On growing older and having to accept that time marches on. I present to you a song.land reflection on gratitude and the elements that offer further life, even when youth has or will pass you soon enough.

I mention the ancients in this episode. This is a reference to potential advanced civilizations that existed before a catastrophic event about 12,800 years ago. Explore this idea yourself from the Joe Rogan Experience with Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson if you would like.

We cover two aspects of love in tonight’s song.land: love as friendship, and love as commitment and attachment. I also mention snow multiple times.

It is that time of year for me in the northern hemisphere.

You know it’s good because of lyrics like this:

And now I hear you’re living out of trash cans in the Philadelphia area
Lettin’ the snow grow deep
Maybe there’s something special that we missed all that time
All that time, all that time

Also, this episode is uncut beyond the beginnings and endings. Yay to smooth transitions!

Welcome to a strange episode of song.land celebrating the shortest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. It’s a celebration of light, of joy, of the laughter of the moon.

I am not a trained opera singer. Still, singing in this way unique to me makes this episode quite passionate.

Happy winter solstice! Sing it to the night!

Imagine this song.land episode comes to you from deep in a cave. I’ve been reading Underland: A Deep Time Journey and recorded this episode inspired by some of the experiences and thoughts from the book.

For example, I journeyed with Robert Macfarlane into the roots of trees, where the forest shares nutrients between each other through roots and fungi. So I reflect on life at a cellular level, supporting and growing and sharing and hurting together.

This episode is a quiet episode.

If you don’t want to commit to the book, you may also enjoy listening to an interview from On Being with the author.

In this week’s episode, Derek joins me as we create together. He brings a Mississippi style that I cannot offer. As always, I bring the high voices.

It’s the first time I’ve gotten to play music with someone else on this show and not overdubbed or used artificial instruments. Yay!

That’s part of the goals I’ve set for the coming year of song.land.

I had a great time making music. I hope you enjoy it, too.

This episode contains explicit language.

Practical life. It’s natural for me to sing about the power of love over life, but what about the examples where love is not the modus operandi?

Inspiration for this episode comes from my listening to the Finding Fred podcast, exploring the story and decisions of Fred Rogers. I mention Backstreet Boys, the inspiration of which came from the documentary about the manager for Backstreet Boys and others, Lou Pearlman.

One day later, I recorded additional music that I appended to the end of the episode. I’m happy with what I got to express in that additional music as it helps clarify more of the specifics of love: it’s an easy policy to prescribe, yet it’s still practically hard to live a life of love when the word itself is hard to define.

This week’s song.land meanders through the relationship between loss and gratitude. When life “…falls like dominos coming down the mountain” we can still turn to gratitude to find comfort and a brighter future.

Recorded this on the evening of Tuesday, September 12, 2019.

References

• I reference zombies toward the end of the recording. I was inspired by the history of zombies, whose story begins in Haiti.
• I then mention the sugar fields and “all our greed”. Sugar was the primary crop that cost the lives of so many people for the people of the island. The current dark truth is that it continues in our current day history. I use the A Sweet Deal episode from the Rotten Netflix series as my source of understanding this.

Tonight’s episode of song.land brings you the ideas that, when expressed, lead to wholeness and an undivided life.

Salamanders compares fear with nature. When I feel afraid, I want to hide myself, that it can somehow protect me. It won’t, though, and we can look to evolution to answer why: why do bees exist? Why do so many salamanders live in the Smokies? They survived when it was time to change.

So can you, and so can I.

Two sections of today’s podcast use the ukulele. I’m happy with the songs that came out of the time with the instrument, yet the quality of this ukulele is very low and the mics I have on it are also of low quality. The intonation sounds awful. My ears tire of hearing it, so I broke up two ukulele sections with a guitar section in the middle.

That’s also why I sing about leaving a review in the middle of the episode instead of the end. That wasn’t intended when I recorded it.

References

• “I cannot find our hope”—I was thinking of the content of Mark Manson’s latest book, which taught me that not having hope is not inherently a bad thing. Things can still be good without predicting what the future will bring, but instead accepting it as it comes.

Thank you for listening to song.land.