Think about the times that “non-musical” people do sing in public just for fun. They are almost always drinking or in junior high. In either case, they’re tapped further into their true messy humanity than the rest of us, and they are having a wonderful time. But we’re afraid to do this ‘in real life’ because A) someone might judge us and B) we at some point collectively decided that singing songs with friends or family is a stupid way to spend free time.

Folk music means music of folk, music of the people. But when we say it now, we usually refer to a specific kind of music associated with a specific group of people or a specific period of time. When we think of American folk music, we’re thinking of something very particular, and even though it’s pretty cool, most of us see it as a novelty or as a hobby of those in that particular musical scene.

But we like it.

Note the recent rock(ish) renaissance of the banjo. I don’t think it’s only because of hipsters (though they’ve surely helped). I think it’s because the banjo lets us access access a musical feeling that we don’t touch anywhere else (maybe some churches, but then you have to be on good behavior).

The banjo is approachable, inviting, humble, democratic. Would this happen with an electric guitar or anything autotuned?

Look how happy that crowd is! They are having a fantastic time. This is folk music not because of the instrument but because of the crowd. It does not matter at ALL how good of a singer you are. And I want more of it.

I want to revive folk music. Real folk music. I don’t care if it’s Seeger or Gaga – if you’re singing it in your house or your yard with people you know and like, then it is folk music and it is awesome.

Insurance = peace of mind = invaluable. Rejected insurance claims are terrifying; fighting and winning reversal brings relief, which is gradually eroded by having to repeat the process every. single. time. But I’m lucky, because I can afford insurance and have the time and energy to go to bat for myself. Still, I feel more secure about my cat’s and car’s policies than my own. Maybe they’re better policies, or maybe your own body is just scarier to be scared about. But it still feels like something is off about this, and I’m not even amongst the 45.7 million uninsured. Yep. Off.

My brother sent me a fantastically grotesque shitake-growing kit for my birthday! It balances out everything non-fungal in my life.

Contrast is essential. I credit it for me finally getting back to my normal buzzing self after… months? years? too long. I’d list examples of quiet/noisy time and rest/action, but they’re self-explanatory, and anyway I just keep ending up at that Byrds song. I will say, though, that I enjoy my weekly practice of Science and Art – master gardening classes on Tuesdays and choir on Wednesday. Both foster new growth.

“The people” matter. Firstly, Go Egypt! I’m curious to see what happens, but it hope it’s representative of the people’s will. I trust them to run their own country; it doesn’t really matter what American thinks.

Secondly, Wisconsin could take a lesson from this. I’m all for balancing the budget, and state workers shouldn’t get an excessively sweet deal (read: why weren’t they already paying into their pensions?), but you can’t balance the whole thing on the backs of the workers alone. Thanks for taking away collective bargaining rights, Scott Walker. I know my girlfriend’s $6,900 salary + tuition remission + health insurance she’s never used are really bleeding you dry. Better push her below the poverty line so you can keep those tax cuts for businesses! Maybe one of them will hire her.

You are great. Seriously. People make my world go round, and I’m lucky to know a lot of really great ones. And with overpopulation on the trajectory it is, who knows how many I will never meet? Like reading great books and really-listening to great music, there’s just so much. You gotta savor what you can soak.

So is Sweden. This is not new, but I melt for strong vocal harmony. And so can you!

And my favorite:

for the record, my wholly uneducated belief is that our salvation as human beings lies in each other. that art of all kinds lets us keep our sanity long enough to fight back. that we should love each other so much that our hearts threaten to break. that we should sacrifice our defenses and walls and worries and hesitations until we experience the joy we were born for. that evil is indifference. that god is a verb. that it is worth the work to transform the self from shattered to whole. that the world is worth it, too. that there is always hope because everything turns out alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, then it’s not the end.

good job good friend, peacock, sister, whatever you will be called then or now. i’m glad you make words.

And let it be noted, Metroplis Coffee is pretty darn good!

“It is my mission in the north to acquaint people with unstereotypical facts about Georgia. For instance, the almost-insane, almost-naked pop music sensation, Lady Gaga: that name comes from ‘Lady GeorgiaGeorgia.’ She’s from right down here…and her people are just as proud of her as if she had turned out wholesome.”

Wendell Berry, poet farmer

Spring is coming and I’m turning (back again) to Wendell Berry. It’s been months (or years – I’m starting to measure time that way – it’s very strange) since I’ve given him any sincere attention. It’s easier, more convenient, not to. He writes so plainly. He makes so much sense. His work is simple, and good, and hard to ignore. I have more Wendell Berry / Dr. Jason Peters guilt than I do raised-up-Lutheran guilt. He’s a less complicated barometer. A barometer I can believe in!

So I’m back to Home Economics, with underlined passages from college freshman year. I don’t have anything profound to say about it; no synthesis of his words into something immediate or more personally meaningful. He does it all himself, and I’m just struggling to figure out what it means, what it should mean, for me. But it feels good.

A passage, from “Two Economies,” on what we include and exclude when measuring value:

It is possible to make a little economy, such as our present one, that is so short-sighted and in which accounting is of so short a term as to give the impression that vices are necessary and practically justifiable. When we make our economy a little wheel turning in opposition to what we call “nature,” then we set up competitiveness as the ruling principle in our explanation of reality and in our understanding of economy; we make of it, willy nilly, a virtue. But that competitiveness, as a ruling principal and a virtue, imposes a logic that is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to control. That logic explains why our cars and our clothes are shoddily made, why our “wastes” are toxic, and why our “defensive” weapons are suicidal; it explains why it is so difficult for us to draw a line between “free enterprise” and crime. If our economic ideal is maximum profit with minimum responsibility, why should we be surprised?

…

If, on the other hand, we see ourselves as living within the Great Economy, under the necessity of making our little human economy within it, according to its terms, the smaller wheel turning in sympathy with the greater, receiving its being and its motion from it, then we see that the traditional virtues are necessary and are practically justifiable. Then, because in the Great Economy all transactions count and the account is never “closed,” the ideal changes. We see that we cannot afford maximum profit or power with minimum responsibility because, in the Great Economy, the loser’s losses finally afflict the winner. Now the ideal must be “the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption,” which both defines and requires neighborly love. Competitiveness cannot be the ruling principle, for the Great Economy is not a “side” that we can join nor are there such “sides” within it.

These essays, along with UU church on Sunday, have inspired the following additions to my reading list:

• E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. (2nd try)
• Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (esp. “The Land Ethic”)

I’m tired of “green,” but land, integrity, and scale feel good.

There’s a bonus video on this French CD I have. It shows a child smiling deep and running over perfect sunny green hills. After an idyllic day in the sun, she savors the last moments before shuffling off a movie set so the next kid gets a turn against the backdrop. “Il faut que tu respire,” the chorus– “it is necessary that you breathe” by my high school translation.

I found the video my freshman year of college, around the time that Steak and Shake was exhilarating and we were so sincere and jazzed in our unfolding. We swam through Descartes and apple Pucker the same as strip poker and multiple choice philosophy tests (gross).

Il faut que tu respire. I don’t know any of the other words, so its meaning is up to me. I think at the time, it said to me something about authenticity and society. I’ll bet I saw the world as content with that backdrop in the name of progress, sedated by technology, not truly alive or ’real’ or asking the important questions, and no one gets it but us because we wear Chuck Taylors from before they sold out to Nike.

The song served the exact purpose it should have to an 18-year-old, and it didn’t roll around again until the river dredged it up today. THE river. Huck’s river, right where it confuses everyone by flowing west.

I spend all day at a desk looking out over the water. I see hawks and boats and barges. And I watch the wind and current duke it out (they really do). But after a full day of look-don’t touch, I inhale none of it. So this year, daylight savings has been my Easter. And with the return of sunlight, I’ve set myself to spending some chunk of each day outside.

Cloudy damp today called for a ride along the river, and it seemed like everything on that path had gone white-flight on history. Like I was the first one to venture back and remember what old buildings used to mean. I passed the base of the arsenal bridge like a little Alcatraz lego. Then there are old brick mansions above old wooden benches and lots and lots of seagulls. And finally sailboats—there are actually sailboats!—before gray and gray lock together for a deliciously dreary opening out. I turned around to head home.

On the way back, a freight train. Slow behind me and the rails clattered and I rolled to let it lumber up and past me. The mighty Mississippi 20 feet to my left, just pouring along, with sailboats winking from under their tarps. 20 feet to my right, massive insect cars thundering along. And then little me, in this history river rail corridor, just treading the air in between.

I was so struck by this. I felt so skinny and small and smooth; I was sliding down a leaf. I opted to humbly reflect on this moment by, of course, seeing how long I could keep up alongside the train. a friendly race. the second blue bin car and I were besties on a casual Tuesday night spin, this playing in my head:

shoo away the swarms of commuter planes
and find that train ticket we lost
cuz once upon a time the line followed the river
and peeked into all the backyards
and the laundry was waving
the graffiti was teasing us
from brick walls and bridges
we were rolling over ridges
through valleys
under stars
I dream of touring like duke Ellington
in my own railroad car

But getting into town, she sped up. And I switched gears. She sped up more. And I peddled harder. She started to really move. Her axles were dizzy, and the gravel kicked up, and the puddles sizzled as we raced and we raced and we raced and she kept getting faster. It had been at least a mile by now, and my knees were ungluing and I had lost blue. So I challenged the train’s tail: one final sprint to the arsenal bridge.

I pedaled, she thundered, I pedaled, she thundered, and I spun under the rusty shadow just as the last flatbed said it didn’t need me anymore. I made it. Raw lungs and all.

Il faut que tu respire. The French song plinked into my head like a friggen pillar of cloud as I slowed down. Shaky-legged and rubber puffing, I thought of breath and pulse, pulse and breath while I walked the few blocks back to my apartment. Respire as I laid on the floor to be patient with my heartbeat.

I took a bath that turned me pink; I drank clear water from a clear glass. I inhaled.

The song still speaks to me of authenticity, but this time around I am less concerned with the breaking of molds. Il faut que tu respire. To someone else, that necessary breath is probably calm or patience or reflection. For me, right now, that breath is full lungs against petty distraction. It is the river outside the office. It is the willingness to let the inanimate come to life, to engage with it, and to be changed by it.

It’s a silly thing, a little dead fly that’s acting like a living fly. But it made me happy to think that it lived its whole life (even a short, fly life) and then got a bonus waltz with the wind afterward.

I’m thinking of it this way: if we put ourselves in the right environments, surround ourselves with the company of good and lively people, then even when we’re feeling dull or lost, we still get whisked along, still participate in liveliness despite ourselves. It’s okay to let the wind carry you sometimes; just fold up your legs and go with it until you’re ready to take over again. At least it won’t be boring.

i felt ever-so-slightly under the weather today. science tells me it’s probably a bug of some sort, but who’s to say? it doesn’t take much imbalance for a bug to tip a scale, and since i’m the scale, i turned off all the lights, and turned on krista tippet, and stretched my limbs out slow. bath, chakra candle, buddhist monks, and here we are, savoring the solid solitude of bathroom floor. mmm nighttime.

cutting the lights does wonders. it turns off all the stuff, so many visual reminders of must-do’s and meaning-to’s. darkness is freeing like swimming is freeing: if you only see as far as your hand, you’re content to wave it around in the space in front of you. no entertainment needed. i know when i’m dreaming because i move slow, as through water, in long arching leaps. the slow food movement acquaints you with your sustenance. plain slow movement acquaints you with…. you?

sometimes there’s too much stuff. what if this nighttime landscape bled into day, melted down some of that stuff and traded it for open space, easy as darkness? the simplicity is so appealing. but then sometimes i’m maude, with a closet full of instruments and a parlor of flowered contraptions. there’s such simple joy in that.

i suppose i could seek balance between the two, but i know i’m not a libra, i’m a pendulum. a little goldfish of a pendulum, excited anew for cleaning each spring and nesting each fall, for yoga and garage sales. a simple living packrat. a bathroom floor blogger. so it goes.