CURRENTS
Intimacy
My Music, to me, is a powerful form of intimacy.
At its best, it's my way of getting as close to my world and my human community as I ever will in this life.
Molecular reality is a hard reality; it takes force to break down a wall, energy to build one up.
It takes immense strength to bend a bar of steel, and it takes the right tools to straighten it again.
We live within the restrictions that our molecular universe imposes on us, to a degree. Some of us will never enjoy the sensation of flying, except possibly in our dreams.
Then there are those who, by accident, design, or sheer will, are able to fly, without an aircraft of any kind, right here in this molecular reality, right here in this heavy gravity well we call 'life'.
Some fly with words, some with notes.
I know one woman who flies when she sets paint to canvas, and another who flies when she sings a song.
I'm the woman who flies when I sit down and touch the keys of a piano (or when they touch me... I've never been sure of which).
No ego, just my reality.
Like someone who can swim really well, like someone who can dance like the wind, I meet myself when I meet a piano.
When I hear Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers play a stately tempo on a ballad (somewhere around quarter- note equals 90 bpm), that's flying to me. You could hang your clothes on that tempo, set your watch to it, eat your lunch to it, live your life by it!
It's an elusive art, this ability to fly. It can be practiced, but we're never (none of us) beyond crashing occasionally.
It makes me happy to know that I can still fly!
It makes me warm inside, to know that my flight helps others to fly.
The intimacy I feel with others with whom I share my gift helps make up for those lonely hours in airports, where I feel totally lost, completely at sea.
There is a hole in this world, created by those who are hungry for power and control.
By unspoken decree, they stole our art and music and words, our stories and our spirits.
They who control populations with drugs and guns and wars and greed and fairy tales have stolen our wonder and innocence.
They've overlooked me and plenty like me, though.
Once the world was softer. Walls were for walking through.
Anyone could bend a steel bar.
Molecular density was more tractable to redesign.
And we all could fly.
This was before the truth was stolen.
The truth is that we are beings made of love, and when we move away from that love and live in anger and fear, our feet turn to lead and we can't fly or run or jump or play or even see or think.
In our old way, we were songs, and colors, and stories, and we were all intimate; intimate with our world, with trees and sky and flowers and animals and each other.
Now we are warriors and money magnets and magnates and tycoons or we are beggars and paupers and misanthropes.
We are measured not by our capacity to fill the world with love but by our ability to fill our bank with money.
If there is one thing that will make one earthbound, it is the complete and utter denial that flying is possible.
Let our mission be this: to make the world softer, more pliant, more hospitable.
To be more like a kitten or a puppy.
To let the music flow through us like water, without any fear of getting wet.
To fly if we want to, even if others laugh at us when we do.
To see through the veil of hardness and darkness that has become the world-construct of our times: the lead boot, the march to victory, the repetitions slogan, the aching emptiness of blind patriotism, the soul-killing anesthesia of extremism.
To be more like the wind and the weather and the rain and the sun and the moon.
The way to fly is through our own inner power, and it is infinite.
- JW -5.19.04