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When I am alone in the unadulterated natural world–meaning the pristine world, the world without evidence of human intervention–I find myself looking up and seeing the infinite sky, the cirrus clouds, the hawk spiraling up, and I start to cry.

It is as though someone, something is writing me a love poem, and if I could just read the letters made by the intersection of the hawk's flight with the lines of the clouds, I would be able to hear and understand. Someone's calling. infinite sky, the cirrus clouds, the hawk spiraling up, and I start to cry.

It feels like a love letter sent through the centuries, from the primordial past, and woven into everything that lives and everything that exists, and just as a letter from a dear friend whom I haven't seen for a long time, this letter pulls up a bucket from the well of longing.

It makes me want to move toward the source of that love. I want to move in that direction, but how do I read the map? How do I move up into the sky and become the hawk?

This is also why I love the poetry of Mary Oliver. She reads the poem in the flash of a fish. She gets the letter in the rain and translates it into words that I can read and understand.

LANDSCAPE
by Mary Oliver

Isn't it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about

spiritual patience? Isn't it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing as though they were the most fragile of flowers?

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning, so far, I'm alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky–as though

all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.

Drawing by Boss, age 8

My owners, Ron and Jean, put me in my cage and took me to the vet. He probed and checked inside my mouth, and then suddenly I the fur between my shoulder blades was pricked. I slowly felt myself grow sleepy and as I drifted off, I could feel the fur on my left front leg being shaved and then an IV was inserted.

Everything went dark.

Some timeless time later I seemed to awake into a dream where I became aware of a searing pain like a red light starting to glow in my brain. The entire left side of my body grew warmer and warmer as though it were on fire. I felt the urgent need to escape but I couldn't move. I wanted to run but my muscles wouldn't obey me. I couldn't open my eyes. The pain grew stronger and stronger. After what seemed an eternity I was jolted into consciousness by hands lifting me. As they lifted my fur and skin peeled away from my body. I tried to scream, but I was still under the effects of the the aneaesthesia.

I heard horrified conversation around me but I couldn't understand it. Then another needle pricked my back and everything went mercifully cool and numb. The pain was gone.

I slept again.

When I awoke I was wrapped in bandages and back at my house. Ron and Jean were telling some friends how the vet had left me on a heating pad and forgotten about me and left me there the entire night with the pad on. The pad had burned me and in the morning he had lifted me and pulled my skin off my body.

Over the next week the wounds healed and then the itching started. I wanted to scratch and scratch and scratch, but when I lifted my paws I found that my claws had been removed.

The piano was my first instrument. I started studying when I was fairly young, and when I started it felt like coming home to a country that spoke a language I had forgotten I knew. It enthralled me that patterns of notes could evoke feelings for which I had no words. For instance, the simple pattern of 4, 3, 1, (in the key of C: F, E, C) seemed to combine a sense of resolution and longing at the same time. (It's also one of most clichéd cadences in popular music...)

For hours I banged away at repetitive patterns, alternating them, transposing them, trying to distill just what it was exactly that gave them their power. (My mother's sanity may be due to the fact that she is severely hearing impaired.)

I would use any three notes to make a chord. Their power was static and only became influential when placed between other chords. Or when those same three notes were played in sequence, their power derived from their relationship to each other, to how loudly or softly they were played, and to their relative duration.

And I composed endlessly, constantly stringing notes and chords together into combinations, trying to lock in some kind of elusive meaning, some emotive power that always escaped me. Each fresh combination, juicy with musical fruit, would become dry and brittle after repeated playings. Some bright flashing thing I would hear for a second and try to grasp at with the notes would become hazy and then disappear. If I caught anything, like a fish on a hook, soon all I held in my hands was deadness. In one sense, every chord is "the lost chord."

A piano is at once a very versatile instrument, and at the same time a profoundly limited one. Each note is rigidly in tune. You can't slide between notes. There is no vibrato. A piano has none of the essentially organic qualities of a human voice or a violin, and yet it's range is extensive, from deep bass to tiny treble.

But still, this incredible range from deep A (27.500 hz) to 8 octaves above -- the high C (4186.009 hz) , is all created using groups of 12 steps -- the Western chromatic scale.

With these twelve notes Bach and Beethoven and Liszt and Mozart and so many who have come after have all made their music and their art. Imagine if all the great painters in history had only painted with 12 colors. Imagine if our eyes had only been trained, for generations upon generations, to only see and appreciate 12 colors, and if anything outside of those 12 colors looked garish and ugly.

I read somewhere once that all the music that could be written has been written, what with only 12 notes to work with, we've surely run out of combinations by now and everything that gets written is redundant. This is not quite true, and to most people it doesn't even feel remotely true. And music continues to be written, and it sounds new and that's good enough for most people.

It wasn't good enough for me.

For many people, judging from how reoccurant it is in popular music, the "heart and soul" chord progression (I, VI, IV, V) seems to be deeply satisfying. I soon learned to despise it. It was predictable. And easy. Like a crutch. It bored me instantly. I would play a chord progression and struggle to go somewhere else. But there really aren't that many choices.

Every chord "leads" to other chords based on where it sits chromatically in its family. The tension between its own notes and the notes around it pull it towards a resolution. The resolution that we long to hear can be teased out by a tension of going away from the resolution and then returning. The route taken away and back can be something one has heard a thousand times before, or something that is slightly unusual or fresh, to something that seems completely random or accidental. 20th century music explored this boundary created by the total random progression of notes, but the music that has continued for centuries to please the popular culture has been music that sticks to a fairly predictable path away from and back to the resolution or "tonic."

I often struggled to refresh this path. Trying all sorts of different manuevers, as though I was playing chess. Each time I would either head down a path only to find myself lost, or my attempts to take a new direction sounded forced and contrived.

It wasn't until many years later when I was able to record my ramblings and improvisations and stutterings that I discovered the secret. The trick was to forget everything that I had learned, every single piece of knowledge gleaned in 16 years of intense muusical education, including 4 years at Oberlin. It was in listening to recordings I had made where I had forgotten what I had played, where I allowed myself to not hear the progression and analyze it through my years of music theory education, to not reduce it to a mathematical equation, but to hear it as a sound in nature, a wild bird's call, something completely random, was I able to once again capture the power behind the notes and the chords they produced.

all disease is a manifestion of our sense of being unworthy of love or unloved?

and all outwardly directed affection and love and obsession is our attempt to heal someone else through loving them and in turn heal ourselves?

Here's my design for a t-shirt for the Rhythm Society's September 2005 All Night Dance Celebration.