joy, sorrow, rhythm, and sound pulsating like the seasons...

As late summer slowly shifts into early autumn, and the multiple greens of the wetland morph into reds and browns, my heart returns to music-making. The next 90 days in these hills are my personal favorites: the luscious corn of Lamas passes the season's mantle to the wheat harvest, sumac and grape vines shimmer with their unique crimsons, the nights demand blankets on our beds again, and the autumnal equinox points us all towards Samhain and the liminal space of All Saints Day. David Cole writes in The Celtic Year that "the autumn season is the time when we lose all that has once been."

It is the season of harvest, when the crops get chopped down and the fields become empty. It is the season when deciduous trees drop their leaves and the ground becomes filled with yellow and brown... and it is the season which teaches us to let go: it carries with it the life-giving aspect of detachment.

Small wonder that our ancient Celtic mothers and fathers sensed that this was the transition that marked the start of a new year: November was the ancient beginning, not January, where darkness and death invite us into the primal womb of waiting in anticipation of new life. The Christian season of Advent is shaped by these truths where the days in-between show us how to slow down, focus, rest, discern, and return thanks for all that has been. We're not there yet, of course, but already the burning bushes are starting to look like fire and a few of the older trees are settling back in repose: a perfect setting for this year's Play Music on the Porch gathering.

The late Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead fame hit the nail squarely on the head when he told us:

People need celebration in their life. It's part of what it means to be human. We need magic and bliss, power, myth, and celebration in our lives - and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

Another wise old soul, Nick Cave, put it like this in a book-length conversation entitled: Faith, Hope, and Carnage. In response to Sean O"Hagan's query about the meaning of music, Cave replies:

Music can draw people out of their suffering - even if it is just temporary respite... That's because music has the ability to penetrate all the fucked up way we have learned to cope with this world - all the prejudices and affiliations, agendas and defenses that basically amount to a kind of layered suffering - and get at the thing that lies below and is essential to us all, that is pure, that is good: the sacred essence. I think that music, out of all that we can do artistically, is the great indicator that something else is going on, something unexplained , because it allows us to experience genuine moments of transcendence.

As these two souls dance together while existing in completely different spheres - death and life; the folk/rock/jug band vibe of the Dead next to the T.S. Elliot punk verve of Cave and the Bad Seeds - a unique song is given voice where celebration is practiced in the presence of suffering while magical bliss accompanies the enigmas of our existence. Lou Reed called it magic and loss. I encounter it as trusting the mystery of the journey that carries both blessing and tumult. Cave speaks to my heart when he says:

As I've gotten holder, I have come to see that maybe the search IS the religious experience - the desire to believe and the longing for meaning - moving us towards the ineffable. Maybe THAT is what is essentially important, despite the absurdity of it - or, indeed, because of the absurdity of it.

That's the paradox of music-making as I experience it, yes? It's the absurd AND the ecstatic. The restorative AND ephemeral. Joy, sorrow, rhythm, sound, movement, discipline, and abandon resting within a trust that pulsates like the seasons both in and out of time. When asked how he chose to engage the world after surviving the Holocaust, the late Elie Wiesel said: "I dance." The dance of life is resistance and surrender - it is embodied spirit on a journey of faith that not only acknowledges but accepts grief and healing, assurance and doubt, sound and silence simultaneously as well as the power of vulnerability. Cave wisely says:

To be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse and obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things, creatively and spiritually. It can be perversely a point of advantage, not disadvantage... a nuanced place that feels both dangerous and teeming with potential and the more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged and that is ultimately where the freedom comes from.

And so, at this point in the journey, I choose to link myself to my music-making mates who bring with them their own wounds and wisdom to share in an aesthetic stone soup of sound. That's what the songs we've crafted for this year's Play Music on the Porch feels like to me: nourishment from within shared in community as respite and rebellion. Or prayer and party. Or maybe simply dancing in defiance of all that defiles us. Poet farmer, Scott Chaskey, wrote:

The challenges that confront us daily in the twenty-first century - familial, social, economic, political, environmental - can be overwhelming. As we encounter what is reported as the greatest challenge humanity has collectively face - climate disruption - it is timely to revisit an ancient theme, an interspecies them: our kinship with nature. (Soil and Spirit)

Many of the songs we've selected are chill this year. There are a few kickass rockers but those are the exception to the flow. As we've been practicing over the past month, I've wondered why the vibe keeps coming out subdued and introspective. And now I have a few clues: that is what the season is singing to us. Be still - and know. Be grounded - and trust. Be awake to one another during the insanity of this era and bless be the ties that bind. When we sit upon our deck facing the wetlands each morning, not only is the foliage changing, but so too the birds and four-legged critters. They dance, to be sure, and sing some, too but all in preparation for a deeper change.

An agitation of the air, A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

(Stanly Kunitz, The End of Summer)

No wonder it felt like we needed "Ripple" as well as "Gimme Shelter."