Religion

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful –Edward Gibbon

The Next Day

There are few things more poetic to me than the collective recall of a novel prior event. A gaggle of folks placing puzzle pieces of the previous evening, laughing with the pictures being formed, the holes left behind, the pieces I hide in my pocket, embarrassed at the data it provides. MY forms of this experience border the mundane, a vain LCD beer-goggle memory of flamboyant dancing, perhaps a smooch, free-flow rhymes of internal overclarity.

Catching the eye of a co-party goer, my pelvic preaching reaching for the brakes braces for impact passing competition, reducing the partition from attracting atoms, protons and pro-contraceptives, deceptive cadence, rhythmic steps towards a mutual goal. With blurry eye contact I contact her equally hazy eye contacts I impact my intact ego ergo I go gogo grass romping and floor stomping hashtag #YOLO. Self esteem repleted, cell phone number deleted, day by day proceeded unimpeded no repetition needed. I played it  professional, let the night get locked into internal scrap books and unspoken eye glances remembering the night previous.

When I see films of the fantastic, I brainstorm how protaganists woke up the next morning, how they looked at one another, how they felt a week later. Our ability to consciously and unconsciously gold pan the silt and stone of our experiences post-hoc float on the boat of our rules and regulations, our judgments of the situations past present future – and future intoxicated. I heard once that we are the only animals that get punished more than once for failure, because we can be embarrassed by it later.

Let your judgments devolve, consider their efficacy, the biological advantageosity, ask yourself if your actions would have helped your survival, or hinder it; let the good and bad be not good and bad but incurred better survival or taught you for the future. Don’t stew on negativity, simmer on success and boil and improvement. Strain the pain of your gambits and games, let the colander hold the pasta (pronounced like New Englander) accomplishments and let the scalding water of embarrassment pass through to the garbage disposal. Let your dreams steam, brainstorms cracking lightning, create and ameliorate flow what you know and let yourself be great, let/ go of your imbalances at the graffiti covered overpasses/ don’t wait  /greet the /semi/ at the inner yellow dotted middle of the interstate/ play chicken with hitchens which ends whichever way that you create. Choose your evolution, be your own rebel, and revolve. Revolve around and judge your own actions, be a mirror, a camera, a blog posting stranger, endanger your assumptions and be the popcorn peeking brief glimpses of your projected love story, comedy, drama, and documentary. Be not the protagonist, be the screenwriter, the director, the guy who clicks the marker at the beginning of each scene.

            I love the reruns, the backward swirl behind a boulder eddy letting wetbeds revisit the steady amidst the rush. We do, we review, we learn. We question, we answer, we question the answers, we ask for input, we discuss, we say it out loud, we say it in thought, we don’t say it at all. We have the gift of the instant replay, the memories, the memories of memories that may or may not even be true anymore.

I don’t just want to learn from my memories; I want to revel in making them.

"How did your education prepare you for the future?"

My music school graduation convocation speaker contest has the prompt "how did your education prepare you for the future?" My friend wanted to know what I would write, and was encouraging me to do so for the actual contest... so she whipped out a camera and asked me to just talk about it.

It's basically just me talking about my experience in school, and what I learned from it.

I’ve never been able to see the future, but I can hear the sounds

 *note: This poem received a regional music therapy scholarship!

Ten years ago I did not know that music and therapy could be joined at the hip to help tip the scales in favor of an individual that may stand residual;

Those that the bare bombardment of previous attempts at care had left behind.

I did not know that the beat beat beat of a metronomic clock or tick or bang or blip entrain the brain and train a man to walk again or teach a kid to say her name or

help an old couple of sixty five years step and sway with a grin as they waltz the first time since dementia set in.

5 years ago I entered university to study music theory and composition, not knowing of the existence of a fourth floor entity that would eventually house me in a profession yet unbeknownst to the then unknown me. My trials and tribulations were the ACME rocket skates and catapults flying my body after the imperceptible future self,

road running down the train tunnel of my

sort of mental, sentimental, illegitimate entitlement. I am not a cartoon. I stopped the shenanigans, setting in plans and locomotion to force open the clock face, stick my hand in and replace the smallest hand embracing that I control how fast,

that I’m not yet late, but I need to paddle harder if I don’t want to be in last.

1 year ago ago I still didn’t know what to do with my life.

6 months ago I found myself solving complications directed through filters of goals and objectives. I’ve gone from believing anything

to  “What are your sources?”

From ‘music is magic’

to “neural structures enact and react, dynamic not static, idiosyncratic periodicity a rainbow through the prism of cortical restructuring and neural Darwinism.”

3 months ago I knew enough to help my family.

Now: My internship is lined up, my textbooks almost back on my shelf, the process of college finally high fiving me with a step to the next adventure.

I walk dorian through the door/ again, to my left, lit in Lydian fluorescence, my past debacles crackle under the weight of what I learned from their existence, mixed in a mixolydian fixation on reexamination of my options. MT BC 2B simply gives me a vessel to practice my passions of people and using the music to make endless ends meet. Not just making music in order to be at the aid of another, not just creating music to restitch the fabric of an individual, but making music through making lives better, pitches and rhythms emanating from the mere mending of the textile. I have before me the opportunity to spend my life using music to help others, and helping others to make music. How could I possibly turn that down?

Major, minor, flat nine, sharp eleven…

I’ve never been able to see my future, but I can hear the sounds.

I’ve never been able to see the future, but I can hear the sounds

Music Therapy Scholarship Submission

It takes a village

Many persons know the story of the swallow which had entangled its claw, by some means, in a piece of thread fastened to a spout on the wall of the Collége des Quatre Nations, at Paris. Its strength being exhausted, the bird hung at the end of the thread, which it kept raising in the endeavours to fly, uttering plaintive cries. All the swallows from between the Pont des Tuileries and Pont Neuf, and perhaps still further, gathered together, to the number of some hundreds, all uttering cries of pity and alarm. After some hesitation and a tumultuous conference, one of them seemed to have found a means of delivering their unfortunate companion, and no doubt communicated it to the others. They placed themselves in order, and each coming in turn, struck the thread with the beak, somewhat after the fashion of ’tilting at the ring.’ These thrusts, aimed at the same point, succeeded each other every moment, and greatly incommoded the poor captive; but in a short time the thread was severed, and the poor bird set at liberty! The flock remained till night, chattering all the time; but in a tone which had nothing of inquietude, and was expressive only of mutual congratulation.

– Ernest Menault, The Intelligence of Animals, 1869

retrieved from: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2012/03/15/it-takes-a-village/

i am alive.

Life. I love being alive. Of all the trillions of sperm and billions of eggs available during the time of any conception, the eventual interdependent amalgamation is statistically infinitesimally improbable. Following fertilization we still struggle making it unscathed towards the light of existence.

But here we are.

We were the sperm with the strongest tails, the highest-octane mitochochondria; the egg whose fallopian flight best descended to the integral location for a genetic chest bump.

Regardless of your religious options, adoption, upbringing in thinking or plowing fields with oxen I rate this the greatest knowledge that led me to the edge of existential appreciation.

The opportunity to be conscious, to feel with our fingertips the grits of sand crashing and passing the crests of our fingerprints, to have a skin color and bodily imperfections; the opportunity of opinion to have a favorite anything, to type a poem in a periodic sonic environment of on-beat clocks ticking off-beat with one another. It is simply miraculous that we get to breathe. There is probably a better chance of winning the lottery every day of your life than being alive in the first place.

I don’t know if it’s possible to NOT exist… But isn’t it cool that we …do?