I’ve been having fun taking public domain poems and setting them to music recently. Here’s a little spring fever piece by Robert Frost, very roughly recorded by yours truly. May you very soon find the brown beneath the white, wherever you live in the northern hemisphere anyway!
Heaven and the music industry* have twisted themselves together in my brambled mind. I mean the heaven I used to believe in, and the music industry I used to dream about, and the way they both still affect me on a gut level I’ve not paused to think about before.
Something about being chosen, about higher-ups moving in mysterious ways, about knowing the right people, being in the right place at the right time.
And clashing with that, having a voice and a soul that feel too large for my timid self, that come tearing out sideways if I try to box them up – but not having enough of the mysterious something – the look, the drive, the belief, the secret decoder – to make it with the gatekeepers.
Something about scarcity, about me and scads of people I know or have heard, who keep making music and living big soulful lives because what else can they do? – and the airwaves being just too crowded, the need for the higher-ups to choose only some, the ones who work the hardest, clamor the loudest, get born into the right family at the right time.
And how I don’t feel like I really want to be chosen in a system like that, and how I feel more alive outside the contrived paradise, where kids and old people and loud people and shy people and generally awkward people and anyone else below the industry standard are making their music and living their lives, sans audience, sans halo.
No mansion for me, and no platinum record. I’ll just be out on the front steps of heaven, singing my guts out** with the rest of the unchosen.
*Whatever heaven may be, this ain’t it; and “the music industry” is hardly such an easily-generalized monolith, and there are many highly successful musicians making music I love and doing good authentic work. This post is about opting out of elitist mentalities, wherever they crop up, and not letting fear of being unchosen keep us from being who we really are, making music whether anyone listens or not, searching our souls despite the disapproval of the gatekeepers of faith or tradition or clout in any form.
**“You’ve been singing your guts out / Is that not enough to do?” – I love this phrase from a Luka Bloom song, whose lyrics also seem relevant to this post: http://www.lukabloom.com/lyrics/riverside_album/the-one/
Extra credit – these songs:
[I wrote this after a school-morning parenting moment with my preteen daughter earlier this year. Sometimes I am just as amused at my words in moments like these as I am at my daughter’s!]
You absolutely adore your teacher, and he fiercely cares for his students. One day when I am volunteering in the lunch room you walk in and sit down, and you are crying. Your teacher confides in me that he doesn’t get it why you cry sometimes and can’t say why.
I get it. You know why, but it’s not a talking kind of thing. You and I sat on the couch this morning and tried using words to unravel the problem, but it only wound tighter, tightening along with your shoulders, along with my tone of voice.
Using words, we outlined the problem something like this:
You need to make your lunch so you’re ready for school.
I can’t. My life is so hard. I’m lonely. I hate it here. I want ramen noodles. Please buy me ramen noodles. We don’t have anything I can make for lunch.
I just went shopping yesterday. We have plenty of food.
No we don’t.
Yes we do.
No we don’t.
How have I failed so miserably as a parent? We need to leave this country. You need to see how most people live. You have clean water and more than enough food and a safe place to live every day. You get to go to school every day, and have few other responsibilities in life. How can I show this to you?
You hate me. I make you feel like you’re a bad parent. I need to leave. I’ll move somewhere else. You don’t want me.
Words, which I love, often fail me in my parenting efforts. So I close my arms around you, my dear miserable child, and close my mouth. Your shoulders relax, my throat loosens, and eventually, you are in the kitchen making your lunch and singing.
Something I read once says that each of us can find ourselves in one (or maybe more) of the characters in the Winnie the Pooh stories. For instance, Eeyore with a dash of Rabbit and a smidgen of Owl feels like a decent description of myself. (In other words, sadsack with a penchant for agendas and a bit of a know-it-all.) But those three characters are loved in the Hundred-Acre-Wood, and the stories wouldn’t be the same without them. It takes a village, and all that . . .
I was sifting through some past morning pages (I try – key word is TRY – to write a little bit every morning), and found the following few paragraphs. I think this is what was in my mind when I wrote the poem I published in the last post:
I’d like to write bright shiny things, because I want to have bright shiny things to show to other people. Bright shiny songs to pull out of my back pocket. Bright shiny blog posts to bring smiles and good vibes. Bright shiny everything so I stop looking sad and depressed.
But in truth, I am sad and depressed. Not clinically, not chronically, just characteristically on a consistent basis. When I am smiling or laughing, it’s real. But when I’m not, that’s real too. I’m sorry, but I’m one of “those people” – whose mind says, “what for?” when her heart says, “let’s dance!” Who loves a good starry night, a brilliant sunset, but feels the chill of dark matter and endless space out there beyond the atmosphere. Who sees the transcendent qualities in her fellow humans and herself, even as she sees great apes dressed up in finery, bodies destined for decay.
What I’m learning is to let the mind be what it will, but not to let it rule me. My heart, which knows in different ways, also has bad days, but they don’t always coincide with my mind’s bad days.
And my body, in which heart and mind experience life, has the best record for good days. It’s my eyes, my skin, my ears and nose and tongue that find delight without needing explanations, without needing a context of future and meaning to enjoy the life coursing through my body every moment.
Which Pooh character (or characters) are you? And do you notice harmony and disharmony in your own experience of body, mind and heart?
Julia Bloom 