"What if..." and other random thoughts

With the turn of the weather it's become comfortable to just go outside and sit. The last few mornings have found me catching some alone time out in the woods. Yesterday what started as a short stroll down to the boundary of our new acreage turned into 90 wander around full of wonder and discovery.

This morning I pulled my first cappuccino and headed back to a little waterfall I'd checked out yesterday; a perfect little sheet of water coming off a rock. I could tell that the level's already dropped from where it was a couple weeks ago when I brought the kids down to splash around...

Anyhow, I ended up finding a patch of dry grass on the edge of this little singing brook; there was a soft depression that my hip fit into just perfectly. So I laid there in the warming spring sun, not a bug in sight, and watched the water come over this little rock, sending splashes up onto the surrounding dry stalks from last years meadow. In the corner of shadow there was ice clinging to clumps of this grass where through the cold night stray drops built up. While I was there the sun was high enough to be shining on the ice, and it sparkled and shimmered against the dark mossy wet rocks.

You see, in the 15+ years I've been wandering into wilderness, it's always struck me "what if I lived in a place like this?" "what if I got to be here every day; this was what I woke and slept to?" I now live in such a place. And the answers to that question of "what if..." have been stunning in their beauty; cliche as it may be, it is like a flower slowly blooming; its secrets opening to the world.

I could go on and on, about the color of the stones in the creek, or the striking green of a moss-covered rock against the grays and muted browns of early deciduous spring. Of the leaf carpet just after the snow has melted, and the weight and water and pressed the jumble of leaves and branches into a smooth undulating fabric over the earth. Then there are the trees, the old maples and oaks that the old timers left to mark the edges of their fields, the stone walls, the ledges scraped bare by glaciers that left small boulders in the middle of the forest. Nestled into this is our little corner of home, our orchard, pond, buildings, and now garden. Each place coming alive in the spring.

I never knew spring could be so sweet. When we lived down in town I remember feeling like April and May would never end, out here though, I'm content to let them slowly roll on, watching the buds on trees thicken, hearing the songs of the first frogs to wake up. Seeing the pond just after the ice has melted in its crystal clarity before the algae and all the animals go nuts. And there's no bugs. Did I mention there's no bugs? No bugs. So blissful to just be able to be still.

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So I've got the serious itch to start spinning music. Spinning's sort of a silly descriptor for it since I'll be spinning a hard drive rather than records or even cds. Yup, it's all digital now, baby, and for less than the cost of a single decent cd deck, let alone turn table I can be totally outfitted with a console, new headphones, and a new external hard drive.

See, the thing I realized today is: electronic music is to my generation what folk was to the 60's. Burning Man is the current day Woodstock. Electronic music is everywhere, it moves across borders and languages; getting set up to produce it can be done for less that a nice accoustic instrument (let alone all the recording gear or studio time) would cost. In other words, it's a democratic music, and for the most part it is community-driven rather than corporate-commodified. I can go to BeatPort or Fiberline Audio and find brand new tracks from some folks that are just getting out there, and I can pick them up for less than a couple bucks each. That's pretty friggin' cool.

And then there's the whole DJ-as-bard (or folk musician). As a budding DJ, I've spent the last many years, almost a decade, collecting tracks, finding out what I like and then attempting to follow the thread through a maze of underground connections to find more music like it. There's been a lot of dead ends, there's a lot of noise. The flip side of the medium being so democratic is that there's a low signal to noise ratio; there's a lot of mediocre crap out there to wade through to find those really stunning nuggets. Though when those pearls are found, and then strung together...wow. It moves me, and moves my body. So like any other era's traveling storyteller, DJ's cast their nets, and while many do actually travel in the physical world, I think a lot more of us do our traveling in the digital one, surfing the net and iTunes for the next pearl to share....

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I've actually started journaling for the first time in over a decade. For a long time, I thought of my blog(s) as my journal. Though there's something magical about writing on a page. Last night while Kelly was out and the kids slept I wrote by candle light; the house silent. It was one of those moments where I connected to a long line of ancestry; perhaps the only other comparison that comes to mind is of picking berries by hand. It's just something that has been done countless times by an infinite number of hands. Sitting by candle light in silence; an archetypal human experience that hooked me into something greater than my life, in a moment something longer than memory...