From the Ontario trip, three new musicians:
I saw Michael Ketemer playing a beaten up old Larrivee at the Peterborough Farmer’s Market on Saturday. He bore a little resemblance to Neil Young, with long stringy hair under a ball cap, but he is a much different kind of guitarist. Lovely virtuoso finger picking Celtic guy. He played a few very unusual set dances and some jigs and reels for me and we talked a little. I asked him which of his albums he was most proud of and he handed me “Yellow Stockings” which I bought. You can listen to some it here. Michael really made me regret that had not started playing Irish music when I lived in Peterborough 20 years ago.
The previous weekend, in Thornbury we partied at Bridges, which is a bar right on the Beaver River. Pat Robitaille is the house guitarist there, a very soulful singer who plays a lot of big chord melodies and has a very heartfelt indy vibe about him. He plays the gamut of music contemporary and classic and is a fine interpreter of folk rock and acoustic indy music. Pat moved to Thornbury from Windsor, and if you are ever in the Collingwood area it’s worth a drive to see him and to drink fine beer and eat good food at Bridges.
Oh and I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention that my almost cousin Keith Shiner has a new album out too. He’s gonna put one in the mail for me. In the meantime, you can stream him at his myspace page.
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My friend Norah Rendell is a traditional musician of the highest calibre. She is a beautiful singer and a gifted Irish flute player and a curious and lively human being. To be around her is a delight and to make music with her is to be carried away in a space of grace and beauty where we can find out what it means to be truly human. I’ve just spent the better part of last weekend visiting with her in St. Paul, Minnesota, making music and sharing lots of story.
For me the social production of music is a deeply important human activity. When we join our voices together we all contribute to a sound that is bigger than ourselves. We glimpse some transcendent possibility, the notion of a true community. We do so without living out of balance with the natural world at all. We simply make sound and all that is left behind is the echo of harmonies ringing in our ears and perhaps, if we are lucky , a flutter in our hearts that comes with the experience of fundamental harmony – the harmony of notes and of friendship and of purpose. Music does not leave waste behind. It leaves no dangerous or permanent residue at all. Just ephemeral beauty.
I reflect on this here in seat 10A of a United Airlines Airbus 319 flying over the sprawling suburbs of western Denver. My journey this week to the Twin Cities Minneapolis and St. Paul were largely about trying to do two things: support the longing in friends who cultivate a view that wants people and communities to experience possibilit, health and creative, and to design creative spaces for human beauty to emerge in this service. I did this by working with dear friends Jerry Nagel and David Cournoyer teaching some basic ways in which people can come together to talk to each other well. Jerry, David and I also met with Ginny and we co-created both a learning journey for people working in community health as well as a little team among ourselves that was rich and generative and fun.
And then Norah and I got together and we did the same thing with other Irish and traditional musicians, gathering in pubs and around kitchen tables to do what humans in our culture have done sustainably and beautifully for millenia: play music together.
That was my week in a nutshell but it isn’t the way I would have described it until I looked out over these suburbs from my seat, having departed a terminal in which CNN was blaring about Iranian missile tests, murder, pandemics and fear, punctuated every seven minutes by ads for the drugs and goods that would make all this panic easier to take. I’m not pessimistic about the world – rather the opposite, but I am realistic about what is possible for me to do to “fix” it. And in this moment it has become clear to me that my work now is to make beauty; beauty that is created in the endless present moment and that leaves only the trace of love in hearts. I have o idea if this work I do will save the world. But without people who remember the capacities that arise from collaborating and co-creating, there is no chance for anything.
Friends, this society is killing us by small acts and mammoth dysfunction. In fact the ways in which our world is changing seems evident everywhere except on the human scale. Forty percent if the ocean is covered in plastic and soils are dying because the antibiotics we use to keep ourselves thinking we are healthy are destroying microbial communities and making it impossible to feed ourselves without amending the earth with carcinogenic chemicals.
But we humans have no way of seeing things at these scales. If I go by what I have seen this morning at the airport, we seem to react most strongly to compromised business deals, flight delays and a forgotten napkin.
Our craving for permanence has led us to create material legacies that outlast our lives. This seems fundamentally unnatural to me. We take space far greater than that bequeathed to us by our descendants and in return we give them buildings and suburbs and devastated farmland and uranium. We also give them beautiful pieces of art and sculpture and music, don’t get me wrong. But we never question the mindset that leaves things for others to clean up, store or appreciate long after we have gone.
I zm coming to believe that the converstation about sustainability is flawed if it focuses on materials only. I think we have lived far beyond our means and that it is simply not possible for us to make our present impact on the earth sustainable. We have already extended our reach hundreds of thousands of years into the future. You cannot claw back the effect of spent uranium. We cannot put our impact back in the bottle
I think rather what is called is for us to develop and practice the gift of living in community and co-creating beauty together together. If there is one mark I wish to make in the world it is to be a vehicle for the continuation of all that human beings have learned about co-creating community. There is nothing I can do anymore to mitigate to material impact I have made on the world. It is up to us now to ensure that during the change to come in the generations that follow our descendents have the to knowledg e and practice to live, work and love each other well. The quality of my children’s future will depend on, both metaphorically and literally, their ability to make music with others.
Late last night as Norah and I were trading songs after our day of making music with others she told me that she worked for a time in a Jewish geriatric hospice in Montreal. Her job was to sing with dying people, people who had survived the holocaust, people who only spoke Polish or Yoddish or French, languges that Norah did not speak. She would visit them and just sing, sometimes songs she didn’t even understand. And what she noticed was that, even with people who were on the verge of death, they would come to life when they sang with her. The beauty of singing with another woke up their hearts an reminded them that inthe present moment, racked with pain perhaps and a little fear and doubt, they were nevertheless alive to the call of present beauty.
I think, somehow, this my deepest work now: to simply find spaces in which we can find beauty and combat the despair of change we cannot control.
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Check this quote:
Social scientist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971
IN an information rich world, the wealth of information means the death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence the wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
It’s just plain obvious that information consumes attention, but it is not always apparent how it is working on us.
Last night, I was at my weekly TaKeTiNa session with friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk, exploring what happens when we induce groove and confusion using rhythm, stepping and voice, and I was really struck with an exploration of the polarity between planning and doing.
One of the questions we were playing with was “What do you do with space?” The rhythmic pattern we were working with had moments of lots of space, and moments where several movements happened all at once. It was a kind of sprung rhthym, all carried over a steady beat. What I noticed was that in the spacious moments, I took time to get myself ready for the next burst of activity instead of resting in that spaciousness. The result was that, to the extent that my mind was living in the future, my body went there as well and I ended up often doing things AHEAD of the beat.
In other words there was so much information I was taking in, including information about what to do next, what to sing, how the polyrhythms worked, what else was going on in the room, that my attention to the present moment was erased and I had a hard time just DOING.
This polarity between planning and doing is familiar to me. When I meditate, and when my thoughts drift, they almost always drift to the future, to things I need to do or should be doing. I notice that this keeps me away from being in the present and actually paying attention to what is happening all around me.
In group settings, this imbalance can lead to me missing a whole bunch of information about where a group is at, if my mind is fixed on where we are going, or where we need to go.
By contrast, when I focus on the present, and on doing rather than planning, I am in balance. Balance in this case means that every part of my mind and body is HERE. Imbalance is when some part of your mind or body shifts elsewhere, and you very often topple in that case – physically or otherwise. Being present opens up the spaciousness of the present moment (what Harrison Owen calls “Expanding our Now“) and ironically opens many more possibilities and pathways for action.
So my learning from all of this is that information overload obscures attention, fills space and limits possibilities.
Think about that the next time you need to do a comprehensive environmental scan!
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I love Bobby McFerrin, and I love what he does with music. Watch in this video how he pulls out of an audience their inherent collective talent. Beautiful!
Thanks to Thomas Arthur for the link.
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This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island. TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness. In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops. It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life.
We do this by creating difficult situations, polyrhythmic patterns using voice, stepping and hand clapping. This exploration of the edges of chaos and order is powerful, even in the short 90 minutes sessions we are doing.
Each session is offered as a learning journey, and so I have been coming the past two weeks with questions and ideas that I wanted to pursue. Yesterday I was think a lot about community and how people get left behind. In our group there were six of us, stepping, singing and clapping in ever increasing complexity. There were times when I lost the pattern and laid back into the basic drum beat, the basic vocal sounds and found my way back into the complicated rhthyms. It brought to mind a question: what violence do we do to groups of people when we have no heartbeat to come back to?
For any community or group, this heartbeat could be their deepest passion, their shared purpose or the thing they care most about. When those things aren’t visible, people get left behind, and chaotic circumstances lead to alienation and despair. So working a little with sensing the heartbeat, and arriving at a solid home place to return to.