This song began during the dark cozy winter evenings spent alone in my Banff studio apartment. I think the first iteration of the chord progression came on the night before my twenty-seventh birthday. It was a drone sitting on top of changing bass notes (check out my video about it here.) As with any riff or bit that I like, there is a tight, narrow trail of phone or Logic recordings leading back to the rough beginning. As with so many of my songs, there were a backlog of lyrics patiently waiting to be set to music, but a lack of evocative progressions through which to utilize them. The lyrics started to cascade after the chorus was lifted verbatim from a thought that came to me earlier that year:
We must shift our search from the absolute
The only grande, insoluble truth
Is presence and impermanence
I was visiting Lethbridge a fair bit and pretty quickly grew tired of listening to music for three hours each way. The slower pacing and deeper detail of spoken language made it all more grounding and enjoyable to me. I vividly remember the drives beneath riptide cloud banks scattered about with enchanting and fleeting spectrums of colour. The sun would meander down across the jagged line where the sky briefly touched the mountains and hills and one by one the stars would peak out of the spherical dusk-to-azure gradient. There are some moments in life that demand your attention; some where no effort is required to focus on what’s going on, and I found many within these drives.
I find myself prone to periods of contemplation and self-reflection during long travels. A few ideas from recent months had really been resonating with me and slowly began integrating into my worldview. The Tao of Physics had reignited my love of quantum mechanics and the cosmos while again presenting the incongruence between science’s search for quantifiability and the elusive, deeply mysterious, and often mystical qualities of existence. It was through the rub in trying to harmonize these seemingly diametrically-opposed views that I landed on the line that became the chorus.
Having saturated my drives with TED talks (which, I think rightfully, paint our current situation in a catastrophic light), and watched a video on changing ocean currents (check it out here) I had water and conquest on the brain. I thought a lot about how within the past few hundred years many colonizers were guided through this turbulent and unforgiving medium to various parts of the world by these forces and it is through the same pillaging actions and attitudes that these same forces are now weakening and stalling out today. I am always reminded of Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech when such attitudes and actions are viewed or rationalized as positive, entrepreneurial, or even as an act of necessity:
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Why the track is called Patience still eludes me a bit. I think it just feels right. Some say it is a virtue, others find peace and centring in it, but at the end of the day I like how the word sounds and the sense of nobility it carries. Humans may conquer and synthesize and idolize as a means of feeling purpose and understanding towards their home, but all things return to stasis when given time. The earth will endure whether or not we find a way to make our situation sustainable. It is a matter of our ability to find harmony with the natural order that will determine the viability of humankind.
It is the same beings capable of horror and destruction that are capable of compassion and devotion to bettering the world. If we can see past all of the bullshit once in a while there is a peace and direction to be found within it.
Listen to the track here.