I think we are living in a time when every emotion we are capable of generating is seen as a potential for making money. Our loyalty is co-opted by brands. Our anger is co-opted by politicians who channel it towards groups they scapegoat and then ride in as saviours of our condition. Our sense of reverence is owned by Hollywood, who exploits it for the latest superhero movie. Our love is sucked up by celebrities who are ciphers for the qualities in ourselves we can no longer recognize.
The most disempowering thing you can do to another human being is rob them of their ability to love themselves, not in a narcissistic way, but in an authentic acceptance of who they are, full of gifts and flaws and unique ways of seeing the world. There is nothing more dispiriting I think than being unable to love yourself. You think you are never capable of loving others or being loved. And all the while we tap “like” and “love” on our social media accounts and take the dopamine hits from pixels flying from one user to another through the filter of a money making machine.
So yesterday, when I saw this thread tweet, it stopped me in my tracks:
RuPaul’s been telling us for years, “If you don’t love yourself, how the HELL you gonna love anybody else?”
And we agreed.
But then, Lizzo switched it up in her Tiny-Ass Desk Concert. She said, “If you can love me, you can love yourself.”
And I can’t stop thinking about that.— Angela Mayfield (@pinkrocktopus) July 30, 2019
I was struck by how that one almost throwaway line at the end of the performance became a full on sermon for Angela Mayfield. That’s a wicked perception. And following along a little further, I clicked through to the link of Lizzo’s Tiny(-Ass) Desk Concert and could not stop smiling for 17 straight minutes, which you should do right now.
Lizzo is right. If you are capable of loving someone else, or even shouting out at a concert “I LOVE YOU!” then you are indeed capable of shouting it at yourself. It’s a reminder of me to not be exclusively directed my emotions outward, but instead to notice how love, anger, loyalty, and reverence can be a healthy part of my inner life, and not merely directed outwardly all the time. In an era where we project ourselves into the world through media like this, where our images, words and thoughts are put outside of ourselves first and foremost, thereby separating us from our feelings, Lizzo’s small invitation is a powerful reminder to me to take it all in too.
Isn’t that beautiful image? Here on the west coast of Canada the Douglas-firs and cedars and hemlocks that cover the mountains and islands rake the sky for moisture. As the rains return in the fall, the trees help the forest drink. Rain showers pass through and for hours afterwards, the trees drip water onto the forest floor, feeding all the understory and the mushrooms that keep them alive.
That image was one given to me by Chris Weaver, a fellow Open Space Technology facilitator and a poet and a friend who spent years on this coast, south of me, in Washington State. I say friend, in a particularly 21st century way. We never met in person, but the beauty of his words, our shared professional growth and our email exchanges from 1998 to 2006 were rich and playful and full of depth. He brought out a part of myself that I loved.
Chris died the other day, the second of my friends this summer to succumb to suicide from depression.
He is being remembered by friends and colleagues the world over, because his death was untimely and his life was one that touched many people very deeply, even if we were not always at his side.
When my father in law died in 2004, he consoled me this way:
my whole heart descends with you to that place of grieving, all interlaced withthe joy of life well-lived – the test so finely and passionately played insun and rain and mud.
He was referring to Test cricket in that blessing, a sport about which he knew nothing but he enjoyed witnessing the banter between me and Alan Stewart about the Australia-India test series of 2004. He could take something like that and, yes, weave it into a consolation.
Later that month, our mutual friend Ashley Cooper hosted a small conversation on her blog about how we all wanted to be remembered, and Chris shared this:
it’s funny, i have two pieces of music that are back-to-back on a cd called “the gentle side of john coltrane,” and for some reason when i listen to them, i often think, those two songs are all i need for my memorial. they are about feeling it all, and releasing it all into joy. track 11 is “in a sentimental mood,” duke ellington’s tune, a rare time when coltrane and ellington recorded together. track 12 is called “dear lord,” with mccoy tyner back on the keys, & if my life has a theme song, that’s it.
since you’re taking notes for the event ash, they’re both slow-dances
Well, the time has come for us to remember Chris, and so, here are those two pieces of music.
In that post I shared a vision for my own memorial in which I said that I’d love an Open Space with everyone who knew me to be gathered together to talk about good work they could do in the world. To that idea Chris Weaver simply replied:
“i’ll be there, chris (even if my own memorial comes first!)”
Chris’ words are spanning the globe right now as his colleagues and friends remember him. Cherish these drops of rain. Long after the storm has passed, they continue to slake our thirst.
Godspeed friend. See you at my memorial.
Spellbound this morning watching Sean de hOra, a famous old Irish singer, performing his version of the Irish air Bean Dubh an Ghleanna (The Dark Woman of the Glen). He is a gorgeous interpreter of the “sean nos” or old style of Irish singing, which is deeply emotional and moving evoking in the performer something of the duende that Lorca wrote about in flamenco. In both flamenco and sean nos, there is a sense that supernatural creatures are near by, and there is tradition that links the singing of these songs to the kidnapping of the singer by fairies, so powerful is the song.
For these reasons – the weight of emotion being communicated and the fear of being lost – a tradition in sean nos singing is to have someone engage in “hand winding” with the singer and you can see this in this video. It is a gesture of amazing empathy, and it brings the singer into the fullness of the expression of the song without him fearing being lost or taken away.
Here is Ciaran Carson:
In the ‘hand-winding’ system of the Irish sean-nós, a sympathetic listener grasps the singer’s hand; or, indeed, the singer may initiate first contact and reach out for a listener. The singer then might close his eyes, if they are open (sometimes he might grope for someone, like a blind man) and appear to go into a trance; or his eyes, if open, might focus on some remote corner of the room, as if his gaze could penetrate the fabric, and take him to some antique, far-off happening among the stars. The two clasped hands remind one another of each other, following each other; loops and spirals accompany the melody, singer and listener are rooted static to the spot, and yet the winding unwinds like a line of music with its ups and downs, its glens and plateaux and its little melismatic avalanches.
What do you notice here?
My daughter Aine is a musician. She is a singer and also a songwriter and she loves collaborating. She has a Soundcloud channel where you can hear some of her stuff accompanied by herself on guitar. And while she is pretty good on guitar, it’s really cool to hear what happens when she works with a collaborator, in this case her friend Zach Brannon, a local shredder from here on Bowen Island. They’ve been working on an album together and have just reeased an acoustic version of a new song called “Not Afraid to Cry.”
It’s pretty good.
Well, Pete Seeger died last week. And when giants like Pete Seeger die, there is an overwhelming flood of story and tribute that comes in. I haven’t even scratched the surface of it, but here is one of the best retrospectives I’ve found. That will serve as an excellent introduction to this man.
I was raised on Pete Seeger. My dad had a bunch of Weavers records and he used to strum Seeger and Hays songs. My musical upbringing and subsequent love and practice of folk music was directly attributable to Pete Seeger’s compelling hold on my father’s own desire to make music. “If I Had a Hammer” might have been one of the first songs I ever learned. “Abiyoyo” was so emblazoned in my consciousness that we named a tall transmission tower near my grandparents’ cottage for that giant. “Little Boxes” described a future to be avoided at any cost.
I think many people who had just occasionally heard Pete’s folksy singing and storytelling had no idea of his fierce commitment to justice and his radical political beliefs. Here is an amazing transcript of his testimony in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. He did something in that hearing that was unprecendented: he refused to answer questions about his beliefs and his associations and his activities. He considered the entire exercise Un-American itself, and a violation of his basic human rights. For that he was sentenced to ten years in jail, and in 1962 he eventually had his case dismissed on appeal.
Pete Seeger stood as an important chronicler of the best of American life. He fought for the voiceless and stood with the oppressed around the world. He was the greatest friend of any truly just cause, and practiced his principles with shining integrity. And he wrote and preserved and disseminated the people’s music to embolden the people when all other sources of their inspiration had been taken away.