I’ve been listening to a lot of the Ram Dass Here and Now podcast over the past few months. I feel like things are a bit chaotic in the summer and it really kept me on the ground. Soaking in the sun in half lotus for hours on end certainly helped, too. They were moments where the intrusive thoughts about where I should be in my life stopped.
It harkens back to the summer that I was working maintenance in residence at the University here. I downloaded an obscene amount of Alan Watts lectures and would listen while I monotonously mended fifty-year-old furniture. I was in a hole that summer. Almost all of my friends had left for the summer to travel or tour. The person I was seeing went to Southeast Asia for a month and stopped responding to my messages. I was spending the majority of the picturesque days staring longingly outdoors from behind dusty panes framed with gritty old concrete. The work was so tedious that I started listening to audiobooks in a day as there would be no opportunity or reason to talk to my co-workers. I would listen through the thirty or forty so odd hours before starting over to soak in the parts I missed and relive those that I loved.
One part that struck me immediately was actually a quote that Alan had lifted from Tennyson.
The hills are shadows and they flow from form to form, and nothing stands
They melt like mists the solid lands—like clouds they shape themselves and go.
It’s something that still haunts, but also settles my mind.
In the interest of love I moved to Banff three years later. For a month I lived in the basement of an Inn while trying to find a tolerable service job and a proper place to live. Something about being in Banff stirred many things in me and brought this quote back to the surface. For a long time much of my songwriting came from moments of insight collected, rearranged, and later compiled in the Notes app on my phone. In the first week I had written a full song (No Trace which is also on my album Sojourns) as well as the music for Shadows. The music sounded so pretty that it felt like I was going to wreck it no matter what I did, though it later occurred to me that these words would perhaps be the only fit. They seemed too profound for the first and second verse, and thus needed some supplementary material.
I remember having visited the Royal Tyrell Museum the summer prior and being absolutely taken by the idea that a sea once ran through North America. The Niobraran (Bearpaw, Western Interior Seaway, etc.) sea ran through the centre of the continent from current Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico for a period of almost thirty-five million years. As with every visit to the Royal Tyrell, this information made me feel like I am part of something so much bigger. My problems seemed smaller and gratitude expanded.
Humans occupy such a small part of time and space. According to current models of evolution, our earliest ancestors emerged from the rich, vibrant ocean to find a new habitat. They risked everything. We have always been shifting and resettling; taking big leaps. Humans are transients on this planet. So much has happened independent of our species. It can be quite confronting to see the world as impermanent. Earth is our only home and changing our minds can be uncomfortable.
Finding the additional verse immediately preceding the one I had originally heard tied everything together in such a serendipitous way. I ended up using half my own lyrics and half Tennyson’s words, book-ending the song to extend the more-than-two-hundred-year-old text.
My first addition:
Moonlight scatters peaks across the rugged land
And shadows bloom
The very spirit of the earth shall will to stand
And be exhumed
From In Memoriam, Section 123
There rolls the deep where grew the tree
O earth, what changes hast thou (have you) seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea
The hills are shadows and they flow from form to form
And nothing stands
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go
And my final addition:
We are but visitors, shifting through these transitory lands
With starry eyes and sturdy feet
Emerging from the deep
Listen to the song here.
Check out the lyric video here.
Listen to the album Sojourns here.
As always, thank you for reading.