Sparks from the Fire

A Community…  A gathering of people who have like-minded purpose… Not at all people who are like-minded, in fact, better that they are all original thinkers, formulating their ideas, their life plans, their social structures, their life work, their religions, and creativity from a truly internal impulse.  Not followers, but leaders and thinkers and doers.  People who like people.  People who are positive supporters of the good in all people.  People who are an Inspiration to others.

This is our growing community. These are our Facebook friends, our tweeting family, our hands across the world.  The come from Africa, from Europe and South America, from Down Under and all across the U.S.  They are a world uniting to make a better world.

Sounds like a pretty high-falutin’ idea, but, in fact, it’s a reality.  It is organizing and it presently exists through social media, through mutual music appreciation, through spiritual seeking, through friends of Watchfire Music and even through a new CD project called Goin’ Home – On Heaven and Beyond.

It’s an idea that has created itself – not anything that anybody set out to create, but an idea that sprang up from necessity and natural evolution.  I see it coming and I simply try to open the road ahead to let it gain its own momentum in its own natural way.  This community has no leaders and no followers.  It’s a gathering of individuals, of originals, supporting one another with whatever it takes at a time when man really needs to reach out to his fellow man to survive.

I am eternally grateful for this community.  I am a member and I feel its value, its support and its bonding every day.  I watch it grow.  I fan the flames.  I sing its praises!

Money may not make the world go around, but it does help gather people together sometimes to give it a little push.  In this day and age of the music industry blues, sometimes that little push is needed.  In the case of Inspirational music the time is now.

Consequently we have begun a 30 day Kickstarter.com campaign to raise money to complete and promote a CD project that I’ve been working on now for over a year and a half.

It’s the making of new CD called “Goin’ Home” and a subsequent National Tour around this CD.  It involves an inspiring blend of great tradition and cutting-edge new music and deals with a very important aspect of each of our lives.

It deals with the experience at the end of our lives that we each face eventually that I like to call “transition”.

In the words of Jenny Burton, one of the project’s stars, “It’s a subject that, at first, we walk away from, but will walk towards one day, so why not walk towards it informed and without fear.”

I, personally, would like to go through that experience, when it comes, fully aware and alert, expectant joyful, and filled with spiritual curiosity.  When it comes to that transition, we Americans tend to look the other way and pretend that it doesn’t exist.  I don’t want to be like that.

What better way to prepare than to write about it.

So Goin’ Home is about Heaven and beyond.  I’ve thought from childhood that the much of the world’s perception of Heaven, though certainly idyllic, was really rather like a fairy tale or a Santa Claus story.  In a song entitled Heaven on the CD I write the following: (more…)

Alan Smallwood

In an earlier marriage my wife at the time chanted the Nichiren-Buddhist mantra “Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo”.  She was going through a particularly rough stretch in her life and she would go off and chant in our guest bedroom every day for a couple of hours.  She would always emerge from these sessions a different person – calm, centered, and quietly joyful.

I supported this practice at first because I saw that it worked wonders for her and over the couple of years that she chanted, I grew to love the sound of her voice pealing through the house, its mellifluous vibrations casting its positive spell over both our lives and probably even helping our plants to grow and be happy as well.

I think it was the thing I missed about her most when we parted.

Several years afterwards I began to work with a young musician named Alan Smallwood who came into my life at just the perfect time and brought to me in musical terms exactly what I seemed to be missing in my life.

As a musician, I had no real formal training.  Most of what I knew came from playing in bands, singing in folk groups and conducting student choirs.  I did study drums for several years with a fine teacher as a kid, but that was about it.

So there were many holes in my understanding and knowledge of this amazing world of music and consequently there were many holes in my music.  Alan Smallwood, several years younger than I, filled these holes with his genius, his fascination with the then developing new technology of synthesis and became my musical director and arranger/orchestrator for many of the musical projects that I created. (more…)

“Ouch, my arm hurts” you might say.  But you’d be wrong.  It’s not your arm that hurts; it’s your brain.  “Whoa, them’s fightin’ words.  It’s my arm.  I oughta know.” you retort.  Sorry, wrong again.  You’ve been duped – duped by a 5000 year-old misunderstanding of the origin and practice of pain.

It’s amazing the lies we’re taught and then live by for all our lives here on Planet Earth.

In a recent and most enlightening article in Sports Illustrated entitled The Truth About Pain: It’s In Your Head by David Epstein the old theories of pain’s beginnings in the injury itself and then traveling through the body’s nerve to the brain are trashed and re-theorized by modern medical science.

Relating to athletes in pain, a number of fascinating stories are told of athletes overcoming pain to complete their events, and these studies show conclusively, one after the other, that pain originates, not in the broken bone or the pulled muscle itself, but rather in the brain and not the injury. (more…)

Today marks the launch of Watchfire Music’s commitment to its new video campaign.  As mentioned in a previous post, “…we’re proud to announce, that WFM is going Video!  We’ve always dreamed of being the place to be for Inspirational Videos on the web.  We started it, but it got a bit postponed in the process.  Now the dream comes true!”

Check out our Home Page for the new player and our WFM Featured Video selection.  These specialized programs will be rotated and updated weekly and will feature some of the best we have to offer.  Soon you’ll also find the new player on the DSM Home Page as well.

And if you want to dig deeper, simply go to the Nav Bar and pull down the Video window and visit either The Best Of The Web or WFM Artists video libraries of our ever-growing collection of Inspirational music and video. (more…)

This morning as I sit and drink my hot chocolate, I watch the sun come up pink on the buildings of a new day – and a city that never sleeps.  What a time for Inspirational music!  If the Missus weren’t still sleeping, I’d go into my studio, throw open the windows and crank up the volume.

Perhaps a song called Faith, perhaps Who Will Heal The World, perhaps Julia’s Upon The Mountain.  I’d play my ‘hood, Hell’s Kitchen, awake and stand on my terrace overlooking Lower Manhattan, the Village, Wall Street and the Statue Of Liberty and holler, “Wake up, New York!  We’re alive!

Last night I looked out on a new building springing up down where the Twin Towers once stood.  It was lit majestically in red, white and blue.  It stands where once, not so long ago, there was nothing but a hole in the ground.  Hope re-kindled.

This morning the sun rises on the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

I wasn’t in NYC ten years ago this morning.  At first I counted it a blessing.  I was in my other home in Colorado sleeping with the Missus when the telephone rang to tell us of the unbelievable news.  We spent the rest of the day, just like the rest of you, glued to our TV and watching the images over and over in disbelief as they burned into our brains for all time. (more…)

“It’s not easy being green”, so the song went.  It’s also not easy being a small start-up company with big ideas and dreams.  In the beginning Inspirational music seemed like such a great idea and, yes, it turned out to be true, but getting there was not always fun, quick, profitable and easy.

Many of our ideas were cast aside as too expensive, not timely, too small staff consuming, beyond our pay grade or simply not working.  But as we first survived, then broke even, then became a successful enterprise and finally moved from being a small start-up to just being a working company we found the balance between what we could do, what we should do and what we would do.

What we would do then evolved to what we are now and that, of course, is still evolving.  One of the grand ideas that we originally had was laid aside as too expensive, too understaffed and simply not the priority of the day.  But this was an idea the clearly needed to be a part of Watchfire Music, so we limped along with a “taster” for years.

This “taster” became an embarrassment to me because I want our site to be full of new stuff and up to date every week if not every day.

By now some of you long-time faithful have probably guessed that I’m talking about Video.  We’ve had a video player and some WFM artist videos on the Home Page and a Video Page where you can go watch a small collection of Inspirational videos, but the same stuff has been up there and available for several years now.

Now that’s gonna change – Big Time!  Next week, we’re proud to announce, that WFM is going Video!  We’ve always dreamed of being the place to be for Inspirational Videos on the web.  We started it, but it got a bit postponed in the process.  Now the dream comes true! (more…)

Summer’s end has arrived.  Here comes Labor Day weekend and we all know what that means: Time to finish the vacations and get back to work, get back to school, get back to where you once belonged.  Whether you’re 12, 24, 48 or 96, retired, fresh out of college, rich or poor or probably somewhere in between, into chemistry, widgets or inspirational music, it’s a good time to stop before you start and do your goals and motives.

Said another way, it’s time to get organized – not just to get your stock in order, but more importantly, time to get your mind in order.  I’m probably advising and reminding myself here more than I’m speaking to y’all out there, but September 1 is always a good time to stop and take mental and physical stock.

Goals and motives – it’s a practice my parents taught me, and one that I’ve tried to pass on to as many as possible in my life.  Why?  Simply because it really works – big time.

Taking an hour or three and sitting down with your self, your spouse, your team, your partners, whatever, and drawing up a ten point plan for the next six months is a simple practice that can serve us all whether we run a large company or a small household.  It makes no difference how large or how small.  Having a plan is essential to all success.

But just having that plan is not enough… (more…)