Sparks from the Fire

Note: The following is a compilation of several posts and some new updates intended for newer readers of this blog.  Much has been written about our new project, Goin’ Home.  If you’ve been following all along, you may find some redundancies here; however, if you’re somewhat new to the project, you’ll find here a summary of events and thoughts that will bring you somewhat up to date.

What if today you could go over to your neighborhood grocery, grab that cart and shop for anything your little ol’ heart desired, then, instead of getting into the checkout line, skip that and just head home with your groceries – steak, shrimp, Haagen Daz, throw in a little Kobe Beef, some chocolate truffles and perchance a tin or two of Almas Caviar.

When you got outside with your overflowing shopping cart, the police would be there, but would just look the other way as you passed by chuckling gleefully, licking your chops.

What a great idea!  Why don’t we do this?  Food should be free!  I think most of us would agree that life would be a lot easier if food were free.

Trouble is, after very little time, maybe the next time we went back to the supermarket, the aisles would be empty, the shelves bare.  “Hey, all the food is gone!” you might cry.  “Well, let’s go back to the farmers and get more,” the store manager would say.

So we’d go to the farmers and say, “Hey farmers, make more food!”  They would respond like this:  “Without getting paid, it’s just too hard.  Sorry, but there’s just no more food.  We’re gonna go do something else.”

Well, essentially that’s what just happened to the music business – except for one problem.  Of course the farmers equal the artists in this little analogy and the artists, who love to make music, are still saying, “Oh cool, you like my music? You actually want to listen to my music?  OK, I’ll give it to you for free!”

So it’s gonna take a little time before this situation is righted.  Give the starving artists a chance to really starve.   Then they won’t be able to make any more music no matter how much they love to do it.  Cuz we all gotta eat! (more…)

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!

“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…)

A number of you have asked whatever happened to my Inspirational music project called Goin’Home. 

 Goin’ Home
A Gospel Cantata
On Heaven and Beyond
Additional Music and Lyrics by
Peter Link

Yes, there is a light, and yes, there is a tunnel.  Turns out it’s an extremely expensive project that has been in the works for nearly two years now.  Time and money have, for too long, been the obstacle.  Now we’re poised to overcome both.

The plan is to get the CD out for Christmas of 2011.  But first we have to finish a song and a half, mix the album, master it, design it, manufacture it and promote it.

Originally, I raised about a 3^rd of the money for the project from two very dear friends and supporters, Watchfire Music put in the another third and then time and money simply ran out before the project came to completion.  There’s a missing third. (more…)

I grew up in a family of four.  My older brother, Jim, was five years older than me and led the way in just about everything.  I idolized him just as every little brother should.  In our family, it was always said that Jim got the brains and Pete got the work ethic.  I don’t remember ever thinking much about the “work ethic” part, but I sure wished at the time that I had gotten the “brains” part of the deal.

Jim was a lefty.  That meant, as all you lefties out there know, that when you learn to write longhand, you have to drag your hand across the already written word often in the beginning smearing the ink or even the pencil marks into oblivion.  In order to not do this, you have to lift your hand awkwardly up, losing your controlling leverage.  Consequently many lefties start out as poor hand-writers until they get the hang of it.  My brother, Jim, was just such a monster.

My school district in Kirkwood, Missouri did not go by the usual A, B, C, D, F grading system that most institutions use today.  Instead it was as follows:

S= Superior
E= Excellent
A= Average
P= Poor
U= Unsatisfactory

Why or how I still remember this is beyond me.  Sorta like remembering my first telephone number was “Kirkwood 1084J”.  Another was “Terryhill 31390”.  Those were spoken when the operator came on and said “Operator” – before dial phones.  I guess that oughta date me.

But I digress…

When in the sixth grade, under the tutelage of the feared Miss Cochran, older brother Jim had pulled off the near impossible.  He had, with his big brains, received straight ‘S’s at the end of the year from the toughest teacher at Osage School.  Except for one thing.  He actually didn’t get straight ’S’s because he got an ‘E’ in handwriting – probably a gift from a momentarily generous Miss Cochran who felt sorry for the kid who was so smart but had the dreaded Lefty Disease.  Even in the sixth grade Jim’s handwriting was still unreadable.

But everyone except younger brother, Pete, gave Jim the benefit of the doubt and his straight ‘S’s (except for Handwriting) became the talk of the neighborhood for a season and a high-water mark in our family for what felt like forever.  Every time grades were brought home we were reminded that Jim had received straight ‘S’s in the sixth grade.  (All except for one)

So this became the life objective for younger brother, Pete, not necessarily self-perpetuated, but certainly parent perpetuated.  This became the record to beat for five long years of my life as I waited to try my lesser brains in the sixth grade. (more…)

The findings of quantum physics are startling to us all.  Well, maybe not to all of us, but certainly to the way the world now perceives matter.  These findings impact the material world dramatically as well as corroborate the truths of the spiritual world that have been labeled as “miracles” for centuries.  These findings are the fodder for an inspirational song I have written these past few days that is being orchestrated now in my recording studio for WFM vocalist, Julia Wade’s new CD, Silk Road.

As American physicist, Barbara Brennan, states in her book ‘The Hands of Light‘: “Through experiments over the past few decades physicists have discovered matter to be completely mutable into other particles or energy and vice-versa and on a subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty in definite places, but rather shows ‘tendencies’ to exist.  Quantum physics is beginning to realize that the Universe appears to be a dynamic web of interconnected and inseparable energy patterns.  If the universe is indeed composed of such a web, there is logically no such thing as a part.  This implies we are not separated parts of a whole but rather we are the Whole.”

This is just the beginning of a whole series of articles, comments, theories and scientific findings on the non-existence of matter.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know what I think about all this.  Here’s just a bit more thought on the subject – not necessarily a scientific approach, but certainly a more poetic or lyrical approach to the subject. (more…)

One of my favorite things to contemplate is a statement by one of my heroes, Albert Einstein, who said that something isn’t there and so we see it, but rather, we see it and so it is there.  This got me to thinking.  I realized that he was really saying that as we think it, it appears.

So we create our world in our minds.  This goes for the physical world as well as our imaginative world.  And on second thought, this goes for each of us as well.

I’ve always found this to be a pretty mind-boggling concept, but not really when one considers the world of our dreams.  When in that mental state, the world around us seems as real as the world around us in our waking state.  Then there’s the awakened state that most spiritual leaders often speak of – that which we are working to attain in this life on Planet Earth.  Three states of thinking: Dreams, Waking and Awakened.

“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?” – Plato

(more…)

The snow just fell… and fell… and fell.  It started around 6:00 at night, snowed all night, all the next day and again into the night.  I had somehow gotten myself up to a friend’s apartment for a work session in the middle of that day and we had holed ourselves up, working through the blizzard.  It finally stopped around 2:00 in the morning and it was then that I realized that I had to get home.

I left my friend’s apartment and walked out into the canyons of New York City that were now, literally, valleys of snow drifts.  Not a cab to be had.  Not a soul on the streets.  Even the subways were closed.  It was one of those blizzards back in the 70s that made the Blizzard of 2010 look like a light snowfall.

I knew I’d have to walk.  I headed over to 57^th Street because it was a two-way street and wider.  It might be easier negotiating the drifts.  I had to cross Manhattan island from the East side to the West.  Besides, I lived on West 57^th Street.  When I turned the corner from Third Avenue on to 57^th, the scene was the most surrealistic I have ever seen.  I had no idea that that was just the beginning.

(more…)