Yesterday a pandemic started, and next week it’s Christmas. Somewhere in between the most contentious election any of us remember happened. How weird is that? Christmas with Covid is lining up to be a somber season, in spite of a positive election. I thought about that because of the zoom meeting I just came from where the only person who had any positive perspective on the world had just finished swimming laps at Jones Center, which distorted his perception of current reality. The rest of us were realistically dour.
But then, between the tragic deaths and political posturing on Facebook were scattered an amazing number of adorable babies just born this same year, and some lovely poetry.
I believe this is why it would be good to frame today’s thoughts around music.
Recently I’ve had time to attend to the radio and youtube videos more than pre-covid. I’ve been looking for understanding of what new generations might be searching for. In the same week I’ve been introduced to Aurora on one hand and Heilung (German for “healing”). Two very different musical traditions. They both seem to be out of Northern European roots.
They both touch on some primal levels of longing that I’m curious about. I don’t think Americans were as receptive to primal longing pre-covid. I guess that statement could be autobiographical. These musicians were very popular before covid, best I can tell. And maybe it’s also a generational longing. The next generation needs to approach life the universe and everything from a less-confident place than many baby boomers were expected to assume.
Aurora, for one, seems to me to express a longing for child-wisdom, authentic and vulnerable, and open to the experience of life. One song in this performance says “I’d like to feel the world through child skin”. Here she’s zoom performing during covid. It must be strange that there’s no applause between songs. But her songs are wistfully beautiful.
Heilung though is primal in a Viking drum kind of way. Mysterious and earth-shaking. They get their lyrics from Neolithic runes, in fact. The performance is a ritual to something compelling, led by the drums and voices. The audience must arrive expecting to be carried to some worship experience they won’t find in many churches. There’s a lot of incongruence to musicians in costumes evoking ancient earth-based ritual, when half their instruments are electronic.
The next question is about music as a vehicle to draw listeners toward something different-better. For instance, a recent webinar on changing the narratives that drive culture toward things that honor people, planet and community, there was discussion of K-Pop music as carriers toward a life-affirming narrative. That was both surprising and pleasant to hear. Any move by youth toward life-affirming is good. It’s the opposite of despair, which I worry about for them sometimes.
To finally get to the darkest-before-dawn principle, a friend just reminded me that we can think of the great planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn happening next Monday as the real dawn of the age of Aquarius. Our generation has lived our whole lives with that tune moving in the back of our consciousness as we resisted wars and empire and struggled to find some way to live with integrity within the corrupt old order. We haven’t been perfect at that by any means. But we were the star-finders for our time who were watching and warning and doing our best.
And now, after living our lives getting tangled up in the corrupt old order, and understanding better how difficult the shift is, fate is presenting us with an option to support the next generation to push on through the swamp of desolation to the sunshine on the borderland of a future unknown. How can we do that?
1. A simple way is to find good projects young people with good ideas are doing and donate to them. Some of us are at a stable point where we have some extra, and the young people coming up are facing the staggering problems of the future with very little.
2. Another key piece could be called “reweaving community”. It was not by accident that corporate mega-culture got Americans moving all over to get ahead. The Randian philosophy of the rugged individual was something that oligarchs of the 1950’s found deeply compelling, coming as we do from our colonial past. They saw little need for the tight-knit communities that were – for better or worse — the true bedrock of early American culture and spent some effort to scatter families and communities widely, in search of the illusive “good life” of consumer culture. Which provided the inspiration for American classics such as “Bowling Alone” or a thousand others stories of fragmentation and loneliness.
Human beings are a herd species. The last 400 years of experimentation to force us into a rugged individualist economy has failed. Let’s acknowledge that we are the result of this experiment and move on to cultures that embrace and celebrate the communities of our lives, while we sort out the balance between individual and community that allows for the most productive use of individual creativity and ingenuity that can help us all lead lives of meaning and happiness. We can find communities that support who we are and nurture what is good in each other. In community we can find ways to heal the planet capitalism has devastated. We and the planet deserve that.
The Fayetteville community is very much aware that one of our strengths is the sense of community that’s unusual for our time. We value that. At the same time, we also need to remember that it’s our economic engine (Walmart) who is responsible in so many ways for breaking up the local economies of communities across the land. It was the model of that time, but the flaw was in how unaware we were of the inherent value of the community that was laid waste. Now different choices must be made if we are to become a people in tune with each other and the planet that nurtures us.
3. Another piece is that we’re struggling to reweave strands of trust between ourselves. Black and white Americans, for instance. Built-in racism. That was another foundational part of starting a country at war with itself for economic gain. Just because some of our founders built it that way doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to keep doing that. For community healing anti-racism and anti-anythingism has to be a key healing element.
So of course, the music of our time includes reaching back to themes of childhood innocence and Neolithic wisdom. In our bones we know that we know that. We’re opening up the window of hope a crack to let the sun shine in.
Happy planetary conjunction, all. See you in the Age of Aquarius!
Old hippie version of Age of Aquarius:
Your focus on the positive approaches and projects of younger folk really does bring hope, and your statement that finding ways to $upport those young activists is a practical and available tool for building hope is so insightful and illuminating. It’s easy to think of hope as something that happens, evolving due to events, and coming to us from outside. But your exhortation to create and build hope through finding ways to support emerging positive movements of younger folk is an illuminating and transformative perspective on how to generate hope instead of just waiting for it.
Oh Ellis that’s a beautiful assessment of what I said. Thanks for sharing it.
That would make a lovely letter to the editor…. just a suggestion.