The secret ear

In the same way that kinetic energy lurks within all matter as potential energy, sound lurks within all matter as potential vibration. It is in the combination of these seemingly disconnected sounds as they are released that we find the building blocks of music. 

Many of the sounds I use when producing tracks as skincage are built from this sort of hidden sound. I started out by wiring a speaker backward (This was my first lesson in soldering. Thank you James Nickerson wherever you are!) and you can try it out yourself by plugging headphones into the input of your laptop, a tape machine, etc. Now I use contact microphones, which work by producing voltage from vibration which can be recorded as an audio signal, and guitar pickups, which convert movement of ferrous materials like guitar strings in their magnetic field into the same sort of signal.

It takes a while to figure out how to use them properly, but once you do, there is a new dimension to explore. The natural world is full of secret textures waiting to be unlocked, and the man-made world sings electromagnetic mantras beneath the perception of the naked ear.

Here is a track that combines the two, being made entirely of amplified strings played by the wind of a storm.

 

Longing for Grace

Each day now, my first perception is a stirring from the nursery. Some days I hear my daughter’s voice through the baby monitor, and sometimes just through the air. Every so often, I wake up a minute before the sound comes, and feel nothing but simple awareness without the weight of purpose. The sound comes, and duty fills the space. I shuffle off to empty my bladder so that I can give my full attention to the opening acts of the day: changing the diaper and bringing her to still-sleepy Mother for that first sacred meal. As they have their moment, I excuse myself to get the rest of the way into the third dimension.

I was never a morning person, though I find myself occupying the dawn quite frequently. I don’t meant to suggest that I resent these rituals. Truth told, that first glimpse of my daughter’s face is often the most treasured moment of the day, especially if she wakes peacefully and meets my eye with love as I enter the room. To see the smile of your own child, coming to you raw and whole and unaffected, is to bask in the kingdom of Heaven. Each day I accept the challenge of meeting her there, and reflecting that love back to her fully. 

I won’t pretend that I achieve this as well as I’d like to. Though I am happier now than I have ever been and find myself growing up at last, deep beneath my genuine gratitude I often find a certain amorphous sadness. I have no illusions about this being a unique situation or one that deserves particular sympathy. I reckon that, more than anything, it is merely the local echo of a sound which permeates all life on Earth and mankind in particular. I believe it is the silent cry of a weary world, exhausted by the cycle of abuse brought on by delusions of separateness,  longing to return to balance with itself.

That word mankind bothers me. It implies unity among a species which can barely cooperate with itself. It of course includes a bias toward the male in a world where the idea of being male (or gendered at all) is a relatively new one. Because I have a tendency to take things literally, I automatically argue with the word. Man is not kind, as a rule.

I am grateful for all the little lights in the dark that represent exceptions. I am aware that there is, with each new generation, a little less ignorance and a little more empathy. Each new crop of humans finds the beliefs of the last to be antiquated and casts them aside. Quite often I wonder what our little girl, when she is not so little, will believe. 

I very much hope that in twenty years, our family can look back at the tenuous world she was born into and laugh with relief at the progress that has been made. I find that I do not subscribe to the plastic utopia promised by surrender to technology or to the certainty of dystopia (Why do we have this death-urge?) that I once had. When I consider the future, I can only imagine that it is the mystery that it always was. 

I want a better world for our little girl, but also for everyone else. I want a world that runs on cooperation rather than competition. I want a world that is not built on the bones of the invisibly oppressed and lubricated by the blood of the innocent. I do not know if such a world can be built by human hands, but we have to do it anyway. No other work has any real meaning, and I think this is why so many of us feel so hollow at times when we are not distracted, but I can only speak for myself.

So much of what is pushed as normal is simply unsustainable, benefitting only a few at the expense of everyone else, therefore it is insane to cooperate with the status quo. Time is not on our side if we continue to live as if only our own interests matter, and as if the world we must share were our combination playground and toilet. This machine that we are conditioned into participating in can only destroy us in the end. It’s now or never. We need not become one more Rome, or one more dinosaur story in the fossil record. We can beat this. We can get right.

We can no longer look to authority for the solutions. We must choose kindness over exploitation. We must choose uncomfortable truth over willful blindness. We must find ways in our individual lives to subvert, unplug, unlearn, and above all to make the time to listen to the voice beneath the noise which calls us back to service and harmony. 

I sometimes get the oddest feeling. It is as if I have become aware of being a character in a film, and the film is the history of the human experience. I do at times languish, exhausted by the drama and horror that surrounds us despite being ignored. At other times, I get surges of hope, and I feel that, yes, this is a film, and we’re just in the climax. We will come around just in time, like in every other story. We will see the darkness shrink and the truth prevail. We will leave the old ways behind at last. 

The cynic in me, the film critic as it were, expects us to be crushed beneath the weight of our error and perish. I see that voice in many other forms today. It is very loud, and it is easy to succumb to its propaganda. I prefer to believe instead that we will be vindicated, and that no one alive can imagine the glory of a world built with wisdom and love.

I fight daily to stay on the side of that dream.

Musical Interlude

Lyrics:

Why do you dream of pearly white gates, 
high in the air where no bird flies?
No tree grows beyond the sky.

(Our blue sky)

Why do you dream that worms and dogs,
hills and clouds are not like you:
burning light that never dies?

(Our blue spinning sky)

Why do you leave a trail of death?
Air turns brown, trees fall down.
Burn green fields and drive on by.

(Our blue sky)

Could you love God if he didn’t love you
more than rivers, snakes, or wind?
Could you share Heaven with black buzzing flies?

(Our blue spinning sky)

What if this dream you dream with pigs,
you dream with dirt, and this is home?
Is it so wrong to love this light?

(Our blue sky)

Beating a Pale Horse Episode 2: Mark Devries of Speciesism: The Movie

I return with guest Mark Devries, creator of Speciesism: The Movie via the magic of Skype! We talk about the grim realities behind the smokescreen of Big Ag, the true cost of animal exploitation, veganism as direct activism, and the future of mankind. You know, just regular coffee talk.

Visit http://www.speciesismthemovie.com to learn more about Mark's landmark debut documentary, and keep an eye out for him in your local theater! 

"Be Less Warlike and More Starlike" Part One: Hydrate.

Whether you take it from me, Mr. Crowley, who said that "every man and every woman is a star," or Dr. Sagan, who said that we're all "star-stuff," you and I are stars at heart. One must burn in order to shine, and burning is the circulation of energy between states. What ceases to circulate can only stagnate, and stagnation is the road to death. How then do we circulate? 

We're all walking around in the shape of our habits. If you're feeling cramped, it's time to shed skin. I had the following image come to me in a daydream, so I made it physical, then digital, in order to transmit it to you. Consider it a suggestion based on the experience of a stubborn bit of coal who has resisted becoming a diamond until quite recently.

With the exception of "hydrate," the facets of this five-fold circulating path are really up to you to define. I do insist on drinking water, though. On a symbolic level, as the point of the above is to cultivate the discipline that will allow for a natural flow in your life, it would make no sense to omit water. On a literal level, you're made of the stuff, and all of those aggressively-marketed replacements are on a spectrum ranging from harmful-if-abused to straight-up-poison. The more you drink water, the less diminished you are by the effects of toxicity and the more equipped you are to do the other steps. If you leave out the water, you'll find that you spend most of your energy compensating for the lack of it. It's fun to think about the nature of water as you consume it, and Bruce Lee said it better than I, so let's consult him:

Get up early and drink a liter (32 oz, roughly) a day before you have your coffee, breakfast, or anything else. This will flush you out and nutrients can fill the spaces left by exiting toxins. Think of it as a daily cellular renovation project. The body truly is your temple. Keep it ready.

More expansion of the process soon. Start with the water.

Mapping the territory

DISCLAIMER:

I am by no means pretending to be the only person to propose the following concept, even though I am prone to harp on it at this moment in time. I have seen it crop up over and over in my various searches for meaning, and so I figure it's time to pay it the respect it commands.

You will note if you've poked around at all that I am fairly driven by the need to turn over rocks and report on the bugs I have found. Being a bullhorn of doom is not only one-dimensional, the territory is covered. It is my intent to balance out my doom-saying with sooth-saying wherever possible, so let's put aside all the problems and concentrate on solutions. 

At the end of the day, we can trace all the weeds that choke out the sunlight to one root: fear. What do we do about fear? Spray it with love. How do we get to the point where we have enough to go around? First, we have to figure out and deal with the ways in which we interfere with our own connection with love. It's like the tired old sayings from the self-help books keep trying to tell us: You have to start with you.

Right up front, let me shout out to Bill Hicks for putting it so plainly. The choices we make all boil down to choosing between love and fear. I define love as that which connects, feeds, unfolds, moves, grows, changes, and nurtures. Love is the operating system of the Universe, though it may not always be obvious from our point of view. We have a very distorted view of what love is and what it means for us, and I think that creates a lot of unnecessary pain. 

The first thing you can do is be really honest with yourself and define what love means for you. Compare that with your experience. Try to look at things from a third-party perspective if you can. The screen of your experience, just like mine, is covered in dead bugs and acid rain and all the other occlusions that come from constantly comparing your life experience to the story about love that is being sold to all of us. The idea of love we're indoctrinated with is incredibly limited compared to the reality.

The other pole in this system is fear, which constricts, freezes, stagnates, and darkens. There's such a saturation of fear in this culture that even the way we talk about love is couched in fear language. We look at love from a perspective of scarcity instead of a perspective of abundance. As a result, we saddle our partners, family, and friends with the responsibility of providing us with it, rather than taking our responsibility to share the love we already have. 

Love is not something you go get. Love is something you already have. Your ability to connect with that internal source is no doubt damaged in some way, but repair is possible. The first step is to acknowledge that it exists and to take that responsibility. This is a very, very hard truth, and I am still learning how to do it myself, but I can tell you that the effort is rewarded. Love and fear reinforce themselves as they are fed by your actions. The harder you work to recognize, appreciate, and cultivate love, the more of it you will find that you have. The harder you work to distance yourself from the people who love you, the easier it is for those connections to dwindle and end.

You are the source of love in your life. If you accept it, fully, you won't need to play the standard game anymore. You won't have a mirage to chase, and so when you encounter love naturally, you can simply recognize and open yourself to it. Now when you do find someone who compliments you and frees you to be yourself, it's easy to give them all the credit. What you've found in a true partner is a polished mirror, allowing you to see yourself clearly. This may reveal work you have to do on yourself or or in the world, and that's a blessing, as much as it hurts up front.

I believe that we are all wired together under the board, in ways that are not always obvious or logical. The more we do to cultivate love, the better we make the bigger picture. At the end of the day, all choices are, at their root, between love or fear. If you choose love, you move toward growth, development, novelty, understanding, and the happiness that goes with those things. If you choose fear, you move toward a shrinking, a shutting down, and death, really. Love or fear, life or death. It all comes down to that.

Death is inevitable, and part of the deal, but you don't get extra points for walking around dead for decades before your time. You're alive here and now, so you might as well start clearing the rocks out of the road. I like to wax on and on about this stuff, but having practical actions to take is where the blood of this work is, so let's start.

I invite you to examine your life. Look at your behavior, toward yourself, your friends, your family, your lover, and don't leave out strangers. Be brutally honest with yourself, and divide your actions on paper into those reflecting love and those reflecting fear. Start connecting those choices with their effects. Do you see patterns? Which column is winning?

I'm doing this too. I am not trying to be anyone's teacher, but maybe you're in the middle of nowhere and miserable and you just need somebody to give you some ideas about how to get perspective, so I hope this is doing that for you. For myself, I only filled out the fear column so far, because I feel like I have a tendency to do the right things for the wrong reasons sometimes and I want to force myself to consider that before every entry in the love column. 

I believe that the more aware we are of our behavior, its causes, and its effects, the easier it is to assemble a tool kit for building greater happiness by stripping away the obstacles and feeding the genuine. The happier we are as individuals, the harder it will be to sell us ten thousand forms of sneaky misery in the guise of panacea. The more free we are in our hearts, the harder it will be to keep us distracted from our real work.

 

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