This Thanksgiving holiday was a quiet one, delightfully quiet. Snuggles with the pug, delicious food, and mild flu-like symptoms that gave me a good excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway, which was to lay on the couch and watch movies and read and doze. The rain was a gift.
I needed to do something “productive” so I decided to go through old music I’ve recorded and update my YouTube channel. Talk about going down a rabbit hole. 11 years ago I started writing songs. I had a day job in a law firm and when I had a weekend off from the band, I would head to my studio on Friday night and just camp out there for the weekend. The door would close and I was in Playland, with instruments and the computer and drums and my voice and all my little black books of scribbled lyrics.
In my early 20s, I had written a batch of songs and sang them with a band, but I let go of that to play the drums. When I started writing lyrics again, it was with the intention of someone else singing them, but soon I realized that I should sing them. Which brought me to the weekends in the studio, teaching myself to record and edit and write and cobble together ideas so I could have real guitarists and bassists and keyboard players play the songs as I fought all my demons at the front of the stage.
The whole thing has been a great journey, and I am still fond of many of those early songs. Some of them make me cringe, but that’s how it goes with creating things. You have to let the water run for quite a while before the tap runs clean. I don’t know if the tap will ever run clean.
When I listen to the them, I am struck by their energy. When I started writing the first record, I was struggling with depression and had a dire feeling of being stuck. I was frustrated with my routine and had a choking feeling much of the time. This is what I feel when I hear these songs, and I see myself from this distance, struggling. I remember walking to work and trying to figure out why I shouldn’t just keep on walking. The first song I wrote was about that feeling. It turned out pretty good, so I kept writing.
It’s funny how naming something, really sitting and allowing the pain to rise and give it space and form, it’s funny how much gets released. In fact, when I look at how I felt then and how I feel now, I see just how much I’ve let go, just how much lighter my outlook. I sat in that studio and wrestled with all the darkness, all of those clawing beasts that kept me unhappy and confused and stuck, and I let them live in songs. And as songwriting goes, there must be a counterpoint to the darkness, and therefore sometimes you find redemption.
I did find redemption during this process, as well as during a great deal of other work that brought me to my outlook today, which is markedly different in tone. That depressive feeling is long gone, and I have connected with the internal awareness that is immune to darkness. Struggles and challenges rise and as long as I remain in this awareness, this still knowing, darkness becomes just a concept that rises on occasion and vanishes.
This isn’t to say I don’t feel deeply: sadness and grief and fear and anger. The difference is that these things appear and I don’t attach to them, give them the fuel to stay. When I am in awareness, these things are passing. When I know the truth of who am I, which is a manifestation of divine energy, nothing sticks.
I love the saying “light writes white,” and I imagine the ink disappearing on the page as I write these essays. I know that my writing here can often be seen as Pollyannaish. The reality of the outside world is of fear, of difficulty, tragedy, despair. These things will touch me, and do. We are none immune to any of it.
So while I sit in comfort, in my small apartment with my family snoring close by, I strengthen this ability to rest here, in the still and expanded awareness of being. Then, when the eventual maelstrom hits I can move from this energy, from this awareness, and if there is light to be seen I will see it. If I indulge my fear of what is to come I bring the tumult into the room prematurely. I prefer to sit here, eyes closed, falling into the heart, into that place of truth and guidance. Strengthened in the truth of what is pure truth, pure eternal light that shines no matter what may rise.
I called my first album Conversation with Francis Bakin because I had read the David Sylvester book and fell in love with Francis Bacon’s artistic process. He believed that in the accident was the creative spark, and that rang so true to me as I bumbled around the computer and all the instruments and let the accidental lead me along into the song. I also loved that he took his demons and painted them into canvas. When I saw his work in person for the first time, in the Tate Gallery in London, I wept. The paintings were so much bigger than I expected, the colors so much more beautiful, the pain on the canvas illuminated.
In darkness we can find so much beauty. This is why I love the poetry I love, the writers I love. They get inside the darkness and pull out diamonds. Charles Bukowski, Harry Crews, Flannery O’Connor, the list goes on. The counterpoints of dark and light, sorrow and glory, fear and fierceness create a shining depth to art and living. This is what I have learned of songwriting, of meditation, of life.
So I sit and experience it all. I realize that what is different now is that when grief rises, I feel it with a knowing that by experiencing it fully it will disperse, and that leads the way to joyful energy. When fear rises, behind it, peace.
And here, the lesson. Our default is joy. Our default is peace. Our default is love. That which watches the rising and falling, that which puts its head down and blindly walks through the hurricane is an infinite, still awareness. The power of the entire universe rests in this awareness, and I see darkness rising like a moth to an electric coil to flash its final flash against the bright light. We have this power inside of us, and it is possible to live in it.
There is a song in there somewhere. I will leave to catch the words before they disappear on the page.
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You can hear me read this on Soundcloud HERE or as an iTunes Podcast.
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