Reply #8: I'll try to pass on your thanks to the proper sources.... [View All]

THanks for the thanks, but it's not really me that's due any thanks for any guide-star identified. I'm the messenger. So are you. Especially qualified since you're an artist.

Truest thanks are due to the original author, whether that be understood as something outside us (the muse, Spirit, the heavens) or some creative force that is fully within us and part of us, but which we've nearly all tended to either divorce or alienate ourselves from enough that it seems proper to give it a name or identity of its own, even though it is not only just part of human nature but known to be specifically coming from within one's own (say) heart. In my mind, "big props" go out to Emerson and Hawken, and they can, in turn, best know if or what they need to pass on thanks and gratitude for. Could be great- sort of a gratitude chain letter in a way... ;)

But thanks to me? no. Certainly not thanks to "Land Shark!" But then along comes your Peter Gabel quote to remind that perhaps if one owned up to the "stars within" so to speak and fully answered the call then an integration or re-integration would occur, making the above kind of "splitting" disappear through transcendent unity. Examples: splits like that between the creative and "regular" life, schizophrenic crackups, and spiritual/"reality" dualisms of all kinds. All would collapse, or expand, into unity like reunifying East and West Germany only on a more cosmic scale.

BARRING that re-integration, then perhaps, just perhaps, with exactly the proper wry tragicomic sense of irony and wonder and humor, one could amplify and point to the ultimate "separate" source of the message repeated by messenger (yours truly) as follows:

"The creative and divine forces are so strong that few imagine that when we die individually, that those forces also die. Therefore, when we die, the messenger becomes one with the message, being no longer in mortal form. THerefore, shooting the messenger is entirely justified, and even ethically desirable, IF the message is a really great creative/spiritual message!" :)

From a reggae posting board, an "Emersonian" note, in some Rasta language:



NOw isn't that an interesting topic on so many different levels: "Love and affection in the right direction?" When is any of us barking up the right tree? When we bark at none, at one, at two, at many, or at all???

This phrase is also the refrain in an early song by Michael Franti and Spearhead, actually the first track on their first album entitled "Home" and the track is entitled "People in the Middle". On one level it's about reaching the political middle as an artist, using good rhythm and vocal arrangements that come from deep down, and joining that with heartfelt politics that come from deep democracy as well. But as with any good song it works on multiple levels. Anyway, it seems fitting to close this reply of mine with a song, to the extent it arose in or was inspired by the stars, wherever those stars are thought to be found:



And, at the break of every dawn, rises the most spectacular star of all.