Friday, January 14, 2011

River Songs-Everything Flows

"Every single thing we do as animals we do because we are an aqueous solution." 
Lynn Margolis

I spend a lot of time on and along the river near my house; I go to visit it every day. I've been doing so for over twenty years. I came to realize that I was made of the river, and that its waters were flowing through my veins, that my cells were swimming in it, that it flowed through me just as surely as it flows through my neighborhood and my town.

I sometimes say that I only want to write music that I would sing to myself for my own edification if I were in a field alone, and this little song definitely fits into that category.

I wanted to write some simple songs that would express this intimacy with the waters, and the immanence of the river. I have the simple hope that if we come to love the river, we will not hurt it, since we are dependent on it, utterly. If you love God, you gotta get right with God, and if you love the Dharma, you are compelled to live rightly by the Dharma, and if you learn to love the river, you've got to get right with the river.

We are quite dependent upon the river for our moment to moment existence. In this way, our relationship to the waters makes me think of the Zen Master Samu Sunim's teaching about "true suchness": that which is "intimate, immediate, spontaneous and obvious."

This is meant to be one of a small set of "guerilla art" songs I've created to sing on buses during the winter here in Ann Arbor--our University is organizing a semester's worth of events around the theme of Water, and this is one of my contributions.

So here is my first attempt at a simple river song:


Everything Flows:

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