Last night, I went to an incredibly moving music performance — (Music Video #ganavya) and what happened there, coupled with IRS news that came in just after, gave rise to tremendous dissonance. A weather event. Like warm wind and cold wind mixing, making a twister.

How is life actually this simple, skillful, magical, direct, sonic, judicious, caring, familial — and then also so capricious, wily, terrifying, convincing, in the world of men?

The space between these worlds is a train ride.

The people crying on the wet street outside of the station are my brothers, and I forgot to bring any change tonight. My little gay family gets a tax bill shock — reverberating not only with what those dollars go to fund.

And in the rain, on the train — all of us, a lot of us, most of us. What have those protected from this class melting pot of public transportation, city streets, and farms staffed by live-ers turned workers gained in their scoptic, removed from the ground wide angle view?

A life with less music?

The music inspires me to be simple, in a way I haven’t felt for a while. It is novel. It is a carrying forward of what is implicit.

In her concert, Ganavya repeats and repeats again: “I’m not here to entertain you. I am practicing — and now there’s just more of you here to sing with.” A prayer to save us from sacrificing presence for performance.

The implicit and its carrying forward is a life process, Gene Gendlin says. (Video: Gendlin on ‘carrying forward’) We are interaction.

And so I might trace a night of song into an emotional conversation, speculating on what the result of my spouse giving up her green card could be. It’s a movement.

Many are asking the same question, albeit from very different locations: (How) do we seek asylum from an anthropocentric world gone mad- been done gone mad. born of a tiny, mad idea that we're not interdependent.

So a pretty woman and I gesture toward what could be next — living (G*d willing) between Brazil and the UK? Europe. What a privilege to even contemplate. But wouldn’t we be more exposed to violence, to mass extinction, on this side of the pond? Would we be more easily killed by Putin’s bombs?

And what of all the current bombs?

How can sound become a shield? How can listening become an infectious disease capable of stopping us- remember when there were dolphins in the river? Stopping is a superpower that listening makes easy.

What of the fear? Intergenerational trauma that is a shared human legacy we sing from? The Buddhists called it Samsara. They said there’s a way out — but seemed to have left out a great deal of feeling, of affect, on the path.

What they left out is what wailing leaves in. It’s what embodiment assures us of. It’s how embodiment tangles with transcendence.

Is Samsara our debt to pay until we get it right? It sure seems like we could. But I only land here, assured, in interactions from the love below.

Like the melodious, skillful, prayerful song of the Senegalese woman running her food stall on Deptford High Street. Her warmth of heart melts the reality of the man trying to stop her from putting up her table. But does it?

Well, her stall is there, isn’t it? We celebrate. She sings and cooks, and we embrace. I blow her a kiss on my way back down, my mates and I now wearing what we’ve called grieving scarves — walking in the windy, wet, warmer-than-yesterday atmosphere of southeast London.

I am caught up, song to song, sound to sound, and I’m living for this working definition of HOME: a safe enough place for reinvention.

The contrast is high — the fun never starts, and the horrors never cease. But the scream that came out of me, between devotional, genre-expanding music and a phone call from the taxman, was my contribution to the chorus of carrying forward from the wail of all that is.