RockOm

By Trevor Harden, trevor@RockOm.net

How we use or invest our time says a lot about what we value. Time can be utilized positively in worthwhile projects, compassionate outreaches or spiritually-enhancing activities. It can equally be piddled away or even overtaken by mundane, daily tasks. Sometimes, though, just knowing this isn't enough. It's just too damn easy to take the path of least resistance and let the time fly by without any regard to how we're spending it.

So for those times when you need some extra motivation, here are a few songs that might give you the "juice" you need. We invite and encourage you to leave additional song suggestions in the comments.

SONG: "One Day Too Late" by Skillet (Listen)

EXCERPT: "So much to do and so much I need to say / Will tomorrow be too late? / Feel the moment slip into the past / Like sand through an hourglass / In the madness I guess I just forget / To do all the things I said"

REFLECTION: Procrastination seems to be in our blood. We all do it to varying degrees, but it just seems to be inherent to continually put off what we don't feel like doing. What are you putting off today that could just be worked through and completed? Spend a moment contemplating why you're afraid or unable to tackle the task, and you just may see that putting it off is more painful than getting it done. "Tomorrow may be one day too late."

SONG: "Time" by Pink Floyd (Listen)

EXCERPT: "You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today / And then one day you find ten years have got behind you / No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun"

REFLECTION: Much like the last song, these lyrics are hinting at the slow creeping of time. In looking back and seeing how much time has passed, we discover the feelings of either joy and satisfaction or of regret and disappointment. And yet, today is the only day we have. Don't beat yourself up over lost time, but at the same time realize that today is part of tomorrow's past. Live today so that when you look back upon it, it brings you the satisfaction in knowing you it to its fullest potential.

SONG: "Life Means So Much" by Chris Rice (Listen)

EXCERPT: "Every day is a bank account / And time is our currency / So nobody's rich, nobody's poor / We get 24 hours each / So how are you gonna spend? / Will you invest, or squander? / Try to get ahead? / Or help someone who's under?"

REFLECTION: As an experiment, cut out 24 small pieces of paper, representing the 24 hours of the day. Then tonight, before you go to bed, allot those 24 "bills" to what you're going to "spend" them on tomorrow. On each paper, write how you're going to spend that hour: "Spend uninterrupted quality time with my family," "Finish up the blueprints," "Call my hurting friend," "Rest and recharge through sleep," or otherwise. In the same way that credit cards and electronic transfers don't give us the same experience as spending cold hard cash, perhaps experiencing a tangible expression of your "time currency" may be a valuable experiment.

SONG: "Cat's In the Cradle" by Harry Chapin (Listen)

EXCERPT: "My son turned ten just the other day / He said, 'Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let's play / Can you teach me to throw?', I said 'Not today / I got a lot to do', he said, 'That's ok'"

REFLECTION: Relationships are one of the essential pillars of life. The oft quoted John Donne quote comes to mind, "No man is an island unto himself." Therefore, in our quest to spend our time wisely in meaningful work, let us not neglect those around us who are in need of our love and attention. No matter how "spiritual" or meaningful the activity or task is at hand, if we ignore our friends, families, and neighbors in the process, then what are we really accomplishing?

Your Turn: What songs motivate you as pertains to the use of your time?

A few links from around the web!

• Jewish-Arab duo faces criticism ahead of songfest - "Israel is sending a Jewish-Arab duo to represent it with a song of peace at Europe's best-known song competition at a particularly fraught moment for relations between the country's Jews and Arabs..."
• Chris Tomlin leads nominees for Dove Awards - This year's nominees for the Christian / gospel awards show (see also: doveawards.com/doveawards)
• Everyone's favorite philanthropic rock band, U2, streams their entire new album on MySpace this week leading up the album's release on March 3rd. (RockOm note: Did they remove the full album and just leave that one song up... or are we missing something?)

“God respects those who serve him,
but he loves those who sing for him.”
-Rabindranath Tagore (a poet from India)

Life is a constant pull between the illusory and the Real. In the yoga path, we are taught that life on earth as we are brought up to see as real is the illusion. We are taught as yogis that what is Real is that which is eternal, all-knowing, and already within us. It is up to us to find that Source, and try each day to live within its flow. This doesn’t necessarily mean giving up on the illusion of life altogether, but this approach does present an alternate way of being in the world. It is a way of being which appreciates the breath of life as our sustenance. We breathe in colors, we breathe out songs.

The Aztecs believed in the truth of “in xochitl in cuicatl,” or “flower and song.” When a wise people know the truth about life’s transitory nature, they find transcendence in beauty alone. They find wisdom in the songs and dances of their people. The wisdom traditions of the world have always included a devotional path.

In yoga, we call it “bhakti,” or “love, devotion.” It is an emotional way of being in the world, in which devotion to Spirit is shown through a highly aesthetic worship. There are different types of yogis; a bhakti yogi expresses their spiritual joy and zest for life through song and dance, as well as offerings at temples, altars and sacred places in nature. This path is quite different from the intellectual--jnana yogi, or physical discipline--raja yoga, or that of selfless service—karma yoga. The bhakta (“devotee pursuing love of God”) finds him or herself at peace while at temple chanting, playing harmonium, or making flower garlands for deity statues and living gurus.

My mind takes me back to a place God led me to once. It was a wintry night deep in the Himalayas about fifteen years ago. We were down in a forested ravine blanketed with snow. It was a festival of some sort. There were bonfires and Sherpa people everywhere, doing ceremonies at temporary altars and camping out. The jankries (medicine men) danced all night long in their white robes, wrapped in red ribbons and bells. They were still awake the next morning, when we awoke to hike back down the mountain to the village where we were staying below the snowline.

Well now, if you never seen a person dance down a mountain—like an all-day hike—it is something to behold. They literally danced down the mountain—there’s simply no other way to put it. The bells were ringing, as they leapt, bounded and flew onto rocks and over streams. We struggled to keep up with them, as we followed closely to hear their songs.

Someone told us when we were up on the mountain that the people were afraid of the research that the foreign scientists were doing on their lake. The people were upset that the research was going to disturb the spirits in that lake, and they needed to talk to their gods about it. In the face of danger to their way of life, they sang and danced and told stories about the lake, using their songs and stories to create a mystical fortress around their sacred lake.

It was a very beautiful glacial lake of a deep sea green, at the base of Gauri Shankar mountain in Nepal. I feel so lucky to have been there, and I still refer to it as my spiritual home, especially when my physical body is unable to get away into the mountains. I pretend that my ethereal body goes to that lake to meditate for me. Although, it is not really a place you want to live (unless you are a weatherproof hermit with the best camping equipment in the world).

I saw an avalanche up there—a huge one on the other side of the lake—and it was unbelievably frightening. I couldn’t believe it. A huge part of the mountain just slid off and crashed into the ground, rising like a tempest. I felt so small. And then, just as suddenly, everything was calm again… like Shiva had moved a bit, composing a private symphony just for me.

by AMY CHAMP, MA, RYT

University of California, Davis

Founder, Director - Yogi Activist Resource Network (YARN)

Registered Sivananda Yoga Teacher
Doctoral Student, Performance Studies, UC Davis
Designated Emphasis: Feminist Theory and Research
Teaching Assistant, Religious Studies, UC Davis

Government Lecturer, Calif. State University, Sacramento
U.S. History & World Economics Lecturer, University of Phoenix

M.A. Political Science & International Relations
B.A. Anthropology & Literary Studies

http://tinyurl.com/amychamp
http://dharmatigers.blogspot.com

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Since I started to write about DJing one's own going away party, the bark has peeled back from the tree to reveal a world much more fascinated with this subject than I knew. My first clue came casually: "Oh, like in High Fidelity!" I saw High Fidelity, and loved it - but that was a few years ago, long enough to totally forget that Rob Gordon, Nick Hornsby's playlist-obsessed protagonist, had already popularized the funeral mixtape game. Then, I discovered that a mysterious British organization, the Bereavement Register, polled U.K. citizens about this very question, as well - to discover that 79 percent of them were already thinking about it. Apparently James Blunt is well-regarded as a deliverer of dirges; he topped the pre-funeral charts (which is funny, because Brits also voted him one of the most annoying things about their country - insert bagpipe analogy here):

01. "Goodbye My Lover" - James Blunt
02. "Angels" - Robbie Williams
03. "I've Had the Time of My Life" - Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley
04. "Wind Beneath My Wings" - Bette Midler
05. "Pie Jesu" - Requiem
06. "Candle in the Wind" - Elton John
07. "With or Without You" - U2
08. "Tears in Heaven" - Eric Clapton
09. "Every Breath You Take" - The Police
10. "Unchained Melody" - Righteous Brothers

Wow. "Unchained Melody" is only number ten? What an outrage. Actually, I'm pretty aghast at most of these. (Speaking of aghast: Interestingly but trivially, both Hornsby and this poll came from the U.K., a decidedly morbid patch of land.)

People have been playing music for as long as they've been burying their dead, and so I'm sure that people - for as long as we have understood our mortality and could be called people - have been requesting certain songs be played at their graveside. While I can't find any recorded history of the funeral mix, I think it's safe to assume that we started requesting recorded music at our funerals as soon as it was available. Compared to the modesty of flowers and dirt that they used to be, most modern funerals are technological spectacles. We take every opportunity to upgrade even our most ancient ceremonies. We are accomplices to a universal current of crystallizing self-reflexion, embracing every novelty, jumping on every chance to compensate for Death by replicating and disseminating our favorite ideas.

We make a religion of anything that will outlive us. Since there are no carry-ons or checked luggage allowed on that particular flight (the weight limit is zero), we have to cash in at the gates of eternity by ceding eternal life to the living. We hand down the right to endure to someone or something else - our children and our stories, an ideal, or a joke, or a song. We finally find immortality by investing our living and dying breaths in the worship of those things we consider to be beautiful, or good, or true.

To put it another way, we know we end, and so we are obsessed with legacy. And whenever something increases our capacity to leave our legacy - when we invent writing, or the printing press, or genetic engineering, or the internet - we feed it as much as it can eat. Even ourselves.

And so we began investing in fossils, identifying with particular recordings, and not the living music to which they referred - the abstract and elusive, nimble and ephemeral music that characterized being human before the Age of Recording, never the same twice, mischievous and seductive. In a way, we have paved the way for Death by even agreeing to recorded music, by unemploying the spontaneous expression of grief we find only in the music of the bereaved. Postmodern composer John Cage:

"A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection."

If playing recorded music at a funeral does in fact squelch some balance of living response, then we end up not just dead but having managed to pull the funeral down with us, as well. What, then, is the point of coming up with a funeral mix? I think so many people delight at the prospect because making playlists is the fashionable modern way for us to to contain the tremendous, terrifying mystery of the unknown.

A UCLA study led by Matthew Lieberman recently concluded that identifying emotions allows people a degree of immunity from them. By even recognizing and naming our anger, sadness, or fear, we move ourselves to a safe and impassive distance. (Of course, the same is true for pleasurable emotions, as should be obvious to anyone who has ever watched a joke die by dissection.) Not only did they finally find a physiological basis for the benefits of mindfulness meditation - evidence that learning to watch the mind does actually lift people over the thunder and lightning of the limbic system - but they also unwittingly explained why it's so useful for us to write or sing or paint out our troubling experiences.

The emerging model is one of subject-object relations, where describing grief allows us to loosen our identification with it. By speaking about "the" grief, or even "my" grief, we move our pain into the third person - where we have it, rather than it having us. By codifying our lives and deaths, we remove ourselves from them, and no longer suffer total immersion in an unconquerable wash of feeling.

We benefit from funeral playlists because they pin down the most salient metaphors so we can study them, because "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Like good naturalists, we capture our experiences and embalm them behind a glass case, the boundless fury of Nature Red In Tooth And Claw miniaturized and mediated by a guided audio-tour. Our playlists reflect the edges of a giant, hidden shape. They allow us to tame Death by conceiving of it, by relating to it in a way our minds can manage (although, looking through the cage bars into this tiger exhibit, we forget that the tiger is actually still loose in the zoo).

It is precisely because having a funeral playlist somehow kills the living expression of grief - because recorded music offers, in its death, the illusion of persistence and of fathomability - that it is so popular. And the luxury of capturing our whole holographic experience in a single posthumous album is that we can close the books on a truth more grand and intricate than any of us can bear.

But that may also be why, as consoling as they may be, funeral mixes offer no ultimate solace - because keeping Death at arm's length doesn't allow the intimacy of direct experience. Sooner or later, each of us will have to move into Death, instead of away from it, and practicing one won't ready us for the other.

On the other hand, all technology seems capable of supporting both our desperate illusions of security and enabling our unflinching self-transcendence. Could a funeral playlist prepare people for Death, rather than merely offering us distractions and false promises? I certainly think so. In the next installment, I'll discuss the funeral playlist as not just a coping mechanism, but a tool for skillful compassion, and I'll continue to explore the songs on the soundtrack to my funeral.

In the meantime, here's an hors d'ouevre, Stuart Davis' spectacularly irreverent and lucid song, "Practice Dying." If any song can capture the subtlest essence of why to make a funeral playlist, this is it:

Stuart Davis - "Practice Dying"

Get high on ether when there's no one in the house
Pretend it's the big one at the moment you pass out
That's just rehearsal, but it's comforting somehow
To practice dying now

Hang out in funeral homes and make an honest bid
Lay in your casket, let them close the lid
Abra cadaver, roll your eyes back in your head
Practice being dead

Don't feel stupid; we're all scared
No one wants to go to hell
There's still time to get prepared
Start out now and finish well

Try painting tunnels on the ceiling in your room
Imagine your birth backwards with a bigger, better womb
Take little trips out of your body now and then
And if the rapture comes, maybe you'll ascend
You know the saying, "Once you learn to ride a bike..."
Well, that's what dying's like

Get high on ether when there's no one in the house
Pretend it's the big one at the moment you pass out
It's just rehearsal, 'cause that's all that life allows
So practice dying
Cuz you're almost dead
Practice dying now

Previous articles in this series:
PART I: The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, I: Playing DJ To The Bereaved

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

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