Songs are for Singing

My mentor has posted a link to a blog on facebook.  The author was writing about writing.  More specifically, they wrote about loving your audience. 

And this has struck me. 

So far, my song writing has been for a context, for God and for me.  But I've always been a bit too evasive about the idea of 'performance' to really consider an audience. 

Now I think it's time to face up to the fact that music is for listening, and gifts are for sharing.  A context is nothing without people, God can hear the song of my heart without me needing to put it (badly) into transient fluctuations in velocity and pressure in a fluid, and I'm generally happier creating music than I am re-ingesting my own produce.  So it is to an audience that I now look.  I hope that it will change the energy of my songs, and I suspect it may change their subject matter too.

So, who?

Is that up to me?  Maybe not (maybe so), but given that that's a big question, I hope that it's enough for now to have gained the realisation that the songs I write have purpose, rather than just a large amount of identity.  They are for someone, and that kind of adds a bit of an edge to a media which is communication..

Right now, it feels different, so I'll give it a try.

Two Today!

So it's my daughter's birthday today.  And I have been challenged by my wife to write about that rather than some other random fodder circulating my mind.  And because it really matters to me, here goes..

Firstly, I'm just blown away by a whole person.  It's amazing that she is.  That we (well my wife) has given birth to another whole human being.  Not a mini-person, or a sub-person or a second-generation person.  An original, genuine, state of the art, complete and fully spec'd human being.  As valid, important, valued and amazing as anyone.  Wow, reproduction rocks!

Secondly, she is the ultimate hero.  I've discovered that children are.  Because heroes change, they are transformed.  That's what they do, it's their thing.  And unlike "adults", children actually expect this as part of basic existence.  My daughter develops.  In every dimension and direction, she is constantly on a forward trajectory.  It's like her life is made of just two components; love (of us, friends, family, the cat), and "education"; she just wants to learn and do new things.  She wants to say more words and better, communicate more things, express herself more clearly, jump higher and further with less hand-holding, swing higher, climb harder, sing more of the words, dance more groovy moves, do more stuff!!

And as we were discussing today, she has accomplished more in the last year than us by a good order of magnitude or two, and she will again next year.  Which of course is good and right.  But why do we ever stop expecting to change?  I'm sure that we all can (and should) keep on getting better, but the dimensions in which we grow should be deeper.

So here's to my beautiful girly.  A true heroine.  And here's my commitment to expect to change myself.  I can already use a potty, and I can already climb the stairs, and I've already got a little sister, but I'm sure there's room for some major growth in this particular child.

I thank God for my beautiful family and His love which I cannot understand.

A Thing

So here's a thing..

I am amazed at the in-everything-ness of God.  He is in it all and He defies all our instincts about a deity.  His ways are the inverse of our intuition (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RiboB3dlIQ). 

Maybe that's what we were meant to do.  The universe follows causality.  One thing happens, it causes something else.  Everything's the result of something(s) else.  The outcome?  Big and strong things persist, weak and small things decrease.  Our universe, evolution, nature, they all inevitably, necessarily exaggerate imbalance.  It has to be that way.  Entropy brings order but pulls us to the cold grey.  The non-linearity brings about stuff.  But how to go further?  How to take the cosmos higher?  How to make beauty and diversity not only physical but spiritual?  A leopard is beautiful, but violent.  Biology facilitates life, but generates pathogens, parasites and predators. 

Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”

How do you break the cycle?  What on Earth (or around it, or mind-blowingly distant from it) can subvert this convention?  Could there be some kind of creative leveler, some absurd, abundant, illogical return loop that could take things further forward?  Maybe life isn't the summit of creation. 

When God's living image enters the scene, things can be different.  Love is the active agent.  It causes the big and strong to nurture the weak and small.  It drives us to care.  To medicate, domesticate.  Us humans have an amazing capacity for technology and love, the creative flame.  We could take it forward, or we could reassert the old way.  Or worse.  We can use our authority for anarchy, destroy order and promote chaos.  Sometimes it seems that's what we've chosen; to decay.

We are shocked by our inhumanity.  But maybe we should be more inspired by our likeness.  What is more surprising?  That hurt and pain, exploitation and humiliation are given voice in the song of humanity?  (After all, this is the resident condition.)  Or that, despite the pain (there's so much pain in this world and this People), despite that, sacrifice and generosity and healing and forgiveness and hope and trust and goodness and love are?  Surely that is miraculous, it is certainly improbable, seemingly impossible.  Humanity is miraculous.  The occupying empire, the base state, the cosmological operating system may be flawed, but we are intrinsically, fundamentally, essentially made like Him.

In the beginning, He gave us work to do.  In the present, He works in us and out of us.  We are made in His likeness, reformed by Him Like Us, and revived with Him in us..

So let's get creative.