Where the Water Flows
This essay is featured on Episode 3 of the MeadowSong Podcast. You can listen on this page, the MeadowSong Podcast website, or most major podcast platforms.
Not too far from where I live, there’s a beautiful park consisting of a mile-long walking trail that follows along a small run of water. The park is somewhat hidden, surrounded by winding roads all lined with suburban mid century homes. The small run flows down through a gorge that was obviously cut over thousands of years, and from any of the houses that border the park, you would need to walk down a significant hill before finding yourself on the walking path.
I was visiting the park the other day, and while walking along in the direction of the water, I was reminded of how psychologist Carl Jung described the flow of human psychic energy as existing on a gradient, a slope that declines in a certain direction so that our energies naturally gravitate towards some image in our lives. He called it libido, the sense of desire and will we might have for anything in our life (not just sex). What Jung was getting at is like the psychological version of what the yogis of India call prana – the Sanskrit work for breath, also translated as “life force” and “vital principle” – a universal energy that flows in currents in and around our human bodies.
Standing on the path in the park that day, and looking up to see the houses around me, I thought how it’s often true that, in order to get in touch with our own personal flow of vital energy, we must somehow get below the structures of our personality that have been constructed as a response to cultural conditioning – the roles we are expected to play as we go throughout our days, the influence of media, advertisements, etc.
Thinking again on the water, I was reminded that, though it may take a while, all water eventually makes its way to the ocean; and the ocean, in many an old poem and story, is thought to represent eternity, the Great Spirit, or the collective unconscious; and as we know from the natural history of our planet, as well as many creation myths, the ocean is also the place of origin for all life on Earth.
Reflecting on my walk alongside this little stream reminded me of a guest teaching experience I recently had. I was brought into a high school chorus class to conduct a songwriting workshop, and I had started the whole process by asking the students to do a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise. They were simply to keep writing whatever came to mind – in other words, to follow the gradient of their own thoughts and feelings – for a solid ten minutes. Afterwards, they would send me whatever they felt comfortable sharing, and I would use ideas from what they wrote as the basis for lyrics to a song that I would write and then workshop with the students.
The students were all together in their classroom, and I had joined them by video call. After they had begun to write, I got off the call knowing that I would see them again in a few days after reading what they sent to me. Their teacher, however, sent me a text message shortly after I got off the call, astonished at how focused the students were on what they were writing: “You could hear a pin drop in here,” the message said. Just like the little run of water that sits below all the houses that surround the park, the exercise seemed to give the students permission to drop down beneath the various social expectations that might govern the majority of their waking lives, and they were moving with the flow of what they were feeling.
When I read the writing, I was struck by the pain, frustration, and boredom that rose out of an overwhelming majority of the submissions. In particular, the theme of betrayal – by friends, teachers, and parents – was evident. Betrayal is a strong word. But it seems like the best word to characterize the loss of trust that seemed to be at the heart of the stories I read. It was clear to me that these students were aching for connection with other people, and that a year of social distancing (while important for keeping everyone safe) had made that need all the more dire.
Wanting to honor the struggles they were experiencing, I began to write words and music that rang out with a sense of desperation. To be honest, I was afraid that the song might turn out to be a real downer. But when I sat longer with what the students wrote, I picked up on something else… a more subtle destination towards which their collective energy seemed to be flowing… and that was hope.
In the middle of the park that I keep describing, there is a waterfall. It’s small as waterfalls go – about 25 feet – but it’s the biggest one in the area. It’s beautiful to look at, but to fall from the top of it would be quite damaging to a human body. I would venture to say that the songwriting workshop found many of the students in a ‘waterfall’ moment. With such a sudden change in psycho-emotional elevation – such as the shifts we have all been experiencing over the last two years – it’s perfectly normal to feel pretty tossed around, even battered. And… it’s also true that, after traveling over the waterfall, we are that much closer to the ocean. The time that we (the students and I) spent together putting these feelings into a song seemed to give them the chance to step back from the waterfall, consider where it is leading, and recognize the beauty – bittersweet though it may be – in all of it.
You can hear the music featured on this podcast episode by listening to the audio found at the top of this page. You can also hear the whole recording of the first improvisation by going to patreon.com/meadowsongpodcast and find the post titled “Where the Water Flows”. The post is public and accessible to anyone.