Spring greetings from Raveloe Studios. I’m not gifted in the art of flowers, but whether by a previous tenant’s intentions or the soil’s own precocious designs, I have tulips in the beds—yellow out front, red in back—and the monumental birch tree that crowns the garden is filling out in brightening perfection.
With the weather warming, I find I can make myself comfortable again in my music-making space which I am fortunate to have, its insulating properties not withstanding.
A quote from Austrian poet-philosopher Rainer Rilke:
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!
This is both evidently true and famously forgettable. Oh the despair when nothing does come, nothing is made—the existential agitation—and time seems only to pass and pass and rush on and leave one behind, empty.
But the sap does rise.
I’m offering this track here now rather than storing it away for a grander moment or larger context because, well - one runs out of patience, really, or with taking the long view or whatever, and I’d like to share it in its freshness. I made it recently, the day before the birthday of somebody who I am deeply tied to; wrote it for them, meditating on their particularities of person and circumstance. I believe that is why it assembled itself so readily, whereas most everything else I’ve attempted to write lately, promising yet grounded still in abstraction, refuses to find its way.
I’ll leave it here for now and let you listen. I do feel that in general, after a wintry season of infernal/eternal patience, the sap is on the up. Indeed I am working on a new record which I’m excited to tell you more about and hopefully interest you with in coming weeks.
empty your pockets
there’s nothing you need
perched on the rocks on the balls of your feet
free is the falling
when you give up the ground
you know you can never see all the way down
and the comfort that ricochets round in the dark—
the sum of your life is the love in your heart
empty your pockets
no stranger are you
to the mountainside, to the river ride, to the underground routes
free is the feeling
when you give up the ground
you know you can never see all the way down
and the comfort that ricochets round in the dark—
the sum of your life is the love in your heart
and the comfort that ricochets, echoes and bleeds—
the sum of your life is the love at your feet