Happy New Year!
Resolution: Blog every Tuesday and Thursday...plus whenever I'm really worked up!
Actually I've made quite a few resolutions for this year, or more accurately goals. I guess a lot of us live in the moment to such a degree that we...yeah that cliche: "can't see the forest for the trees." I always love it when I actually understand a cliche. 2006 was a year of incredible trees! I traced these trees with awe, tears, sensual joy, naive excitement, despair, an ecstatic optimism. Yo! I got to stand in the same spot as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, etc. singing along with Kenny Burrell! I had a song lyric put in an anthology alongside incredible poets from a really important cultural scene! I put out an album. I toured up the coast. I lost 3 dear friends. I fell in love, tiptoed and tripped. I wrote prose and was published. I flew to Nashville to support a film I scored and linked up with wonderful people. I played a gig there, too. I started this little business writing songs for people as gifts that has really inspired me. I designed a few websites.
Yes, the trees. They were magnificent and though I can't say I'm completely lost, I do need to add a little more structure to all this work. So I'll put some of it out publicly a couple times a week, let you know what's up and ask for a little help sometimes. A main goal that should interest most of you who check out this site often is to play monthly shows in my seven local regions, San Diego, Orange County, Long Beach, South Bay, Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara. So please shoot me an e-mail to suggest a venue. More ideas later.
For the more typical blog stuff...this was hard to write. I mean I'm conflicted. Like I said, '06 was an incredible year for me and I'm personally so optimistic about the coming year. And I guess I'm optimistic for change in the world generally. But the world's been ugly a lot recently. Wishing happiness feels almost trite when we've reached troop deaths of 3000 in Iraq, when a murderer was murdered and people are upset by the timing and the way he was murdered, when hundreds of thousands are dying/being killed and displaced in parts of the world the "lone superpower" has scant interest in offering valuable assistance (if what's 'valuable' can ever really be defined), and a film like Borat passes for serious social commentary (give me Michael Moore's bleeding heart pathos any day...I appreciate Borat's limited expose, but it really lacked heart for me).
Comment on the parenthetical... Yes! HEART. That's what I wish. A Heart New Year. I wish a year full of intimate connection to your individual heart and a connection to the heart of humanity. Do unto others as you would have them do to you in your most generous moment of self-love. (Wow, I just had a funny thought... I've been watching the Sundance Channel's One Punk Under God about Jim Bakker's son. I was also a "Born Again" evangelical Christian for a short time at age 13. So what just struck me in that do unto others idea is the idea that if we're born into sin, if we're all sinners, how do we really want to be treated? Do sinners suffer the wrath of God? Do sinners receive the forgiveness of Jesus or are they spewed from His mouth? Unconditional love, tough love, grace, what do those words mean?) For me that sort of self love and its generosity is really the only mode. (Now I'm thinking of the tune Nature Boy.)
So wishing you and me the love that inspires us to be agents of love that will surpass the violence and conflict in the world. Simple.
Love,
Jason
1/3/06 (a day late for the Tuesday post...)
Actually I've made quite a few resolutions for this year, or more accurately goals. I guess a lot of us live in the moment to such a degree that we...yeah that cliche: "can't see the forest for the trees." I always love it when I actually understand a cliche. 2006 was a year of incredible trees! I traced these trees with awe, tears, sensual joy, naive excitement, despair, an ecstatic optimism. Yo! I got to stand in the same spot as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, etc. singing along with Kenny Burrell! I had a song lyric put in an anthology alongside incredible poets from a really important cultural scene! I put out an album. I toured up the coast. I lost 3 dear friends. I fell in love, tiptoed and tripped. I wrote prose and was published. I flew to Nashville to support a film I scored and linked up with wonderful people. I played a gig there, too. I started this little business writing songs for people as gifts that has really inspired me. I designed a few websites.
Yes, the trees. They were magnificent and though I can't say I'm completely lost, I do need to add a little more structure to all this work. So I'll put some of it out publicly a couple times a week, let you know what's up and ask for a little help sometimes. A main goal that should interest most of you who check out this site often is to play monthly shows in my seven local regions, San Diego, Orange County, Long Beach, South Bay, Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara. So please shoot me an e-mail to suggest a venue. More ideas later.
For the more typical blog stuff...this was hard to write. I mean I'm conflicted. Like I said, '06 was an incredible year for me and I'm personally so optimistic about the coming year. And I guess I'm optimistic for change in the world generally. But the world's been ugly a lot recently. Wishing happiness feels almost trite when we've reached troop deaths of 3000 in Iraq, when a murderer was murdered and people are upset by the timing and the way he was murdered, when hundreds of thousands are dying/being killed and displaced in parts of the world the "lone superpower" has scant interest in offering valuable assistance (if what's 'valuable' can ever really be defined), and a film like Borat passes for serious social commentary (give me Michael Moore's bleeding heart pathos any day...I appreciate Borat's limited expose, but it really lacked heart for me).
Comment on the parenthetical... Yes! HEART. That's what I wish. A Heart New Year. I wish a year full of intimate connection to your individual heart and a connection to the heart of humanity. Do unto others as you would have them do to you in your most generous moment of self-love. (Wow, I just had a funny thought... I've been watching the Sundance Channel's One Punk Under God about Jim Bakker's son. I was also a "Born Again" evangelical Christian for a short time at age 13. So what just struck me in that do unto others idea is the idea that if we're born into sin, if we're all sinners, how do we really want to be treated? Do sinners suffer the wrath of God? Do sinners receive the forgiveness of Jesus or are they spewed from His mouth? Unconditional love, tough love, grace, what do those words mean?) For me that sort of self love and its generosity is really the only mode. (Now I'm thinking of the tune Nature Boy.)
So wishing you and me the love that inspires us to be agents of love that will surpass the violence and conflict in the world. Simple.
Love,
Jason
1/3/06 (a day late for the Tuesday post...)
posted by groovyacousticsoul at 1/03/2007
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