One billion dollars.

One billion dollars.

If you are anything like me, or the other folks I work with, you most likely just read the title of this post with a Dr. Evil accent. I would like to think thats how it ran through the mind of Mark Zuckerberg recently when he decided to purchase the company instagram for exactly the same amount. $1,000,000,000 for a company with no profits, no revenue, and less than two dozen employees. A billion is a hard number to wrap one's mind around. It typically only comes up in conversation when discussing corporate profits or debating the finer points of government deficits. So what is a billion dollars?

The world population as of 2010 was beginning to close in on 7 billion humans. Only about 300 million of them live here in the US. But approx 1 billion occupy a continent just across the atlantic; Africa. Here in the US about 78 percent of people have internet access allowing them to join us in musing about the concept of a billion dollars. In Africa it is closer to 10 percent. About half of them live on less than one  dollar a day and about a third will go to bed hungry tonight. In the US the per capita income is $40,000. World wide approx 1 in 7 people go hungry every day, which conveniently enough, turns out to be approx One Billion.

A lot of numbers to toss around in your head, but still just numbers. You may feel outrage at the idea of a company with almost no tangible value selling for 1 billion dollars while a billion people across the globe go hungry. This outrage has no tangible basis, outrage at a number Many of us work for corporations with similarly outlandish monetary values. None of us actually ever see millions in cash being carried in or out of our offices, stores, or job sites. Almost no one reading this blog post has ever seen, met, or spoken to anyone living in Africa let alone encountered hunger on a personal level.

1 Billion. Enough money to double the per capita income of most of africa. A small connection. Maybe just enough to bridge the gap between us and them. What would it mean to you if your income doubled tomorrow? How much more would it mean if your children had been starving the day before? One Billion is a meaningless number to a woman in africa, but one dollar, one dollar would be worth killing for.

Numbers are a queer business. We probably see Billions of them in our lifetimes. Finances, math classes, election results, sports scores, weather reports; numbers poor into our lives at a steady and endless rate. With the advent of smartphones we all travel about with tiny computers in our pockets pouring digits into our hands and sometimes overwhelming us mentally and emotionally. Although, typically we manage, we are used to most of the quantities we encounter in our day to day lives. Repetition and the human races unique ability to catalog and sort through the endless amount of data in our lives have made us almost immune to most large numbers. Now with a 7 billion plus people roaming the earth, maybe we’ll soon learn to cope with the idea of a Billion. Maybe we’ll even learn how to use it.

Cheers

Memories and Madness (Part III)

I have held onto precious instruments and I have lost others upon the hearth of love. I have listened to the tunes written for cows and sea shells and been left wishing that I had seen an old cow of my own sink into the dark depths of some bog; longed for the sights and smells of sea shells and sand. A fool I’ve been many times in love, now a long lost memory. All of this is madness and somewhere along the way I think I may have forgotten to take my meds…

The following is yet another chunk of lyrics, these from a much more modern song by the band Placebo. The band was founded around 1996, and released the record that bears this track as its title in 2006:

"Meds"

I was alone, falling free,

trying my best not to forget,

what happened to us, what happened to me,

what happened as I let it slip.

I was confused by the powers that be,

forgetting names and faces,

Passers by, were looking at me,

as if they could erase it.

Baby...did you forget to take your meds?

This song hit the airwaves, so to speak, the following year. It was right around the time I felt I too was going a bit mad. The bands name, according to Stefan Olsdal, comes from the Latin for ‘I please.’ It was intended in someway to be a stab at the 90’s cliché of naming bands after popular drugs. It’s a band name that could resonate with anyone caught up in an unauthentic existence trying only just hard enough to please the people around them.

This Song, and several others by the band, has been floating around on my IPOD ever since. The rest of the lyrics drive home the meaning:

Baby...did you forget to take your meds?

I was alone, staring over the ledge,

Trying my best not to forget,

all manner of joy, all manner of glee,

and our one heroic pledge.

How it mattered to us, how it mattered to me,

and the consequences.

I was confused, by the birds and the bees,

forgetting if i meant it.

I’ve fallen. I’ve been left holding onto whatever once was. I’ve been confused by sex, lust, music, drugs, and who ever it is that really is the ‘powers to be ‘ (I’m leaning towards the thought that no one is really in control…).  And now I have come to the point where I truly believe I may not be alone.

Although my path in life seems dedicated to it, and Musashi being my one true guide, I have found a pattern in the winds. When I play the tunes of old pipers gone to dust in the madness of love and war, when I turn on an old album, or when I sit and watch the comings and goings of the world around me, I keep feeling it. That MacDonald, Raghnall, Placebo, myself… we are not just isolated incidents. A pattern emerges. We are all together in being alone.

Cheers. 

Love and Childhood Memories (Part II)

 An album tells a story just as well as any Bard of old. Here is an excerpt from an Album I’ve had since I was a great deal younger. Purchased direct from its creature while I was a student of hers at the Ohio Scottish Arts School:

Lament for Ronal MadDonald of Moroar/

South in Autumn

…as featured on Ann Gray’s 1998 Album ‘Shouting at Magpies.’

“Oh lad of the brown hair, your are eyes are autumn

Leaves fall like tears; I cannot cry

In bitter wind, then, my heart is lonely

Lonely hills and sky

The fields are untended, the cattle scattered

Magpies quarrel overhead

My thoughts are stones to throw at them

If you can, come to me again

Travel by little known ways

Through the high passes, before they fill with snow”

At home now they’ll be turning the fields,

The shadows lengthening, the winter coming

The rooks will call from trees without leaves,

And oh now the seasons are turning…

Chorus:

And if my feet had wings to fly, then tonight in your arms I’d lie

But I’m two hundred miles South in Autumn…

The battles lost, the battles won – are as a dream to me now

Amongst the heather

Of fine rain and mist, we are its children

And I slowly turn for home

Chorus…

I think I shall not see you again, last night a vision to me came

The women they were keening ‘round a hearth grown cold

And I had gone to my last battle

Chorus…

The lament was written for Ronald MacDonald of Morar, known in his time as Raghnall Mac Ailein Oig, a celebrated hero and composer. The tune it self, according to Barnaby Brown, falls with in the Free Lyrical form of the classic Ceol Mor tradition of Scotland. It is ‘unfettered by geometrical repeated patterns,’ other wise so common to other classic Pibrochs’. It’s a good tune but not one I’ve had the pleasure of learning.

Although, according to Highland legend as recorded by folklorist Calum MacLean in his 1959 book The Highlands, MacDonald may have composed another tune I learned as a young man:

‘There is one very lovely pibroch called, MacCrimmion’s Sweetheart… Tradition in the Arisaig district has it that the pibroch was composed… by Raghnall Mac Ailein Oig to a sea-shell that he picked up one day as he strode along the shore.’

According to Iain Macey, who taught me how to play the tune while I was attending his course on beginning piobroch, a different account of its creation could be given. His version, also recorded in MacLean’s book, told how one MacCrimmon wrote it for a favorite brown polled cow that fell into a bog…

Brown pulled cows aside, the tune holds too much emotional weight for me to play a note of it without the memories of my own love past filling my heart with remorse. It carries enough baggage for me to sink my own heart in any bog or swamp.

South in Autumn is a track that tells a tale of a man far from his love, unable to return to her side. At face value it would seem that the war that has separated him from his sweetheart would be difficult to relate to for you or I. But the emotions that come out are universal. The kind of emotions found in millions of love songs and thousands of lines of verse.

Something about being alone, far from the one you love. It strikes a cord deep inside anyone’s heart. Love; Lost or destroyed, in madness or death. That love ‘which paints the petal with myriad hues, glances in the warm sunbeam, arches the cloud with the bow of beauty, blazons the night with starry gems, and covers earth with loveliness.’ In the Highlands or Lowlands, the waters in the north or the mountains to our south. No difference is perceivable in what was and still exists in the hearts of all.

Cheers.

Fools and Love (Part I)

Coffee shops are a good place to tell stories. The following story immortalized Murdoch MacDonald as the “The Harper of Mull” and comes from M.P.A. Ramsay’s ed. of Tamahill’s Poems:

“In the Island of Mull there lived a harper who was distinguished for his professional skill, and was attached to Rosie, the fairest flower in the island, and soon made her his bride. Not long afterwards he set out on a visit to some low country friends, accompanied by Rosie, and carrying his harp, which had been his companion in all his journeys for years.

Overtaken by shades of night, in a solitary part of the country, a cold faintness fell upon Rosie, and she sank, almost lifeless, into the harper’s arms. He hastily wrapped his plaid around her frame, but to no purpose. Distracted, he hurried from place to place in search of fuel, to revive the dying embers of life. None could be found. His harp lay on the grass, its neglected strings vibrating to the blast. The harper loved it as his own life, but he loved his Rosie better then either.

His nervous arm was applied to its sides, and ere long it lay crackling and blazing on the heath. Rosie soon revived under its genial influence, and resumed the journey when morning began to purple the east. Passing down the side of the hill, they were meet by a hunter on horseback, who addressed Rosie in the style of an old and familiar friend.

The harper, innocent himself, and unsuspicious of others, paced slowly along, leaving her in converse with the stranger. Wondering at her delay he turned round and beheld the faithless fair seated behind the hunter on his steed, which speedily bore them out of sight. The unhappy, transfixed with astonishment, gazed at them. Then, slowly turning his steps homewards, he, sighing, exclaimed –

‘Fool that I was to burn my harp for her!’

Before the Bagpipe took hold in Scotland, the Bard and the Harper held dominion on the Battle Field and by the hearth. They where the keepers of the cultural store house, so to speak, of the Isles and recounted genealogies and histories, tragedies and tales of adventure. MacDonald, in many accounts, is referenced as the last of the Harpers. He reportedly died in 1789 just a few years after the Highland Society began its first Piobaireachd competitions in Scotland.

I could never claim the innocents of the Harper in this story. I have though sacrificed an instrument before for the purpose of visiting a fair flower of my own. One that was long gone before my feet ever took to the road… thankfully it was not my pipes.

I wonder how far MacDonald’s feet carried him before Rosie was pushed from memory. If ever he could, how did he move on? Harps are replaced easily. A little time and money and a new instrument replaces an old one. Although, I'm sure none of the Harpers I have known in my life would agree. 

It should be left at that. A harp, a set of pipes, a fiddle; none are equivalent to the love of ones life. But who among us knows for sure whom that is, in till our lives are already completed. In the mean time we keep walking. As MacDonald, we let our feet carry us forward down the road, even as we are forced to leave the one we loved behind.

Cheers

Government Conspiracies: Agenda 21, Light Bulbs, and Smart Meters

Government Conspiracies

Agenda 21, Light Bulbs, and Smart Meters

A few weeks back I opened the local paper. I was sitting at work on my lunch break, and as I often do I turned to the Readers Tell Us column, a local section where readers can call in and leave their personal remarks on local and national issues. A individual had called in to complain about the current federal regulations restricting the sale and manufacture of incandescent light bulbs.  This is a complaint that has been made repeatedly by every one from presidential candidate Newt Gingrich to local Tea Party groupies. But this time the argument, or compliant, was not about having his personal liberties encroached by the new restrictions. The individual was insisting that his home heating bills had increased do to the removal of incandescent light bulbs from his home. He claimed that the bulbs had produced so much heat that their absence was causing a increase in his heating bills.

This sort of argument is becoming more and more commonplace. Today the New York Times printed an article featuring a number of arguments about how local plans to develop green spaces, reduce carbon footprints of local communities, and even smart meters where all products of a U.N. conspiracy to create a new world order.[1] In the past these concerns would have been brushed aside as non-sense. Today with the growing presence of local Tea Party Groups these sorts of arguments are having considerable impact on decision-making on the local level.

If we look to the Chicago-Sun Times we see how misguided such fears are.[2] To steal a quote Kateri Callahan president of the Alliance to Save Energy, stated:

 “There is a lot of misinformation… Retailers don’t have to take inventories of old bulbs off the shelves. The government is not going to come into homes to check. ... You’re still going to be able to buy incandescent bulbs. They’re just going to be 28 to 30 percent more efficient.”

So the gentlemen above may still not be placed at ease because more efficient bulbs mean less of the ambient heat that represents the primary source of wasted energy. Although the pro and cons of ‘light bulb home heating’ seem like something better left up to the Myth Busters we can rest assured that when big brother does invade our homes it wont be to check our desk lamps. For the time being make sure to check out this article and Wikipedia for a break down of the different kinds of bulbs:

http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/tips-on-shopping-for-energy-efficient-bulbs/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp

Newt and his Tea Party fans commonly cite the same UN resolution when defending their fears of a new world ‘lighting’ agenda. It is ominously titled ‘Agenda 21.’[3] Apparently no one at the UN has a degree in marketing, because naming your environmental initiatives in the same way B-movie directors name films is no way to win over the masses. Upon actually reading Agenda 21 you’ll find a very vague plan for reducing consumption and limiting development in rural areas. The plan for in acting this agenda is more carrot then stick. It involves offering developing countries special financing for local planning and developing. For big countries it means mostly education and out reach. If this is the new world order we’re to fear, then we truly have nothing to fear but fear it self.

That is simply what most of the Tea Party’s outrage boils down to, blind fear. Individuals who, do to a lack of education, old age, misinformation from media and politicians, or simple laziness, lack the ability to adapt to an ever-changing world. This is not new. It is a story as old as time. People fear change. Therefore people fear funny shaped light bulbs. What do you fear?

Cheers

---

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/activists-fight-green-projects-seeing-un-plot.html

[2] http://couriernews.suntimes.com/news/9906045-418/old-light-bulbs-fading-but-what-will-replace-them.html

[3] http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml

A Kernal of Whale Truth: Inspired by Brett's Swallowing Whale

Although it is Jonah and the big fish/whale, and not Brett's whale, it was Brett's inference as to the meaning of being swallowed by a whale that inspired this commentary. (See Brett Lamb's blog post 1/22/12 "The whale has swallowed me".

Brett explains that to have the feeling of being swallowed by the whale is something "akin to fate", though it is not a desire to die nor the pain of mortality. Rather, "It is instead the simple feeling we all have in the deeps of our stomachs that there is something going on that we cannot quite put our fingers on...the truth that no man, woman or child can quite describe or grasp in language alone."

The notion of fate we know as a fixed set of events for the future. The notion of something bigger than ourselves is much less prescribed and can be as simple as a quality of humility--submitting to the ideal of family or a community. It can also be deeper, believing in an ideal that has intelligence and subsequently power to affect our lives in significant if not all-encompassing ways. Whether one believes in a predestined life or more broadly a life in which there is an affecting body of person, state, ideal or supreme being(s)...there is still a notion of something existing inseparable from our life...we are not alone.

The next concept to note is that the intelligence other than ourselves (free-willed or not) is not always known. In fact as decades progress it seems more and more would refer to this intelligence as the unknown. Brett alludes to this as that which we can't put our fingers on, that which we have no words to describe. Though artists and poets may reach for the existential to inspire them, many others may feel that being swallowed by the whale can be disorienting or even scary. Most people want to have control over their lives. To feel that their life is being moved, out of their control, or at least under the varying influence of another, can seem to them like a wild sea creature is eating them whole without a moment to escape. Being swallowed by a whale is not a positive experience.

I offer another perspective. The swallowing whale is a fact of life--being overcome, without warning, by a darkness. We get overwhelmed. We transition into new phases of our life--adjusting to new people, new environments, new and unfamiliar anything-- adjustments that are like having to be born again, finding our way unclear of our path. Some experience depression. Sometimes we simply feel lost. Even the most elevated and positive thinkers can find themselves tested or challenged to prove themselves over darkness and back into light.

Whatever metaphor the swallowing whale serves, I venture to claim the purpose of being swallowed is all the same. The purpose being--to be brought closer to that which you seek. This kind of darkness that is cast upon people means that they were previously in light. Thus, their natural instinct is to find a way out of the darkness and back to the light. Darkness thrusts us in a potential search and discovery process, if we accept the opportunity. Searching can return to us void initially and we can feel hopeless and lost...but eventually the discovery of whatever it is we seek, if we continue looking, emerges, we find our footing and the unknown is less obscure and more understood. So if we feel absorbed by the question of our fate or of the general unknown, the question only begs an answer. We are then engaged in the search for the answer--the answer that will bring us out of the whale. The whale is merely the place we go to search deep within ourselves...even if we don't consciously invite the experience.

Having a different outlook of the purpose of the swallowing whales in our lives...that it actually serves us rather than attacks us...can make for a much different outcome in the experience. Those who feel attacked or absorbed unannounced by something unknown that may be friend or foe are likely to remain stuck in the darkness longer. Take this metaphor: If someone knows there is an exit to a maze they are likely to seek the exit until they find it. If someone does not know there is an exit they most likely won't look for it and thus live in the maze (the darkness of the whale's belly) much longer. Putting whale swallowing experiences in context--varied experiences though they are (some blatantly scarey and disorienting, some more subtly so)-- makes for a different overall life experience. Potentially the difference of having greater peace. Some people live around the challenges of life rather than in conjunction with them. It's all life and each person's life belongs to them in its entirety--whale swallowing experiences and all. Put your finger on that notion...it might make all the difference.

The whale has swallowed me…

Yona, Yunos, Lonas… Jonah, and of course our friend the Whale. Then again according to the Hebrew text of the Tanakh, the Quran and the Bible he is of course merely a ‘big fish.’ When did he become a Whale? This question arose the other day when a co-worker was recounting a Halloween were her husband turned his pick up truck into a giant paper mache Whale. It followed me home to where I had been listening to Hugh Laurie's new album ‘Let them Talk.’ Hugh covers an old J.B. Lenoir track titled, of course, ‘The Whale has Swallowed Me.’ The Lyrics are simple, and are what under lie all good blues songs, acting as the perfect source of meditation. Lenoir has given us an interesting metaphor; he sometimes ‘…feels that old whale has swallowed [him to].’

What does it mean to feel like a whale has swallowed you? Its’ not found in the obsession of the Captain Ahab. It cannot be categorized under the uniquely Christian disease, of desiring a death made impossible by the resurrection and redemption of Christ (That Kierkegaard describes as the ‘Sickness Unto Death’). It is not even the simple pain of mortality. Our friend the ‘big fish’ is more a kin to fate itself, bearing down on the helpless seafarers of old, and as it bears down on us today. It is short of the pain of mortality it self. It is instead the simple feeling we all have in the deeps of our stomachs that there is something going on that we cannot quite put our fingers on. It is that same emotion C.K. Chesterton indicated to as the motivating factor of all great poets and artists. The truth that no man, woman or child can quite describe or grasp in language alone.

Lenoir most likely would not have known of the translational error that came from the pulpit. He would have perhaps realized that the story came from the Old Testament making it both important to Christians and Jews. It is less likely that he knew of it’s recounting in chapter 37 of the Koran. Here it is a story much a kin to that found in the Old Testament. Jonah flees from the calling of Lord aboard a ship only to be cast into the sea when the ship becomes overtaken by a storm. His lot in life came as lots where drawn by his fellow shipmates seeking to appease their respective gods. In the end he repents and is rescued from the belly of the whale.

Why did he end up trapped in the belly of the great fish? According to the Quran he committed acts worthy of blame. But what did Lenoir do to be worthy of blame? Maybe God knows? But what we can be sure of is that he grew up in the Deep South during a time of racial discrimination. These motivations came to the forefront in later albums he produced in the mid-60’s titled Alabama Blues and Down In Mississippi. And in a performance captured in a Martin Scorsese Blues Documentary these later themes become intertwined with his original classic. You can check the video out on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34evyrWA0xc). It captures that something, the feeling we cannot describe in words, and it dose it with the images of the fight for civil rights and the bending strings of Lenoir’s guitar.

So when did the ‘big fish’ become a whale? I feel it must have happened sometime shortly after people stopped reading the bible and began to depend once more upon their respective religious elders for divine inspiration. But the whale is a strangely fitting symbol, for those who look past the literal meaning and try to grasp at that deeper kernel of truth. The rest, well they make giant paper mache whales out of trucks.

Cheers