pauldbwatkins Music, Poetry, song

Sound Meditation during COVID-19

Take a moment to stop and listen. Inspired by some similar sound meditations, I wanted to create my own. This was created in a single take.

And this is a remix and meditative version of my song, “I am Om.” Like the original, this version—entitled “All Life is Interrelated (Meditation for Peace)”—is about finding inner and outer peace in a world that often feels disconnected and sick. The vocal clips are from Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders (from Coltrane’s Om), the Dalai Lama, Louis Armstrong, and MLK. I played this version live in a single take using an MPC Live (for the singing bowls and bells), an SP-404SX to remix the vocal clips, an iPad running Xynthesizr, and a KORG volca fm for ambient chords. Give yourself 4 minutes to stop and listen. I filmed the video while out with the kids for a walk at the Colliery Dams in Nanaimo, B.C.

pauldbwatkins Poetry

the multiplicity of everyday life (poem, draft)

starbucks-trash-can
Image from here.

before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world.
-Martin Luther King Jr.

polyphonic murmurings
the city speaks
even while it sleeps.
we are more than ourselves
the sum of our parts
is the larger part of something.
the whole world is allegorical.

our coffee is a miracle of globalization:
a seed is planted,
years later little nimble fingers harvest the cherries:
roasted, processed, it arrives across oceans, hot java,
we sip its velvety elixir & go about our day.

wearing bluejeans, crafted from swaths of denim in a factory
somewhere on a map in a county we’ve never been to.
we transport bodies in oiled machines that run on the commerce of drilling,
& eat our lunches in the break rooms of silent killings.

a solitary pig travels from farmactory to the killing fields.
we eat the animal we never could never know,
walk our dogs after, pet our cats, & yet,
all our bellies buzz with bellowing hunger.

we are all hungry for love, for comfort, for the workings of everyday niceties.
there is no human that is not a part—however apart—of the cacophonous pulling of all things.

the exploding of ourselves is like the imploding stars we’ve inherited.
we share in the cry of babies & the undulation of the ocean.
even if you can’t see or hear the howl of a starving child, we still play part to its cosmic tragedy.
miracles don’t end at the bottom of a coffee cup thrown casually into a recycling receptacle.

they end cause life gets in the way.