The Ocean and Then This

I didn't want to move. I definitely didn't want to go back to the party. I was alone on the beach, and I mean surrounded by the splendid multitude of nature, only absent of humans. 

I'd walked far enough from the neighborhood where I could see the lit up windows, and all the talking, smoking, lies and music were overtaken by the heavy breaths of ocean. So loud and powerful, the wind and wave, yet not near as exhausting as talking to the party crowd. 

Example:

Apparently there was an underground band in the 90's and nobody went to their shows. Yet everyone had a story about seeing this band play to literally an empty room. Also, it was repeated to me many times that I had to hear them, but I probably couldn't because the band only made one rare cassette that's nearly impossible to find... but if I could it would be amazing... L.A. voice, "I mean it was like me and my boyfriend and the bartender... that's it... gawd can you believe it? They're just so good...so good. And then we broke up and the ba***** took all my tapes."

I'll admit if I'd passed by the window, having never been inside, I'd probably be envious... I'd probably want to be mingling and drinking and making up stories, but not now. Not once I've sat on the floor breathing in smoke from vanilla cigarettes, waited for an hour to use the bathroom while people took care of their noses, or drank any that awful metallic punch.

So I left. 

Oh beautiful ocean. I love the things you say. The stories you tell. Now the party is only filled by distant shadows and I'm safe to take off my shoes and socks. To sink in. It felt so good my shirt came off too.

"You are what I came for anyway," I said to the beautiful mouth of the Pacific. It's not hard to understand how it got it's name.

Travel mile after mile of field, desert, mountain. The pain. It must've taken a lot of pain to be the first settlers to get here.
 

Then this...

The moon watching from above like a loving mother. The soft sand pulling in at my feet as if it wants me closer, and the ocean. The great mystery. That perfect embracing vastness. I felt the wind. Pushing hard against my bare chest. And the motion. My world was stillness and motion. The blackness, the space, and me. Listening to the freezing waves come from the dark-beyond, rolling across the sand, over my feet.

I fell on my back, spread myself out across the sand, and closed my eyes.

Open. The water's up to my shins, soaking through my jeans. The night was colder and darker than before. The lights from the party were gone.

"Had they all left?" I picked myself up, dusted off a layer of muddy sand. It wouldn't be the first time the band went back to the hotel without me, but getting lost in Spain is another story. There was laughter in the wind, but from whom, I couldn't say. Maybe people further down the beach. It was too dark. 

I reached for my clothes along the sand brushing my fingers around me... can't find anything. My eyes slowly started adjusting to starlight. I could see the tops of waves coming in from the black waters. And the laugh again from nobody.

It was like a bump. I felt something buried just under my hand. The end of a rope about as thick as a quarter. Slowly I began pulling it towards me and the rope went on and on.

The water was singing. Washing out, hi-hatting in the night, keeping time with the deep bass thud of crashing wave. Striking an old song about the great loneliness in life, and separation. From shore to shore, longing. The laugh came back but this time it came accompanied by a girl.

She was dark and thin, and her hair was long constantly lifting with the wind like the way movies fake it. "What are you doing?" She asked.

I said I wasn't sure, but I had pulled so much I wanted to know what was on the other end.

She laughed. 

Further down the beach her friends were calling her back, but she bent down beside me.

"What if it's supposed to be left alone?" She asked playfully, or maybe she was serious and her sweet accent made it sound gentler, I don't know.

"I'm a little late for that," I didn't let her stop me, and kept pulling the rope out of the water, hand over hand.

"What if the other end holds something you don't want?"

I stopped pulling for a moment and the sounds of droplets falling off the rope, hitting the surface of the water caught my ear.

"Or what if the end is right behind the surface, just underneath where it is falling in now, you could get it with one more good pull."

I tightened my grip and started pulling again.  

It was not the end.

"Or then again," she said, "maybe it just goes on and on for miles covering the whole ocean floor with no end." 

"That's ridiculous," I said coldly before trying to soften up, "I mean it's a rope... it has to have an end." 

I think I offended her, cause she got up to go back to her friends. "You know," she yelled as she turned back to me, "Don't be so sure. There are lots of people pulling and pulling without ever getting anywhere."

-rene

A Natural Life or Speak Like A Horn

I threw a melody to the new morning sky
It lifted through the street faltered and died
This place is not for you, this city's rotting inside
I picked up pieces carried her home
held her tight, reset the bone
told of places, where wild melodies roam



There are some who are born to live in cities. People who thrive on the numbers, who glide on asphalt. Whose hearts beat with the flow and hum of traffic and speak like horns, the only way to be heard. Going hours without seeing the sun, maybe days. It is possible. I'm not speaking against them, or modernism, or technology...though they could hear the words with a choke in their mouth and a bit of guilt throbbing in their chest, and I wouldn't try to deny them the feeling. But I am a man of the fields and wild. I live for solitude. It's where I get recharged. It's where I get inspiration. Jaime pointed out, that Natural Life is a song where a world is created. The song sounds like it's name, it sounds like the lyrics, making it a very complete picture of the open country of home. If you've seen our instagram you could check out what I mean.

*

In the Natural Life
Where it's sunny and bright

I find inspiration in my home, the chaparral. A borderline desert of short oaks and cedar. My dad calls them trash trees cause they're not good for anything really. Only the mesquite is really good for cooking with, and a lot of those have been taken already by previous inhabitants. The cedar does give off a nice pollen perfect for heavy seasons of allergies. We also get cactus by the acre and anything that can tolerate 100+ degree summers and about the shortest winters imaginable. Fine with me, that's about all the cold I can take. I guess what I'm saying is there is as much good as there is bad even in the natural world, but what I find to be inspirational, and what I can't get out of the city is volume and tempo.

The chaparral is quiet enough and slow enough to hear the music that already exists around me. It is everywhere. Old songs. Wild songs. Strange songs with the discordant sourness of death. Dark songs painted in cold isolation. Sunset choruses, and verse falling like rain and drying in the limestone. This is not some idyllic harvest land, but just the way it has always been and will always be. People didn't invent music, we invented rules and patterns. The same way we can find images in clouds, music is inherent in the universe. Songs played for millenia, as ignorant of us and we are of them. The city doesn't give me that. The city is rules and patterns. It is a scream to me, and requires a different ear to pluck out its songs.


Listen to a live version:

Natural Life is not about the songwriter, but a protector and a keeper of the music. In an era where ownership is value, it's hard to say I don't really make music, but truthfully I find it. It might be time to admit there are some things that can not be owned. Somethings we have no basis to claim as our own. Amazingly it is technology that is allowing us to see the continuum in one frozen flash. All of history contained in one source where we can see that art/ideas didn't just pop-up out of nowhere, but emerge from an evolution of thought that is occurring all around us. Luckily, I don't have to go far to find it. This is something inherent in wildlife. The chaparral doesn't just exist on it's own. It wasn't invented or planned, but was inherited. It is a genealogy on to itself, tracing back to the beginning of beginnings. Music is the same.

There was music before and after me, and would have been fine if I never decided to participate in the first place. It is another completely independent genealogy. But also like the wild, it is fully accepting. Music may have an indifference, but it will not turn anyone away. I am completely free to try my hand, to move inside it's line, to participate. So just because I do not own or claim it, doesn't mean I am not apart of it, or vital to it. Just like any single plant, animal or organism, any song, group, writer, can exist in the landscape and even change it in drastic ways. I can walk outside, and be reminded that. The world barely notices me, but also waits for me, continually living and singing. We are simply free to join in whenever we want.

Eaters of the Dark

waves lap and fall
bodies turning
pile and fall
what does it mean to be young forever
Who wants to be an eater of the dark?

-rene


*Photo from: http://musicofnature.com/chaparral_concerto/