There's a Reason

There’s a reason,

For this song,

Why every time I find an answer nothing’s ever solved,

Going to confession are my sins really absolved? 

There’s a reason

For this song

Why I love playing on the swingset in the park

Why I love to look up at the heavens after dark

Find the music of my soul and let it sing

Find the beat that makes me dance and let it ring

If I listen closely there’s a song in everything.

Let the music of my soul dance through me

Let the dance within my heart beat out a mel-o-ody,

If you listen closely there’s beauty in everything.

There’s a reason,

For this song,

Come up with some reductive formula for living,

A reason for my troubles, a reason for forgiving 

There’s a reason,

For this song,

Why golden spirals hide themselves in flowers

Why I feel happy I feel sad at all the wrong hours

Find the music of my soul and let it sing

Find the beat that makes me dance and let it ring

If I listen closely there’s a song in everything.

Let the music of my soul dance through me

Let the dance within my heart beat out a mel-o-ody,

If I listen closely there’s beauty in everything.

There’s a reason,

For this song,

Why I love my cat under the bleachers

Whose advice to listen to if everyone’s a preacher

There’s a reason,

For this song,

Why my heart feels warmer in November

I think I know the reason, but I can’t remember 

Find the music of my soul and let it sing

Find the beat that makes me dance and let it ring

If I listen closely there’s a song in everything.

Let the music of my soul dance through me

Let the dance within my heart beat out a melody

If you listen closely there’s beauty in everything.


      

Hallelujah

There are certain questions that drive my incessant thirst for living, that drive me to be passionate and to become familiar with anything. “What must the world be like so that man may know it?” is a big one. Navigating the space between fear and anguish is why language was created. It’s why politics exists, why art exists, why linguistics exist, why music exists, why dancing exists, why things like gestures and sex categories and ideas about family and religion and holidays and any category exists. There is always something indefinite about the world; it is laden with contingencies and surprises; it is a vital context which is never mastered once and for all; for this reason, it is a source of permanent insecurity. But there are things that bring us peace, that bring us home. 

 Miles Davis said that when he improvises its not about the notes, but the space between them. Picasso said that same thing about painting. It’s not just about what you are painting, it’s also about what you’re not painting. One great dance choreographer asks his students to, when improvising, ask “why not” instead of why. In Bikram you come back to standing or corpse pose after every posture. And I started to notice the same thing when I was beating out whole notes on each cymbal to a metronome set at 60. The space between those really slow beats started to come alive and it was filled with inertia, it was so much more than just silence. the space between...

 “I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what I had to teach, and not, when I came time to die, discover that I had not lived.”
i realize how important the silence is...

Sounds a lot like life huh? If I fill my life up with a million thoughts, people, things, then I won’t have the mental space to listen to the silence and see what it has to say, how it wants to speak. I’ll be too busy heaving under a thousand contemplations to realize that Eden is all around me. and in order to be a great drummer, a great dancer, a great girlfriend, sister, mother, daughter, friend, lover, musician, student I need to hear the silence. I need to let it speak. Just be. Everything is everything the same principles that apply to drumming apply to dancing and driving and relationships and speaking and taking drugs and fucking and playing with your cats. Two lovers sat on a park bench, with their bodies touching each other, holding hands in the moonlight. There was silence between them. So profound was their love for each other, they needed no words to express it. And so they sat in silence, on a park bench, with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight. Is there anything more perfect?

 Once you figure life out it becomes fun to play with and you realize that the system is not controlling your life, that everything bad is good for you, that you are the decisive element.  The hieroglyphics of humanity are very decipherable. Once you learn the rules you can break them.

 Find your beat, beat the shit out of it, and then every breath you take is Hallelujah!   

You have to learn to die, If you want to be alive, Okay?

This is for the children of Eden and Eden’s all around,

The wanton children beating, their song into the ground, 

We’re all there, heaving under a thousand contemplations,

We’re all there, saturated by someone else’s libations,   

Tap into childhood emotionality.

Take away all rational fallacy.

I’ve been born once then born again a thousand times.

Take away all rational fallacy. Bring me back my emotionality.

Something make me numb.

Something get me high.

Something make me numb.

Something make me cry.

I’ve died not once, but I’ve died a thousand times.

Each rebirth at the end of sanity,   

Hieroglyphics of humanity  
Nothing to be taught, everything to learn.  

Baptized into paradises perpetually burned.

This is for the children of Eden and Eden’s all around.   

A magnus opus is born post mortem,

so keep your feet on solid ground. 

I’ve been born once then born again a thousand times.

Take away all rational fallacy. Bring me back my emotionality.

Something make me numb.

Something get me high.

Something make me numb.

Something make me cry.

I’ve died not once, but I’ve died a thousand times.

The Beat

I would have chosen a different instrument if I thought that drums had to be played like a metronome

-       
                                                      - Danny Carey, Tool

All art aspires to the condition of music. But you can only play music if you dance.  And you can only dance if you are uninhibited, if you can let go, lose your mind. So really all “how to play the drums” websites should begin with “First, lose your mind.” Then, dance.  Then translate the feeling, the rhythms inside of you into your instrument. Learn how your instrument and your body function together and how this fusion can externalize your internal feelings and rhythms, your own beats. The question ‘how can I say what I’m feeling with my instrument?’ requires you to feel.  

            I’ve been dancing a lot (but not enough) – in any empty, open space I can find, on subway platforms, in my room. Basically, I turn on music and don’t stop moving. And if there is no music, then I dance to the beat of my own internal drum. Gabrielle Roth’s 5 rhythms is my biggest influence. And I’ve discovered that nothing about me is truly authentic or genuine until I’ve reached the point in my dance where I am completely out of my mind and into my body. Sometimes it’s instantaneous. Other times it takes hours to get to this point. I imagine that if I keep up this practice long enough it will be more than instantaneous – it will have permeated the entire way I live my life and communicate with others. This state of  disinhibition is so dramatically different than any other state of being that I have to ask myself why I even leave the house, talk to people, try to play music, do ANYTHING without first dancing my way into this euphoric place.

            True, I can take drugs, drink alcohol, or do other things of this sort to get there. But dancing is free, keeps my body limber, and helps me internalize rhythm. If I’ve got some H2O and a few carrots then, barring physical trauma, I can dance forever and ever without needing to replenish extravagantly.  

When I was coaching gymnastics last week I said to my girls “I can teach you how doing a pelvic tilt and how keeping your butt tucked under your body, your ribs in, and your arms behind your ears will make flipping, twisting, and turning seem magically effortless, but I can’t teach you desire.” After practice I wondered if I was right. Can desire be taught? Maybe not through words- maybe through smiles and hugs and laughter. The way I feel about what my girls are doing motivates them to want be disciplined. When I scream “YESSSSS! THAT’S ITTTTTT!” when A. hits her cast handstand or “WOWWWWWWW YOU ARE AMAZINGGGGGGG!” when H points her toes I have the capacity (and the duty) to instill the desire for discipline in my kids (not to mention that I actually do think these physical feats [feets] are amazing).

The desire for discipline doesn’t seem like an innate desire. Children desire a lot of things – food, water, warmth – mostly the same things adults desire. What is magical about children though is that they haven’t yet learned about lines. For more info, read Alex Grey’s Let Love Draw the Line. http://www.alexgrey.com/psalms/line2.html This is the quality about children that makes them uninhibited and thus easily reachable and teachable. This is what is meant when people say that it’s easier for children to learn second languages than it is for adults. There are so many lines being drawn in our heads during our 16+ waking hours that we have no mental orifices left over for anything other than incessant penciling in. This is also why adults tend to be less physically flexible as they get older – because their bodies are so full of all the drugs (and by drugs I mean anything that is put into your body that makes you less empty and more full) that they’ve put into them over the years that their bodies become more rigid. 

But it doesn’t have to be like this. It’s not about teaching children discipline so that they can become subservient, obedient, less emotional, “contributing” members of a society, a world, a culture, that desires to suppress their uniqueness. It’s about teaching them exactly the opposite – how discipline can help them retain their childlike wonder at the world because the ability to sustain anything for a good length of time requires the ability to sustain anything for a good length of time.

 Life is so very beautiful. Sometimes there is so much beauty that I can’t take it! And other times I look around and see so much beauty and wonder how I can sit there and look at it without feeling anything from it.
I’ve got a lot of musical friends. Maybe they can enlighten me about some of these things. What I know for sure is that when I dance I’m making music and when I make music I’m dancing and when I make love I’m doing both.What else is there to do? 

Sappy stuff, love

See, the thing is, that there are a lot of people to fall in love with, but not a lot of people who want to just breath together, just not talk together, just stare at stars together - not be in a rush together! And I don't want to mold myself into someone who is compatible with someone who is in a rush just for the sake of having someone who is there during those really lonely moments.

just..

I want to run into your arms laughing in girlish excitement - all the time.. and not suppress it! And wrap my legs around you in crazy hugs, lock you in tight, and laugh when you laugh because you can't breath! hehehe

I don't want to suppress the love i feel for you, that giddiness, that "I just want to jump into your arms and smother you in kisses" thang.  

I want to wake up to you. and you'd tell me "shhhh! we can't talk yet, we haven't danced!" Or we haven't played. Or we haven't listened to music. I want to wake up in the morning and just listen to each other breath - for hours if that's what the day calls for. And be happy doing nothing. And dance. And make music. And love. And love and love and love and love.