A Narrow Line

There is something endlessly nourishing about the ocean.

I’ve been to the beach twice this week. On Tuesday I went to Marblehead, and this morning I spent a few hours at Crane Beach in Ipswitch. I didn’t realize how much I needed these trips until I came back. It was medicinal.

While I’m waiting for the dust to settle, I’m hard at work writing new music. Now that Ten Directions is finished and out the door, the ideas have been coming quickly and I’ve been doing what I can to record them before they flutter away. I’m very pleased with what’s been happening so far, the sound is very sophisticated and clean.

I will be releasing these and all new electronic tracks as Artemis Seven, reserving Jeffrey Radcliffe for other musical projects. More on that in the future.

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I am returned from the mountains and am now a licensed massage therapist. It feels strangely inconsequential in the flow of life right now but it’s no small thing.

The release of the school promised time creates a huge rift in life, and in the moments before life reestablishes a new normal, I’m striving to understand where the lay of the land lies. I’m not sure when exactly things got so complicated, but even so it feels good to stand in the whirlpool and feel the trails of possibilities.

Massage school is over, and I’m waiting for the license process to complete. In many ways it feels like the last 9 months were a dream.

Today, I’m loading up the truck and driving out to the Catskills for my yearly Week In The Mountains. It’s a week of entirely unstructured time featuring lots of music making, silliness and catching up with old friends. It couldn’t come at a better time this year. When I return, hopefully my license will be waiting for me and I can start the transition from study into profession.

The past few weeks have carried me on their swift current as events rush past. The end of the massage program is less than three weeks away now, and as we begin the wrap up the sound of the oncoming falls are audible. Resumés are polished and applications submitted to licensing boards. I’m finishing up project after project, trying to create that academic alchemy from busywork to useful work. Sometimes the difference is all in the attitude and intention.

This school has been transformative for me, and I’m just now getting a sense of the scope of it all. When the mist clears I’ll be able to take stock and see more clearly where and who I am. And then, whatever’s next.

I’m still glowing a bit from last Thursday’s Jónsi concert. It was an event much larger than the sum of its parts, and felt akin to being dipped in Creativity. It’s a smiling, life-affirming kind of creativity, and I wish I could swim in it forever.

I had a passenger with me on my drive to school last week. A small stone had gotten wedged in my tire tread, and it cheerfully tikka-tikka-tak-tak-taked along as I drove. With the window down my little stone echoed off of the architecture and other cars on the road, soloing its heart out. I’m grateful I caught this stone’s 15 minutes of fame, and was a bit sad when the stone finally became dislodged as I navigated the traffic in Watertown.

It’s easy to set up one’s life as “me versus the world.” There’s inner strength to be found in opposition, but is this a good kind of strength?

I’m brought back this morning to the writing of James Carse, specifically Finite and Infinite Games and The Religious Case Against Belief. One of the themes explored in these books is opposition, the “them” in “us versus them.” You can’t have an us without a them, and if you’re concerned with protecting your own self or group or whatever there’s no choice but to draw a wall around what’s yours. Everything outside that wall is the other.

How does conflict end when those are the conditions? If you need the opposition to maintain identity, there’s no way to remove the opposition. This is self-sabotage.

I create opposition in my mind every day. That driver, those kids. Either one of my “kind of people” or one of “those people.” I know I do it, and while I catch myself sometimes, I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t even clue into. I wonder what would happen if all those walls came down at once. Would I be strong and secure? Would I need to be?

We have precious little control over what life brings to us, but all the control in the world in how we handle it. It’s one of those things one hears over and over in life, and while it might be self-evident, there’s the small matter of assuming control. This process is not the easiest.

The few of you who followed me over from Tinctoris know that I write a little electronic music sometimes. For those of you who didn’t, I write a little electronic music sometimes. I put out an album in 2005, Travelog, which people seemed to enjoy.

Now I offer you my second album Ten Directions, which is available now. You can get it on iTunes or Amazon.com.

It’s similar to Travelog, complete with lots of layered complex sounds. Think of each piece as traveling through a landscape. I hope you enjoy it, and would love to hear what you think.