face are not haphazard and chaotic, but have a deep logic of their own. Complex systems such as human societies do not evolve smoothly step by step: their development is highly nonlinear. Step by step they evolve merely to a point, then they reach a threshold of stability and either break down in chaos, or break through to a new way of functioning.

Yet the key contribution of science is not just theory, but a new and vital insight. It is the confirmation of what people have long felt but for what they could not give a rational explanation: our close connection to each other and to the cosmos. As the smallest particles we call quanta are connected with each other throughout space and time, so there are subtle but real connections among living beings throughout the biosphere. Recognizing these connections is vitally important, for it can inspire the solidarity we urgently need to live in harmony with each other and with nature.

The key insight from the sciences can be not only understood; it can also be experienced. To experience our connections with others, with nature, and with all of reality we need to foster inner growth: meditate, pray, open our consciousness to the subtle impressions and intuitions that flow into it when we do not repress them. When we no longer view the world through five slits in the tower but open the roof to the sky we develop empathy with other people and other cultures and sensitivity to animals, plants and the whole of the biosphere. ”

Here is a video of Dr. Laszlo talking about his own life, and the development of his ideas.

Technorati Tags: climate change, Ervin Laszlo, survival, sutainable transformation, systems philosophy

I am still thinking about the words.  The fact is, notes can be limiting too.  But somehow they come.  Maybe it is the process I use to find the words that is limiting.

In a sense, I let the notes come to me.  But I am trying to find the words.  I am just a container through which the notes come.  But I am trying to control the words.  Maybe this is the difference.

I have been hesitant to write lyrics for my songs for a while now. I did write one song with lyrics a few months ago. But usually, I can’t seem to fit what I want to convey into words.

It could be that my level of craft is not up to snuff in my use of words. Words seem too tight. They hone in on a thought. I don’t want my thoughts to be captured that way.

Feels to me like when I try to hone in on a thing, its meaning becomes more elusive. You try to pinpoint a thing and somehow the space grows around it, and it is no longer as definable as you once thought. Like particles. I never studied physics. But I have heard that if you study small “things” on a nano scale called particles, their behavior changes depending on whether they are observed or not.

Maybe it is this rational analytic process of thought which is self limiting. Maybe it just goes in circles after a while. I don’t know. How can I? I may just be going in circles myself.

So I give up. Well, part of the time, anyway. Sometimes I seem to be able to convey so much more when I wail and growl and create my own language and just send my raw emotions through that avenue.

I have a friend who is an artist who encourages me to think outside of the box in regards to my own art. At my friend’s suggestion, I went down to see an exhibition of Xu Bing’s art at the Williams Art Center at Lafayette College in Easton. There is a book there which must be a part of a work called Books from the Sky The piece was created through a long painstaking process of carving small wooden blocks with imaginary Chinese characters and using those characters to print the book I saw and a lot more. The book I saw was put together with rice paper, traditional Chinese binding and water based ink. The book is beautifully crafted, but the characters used are made up. The book does not actually say anything. There were other works there as well, and they all spoke to the relationship between meaning and language.

There seems to be a lot similarity in the different ways in which we humans express. I guess it says something about what it means to be human. Or does it? Sometimes it seems like the shape of a thing on the outside has little relationship with what is on the inside. There is so much to know. Yet, maybe silence will tell me more.

Technorati Tags: art, language, meaning, Xu Bing

What is it about Rock and Roll? It is so much fun to play. It is so simple but packs such a wallop. I have been playing some simple bluesy rock and roll lately. That’s what has been coming out of me much of the time. Generally it is very happy music. Bluesy-happy? Somehow, yes.

I don’t know much about structure in music. I took piano lessons when I was 5 or 6 years old. I learned how to read notes then. I guess I progressed into the second book of piano music. I learned to use two hands in my playing and in interpreting the notes at the same time! I started writing songs at the same time I picked up the guitar when I was nine. My first song was called, “Oh, My Little Gerbils”.

When I was in seventh grade I had a music class where I learned that songs can be written AA BB structure, or ABAB structure. I guess I must have learned a little bit more than that, but I don’t remember now. I did apply some of what I learned to writing music.

Mostly though, I have been a real snob about learning about structure generally. I guess I gave up on “fitting in” in most ways at some point in my teenagerdom. But I realized later that I could have benefited some by learning theory. But then again, I concentrated on theory in a very general sense in college. Actually, I love theory. I want to share ideas.

When I was fourteen, someone gave me a book called Think On These Things by J. Krishnamurti. His writings had a huge effect on me. I carried that book around with me for a couple of years. I used to go walking everywhere as a young teenager with my guitar and a backpack with my journal and that book in it. It was partly through Krishnamurti’s influence that I decided to at least in some ways, rely upon my own perceptions to decide what is and is not true, and to realize the influence that the world has upon me in developing those perceptions. I decided that I wasn’t going to let anyone tell me what the truth of anything was, including any truth about music.

I guess, though, I did end up compromising myself in some ways. But now, as I have said so many times now in earlier posts, I want to learn. I want to listen. And I want to share.

I think the next time I get on stage at the Wildflower I will express my desire to learn a little about Rock and Roll. There are some amazing folks there. I would love to try to play Rock and Roll with some of them. For Fun. What better goal is there?

Technorati Tags: Krishnamurti, Rock and Roll

I spoke in an earlier post about singing through different parts of my body. I said that I discovered that the quality of the sound and the emotional content change as I explore different areas.

Since I started being more aware of my own inner processes in the past couple of years, I have learned about chakras and a little about what the meanings are in the different regions along the spine in the front and the back. The concept really isn’t that far out. It’s not unusual to hear people talk about a “gut feeling” or a “guttural sound” or “speaking from the heart”.

I think that to a large degree, people have come to judge the lower chakras, those that are more connected to the earth, as lowly and less deserving of attention. These areas are connected with basic survival instincts, security, money, home, appetites for food and sex.

These needs and instincts have been used as weaknesses; as tendencies to manipulate. We manage these needs of our own and each other with a focus other than love. We exploit ourselves and each other just as we exploit the earth itself. I want  to focus love and attention on these lower chakras especially. Maybe it is OK to be so very human. Maybe we need to accept each other’s humanness. Maybe it is OK to love and accept the very materiality of the earth. Maybe it is OK to be here, really here. Maybe here can actually be heaven.

My music is responding by coming from a gut level. It is often gravelly and very connected to my body. I can’t help but move as I play and sing. And I don’t want to intellectualize it. It is, I believe, what often is considered primitive; a wisdom that I believe is important now to offset a world which is so out of balance. The outward world seems to be based so very much on control, manipulation and exploitation. And perhaps also the inner world which has its counterpart in the control that we feel we need to exert over our bodies, seeing our bodies, and perhaps our very souls as simply objects to manage.

We need to remember that those “objects”, those bodies and souls are our very being. We really are alive. We really do exist. It is easy to lose track of our present reality when so much of our life is connected to computers, TV’s and cell phones. Maybe I can’t speak for anyone other than myself. I must open my eyes. I must do everything I can to save this thing while there is still time.

I am still so preoccupied, I spend most of my time in my brain. But I am finding my music to be an avenue which brings me back to a fuller perspective which includes my heart, my emotions and my great desire to survive.

I have a hard time putting all of this into words. I am used to using words in a narrow way. The best poetry can convey amazing depth of feeling and more. Perhaps this blog can be my practice in bringing words to that which I want to convey. What I want to convey feels so big and undefined to me, that I find it difficult to begin. My focus is general. It is both upward and downward. It reaches up to God, (and I am not even sure what I mean by that), and downward through my own body and self with all of my foibles and roots itself into the earth. I want to draw nourishment from both directions just like a plant. I feel like I have been focusing so hard lately on the sun that I have forgotten that I also need water and nutrients. The earth feels so arid right now. We need to take care of the earth.

Technorati Tags: appetites, chakras, earth, home, money, primitive, qiging, security, survival, wisdom