Sparks from the Fire

9/26/09

If you were to ask, I’d say that my most favorite singer at the moment on WatchfireMuic.com would be Inspirational singer and Broadway actor, Terron Brooks.

I’ve been putting together a database of all the music of the WFM catalog that has required me to listen to every song from every artist we have.  This is a chore that I first met with some trepidation, but has actually resulted in a most wonderful listening experience over the past couple of weeks.  Like the by-line says, “We got great music!”

I’m very proud of what we’ve been able to put together these last few years and impassioned by the experience to find more of the great talent that’s out there.

Terron Brooks

One of our major finds is definitely the sweet, musical sound of Terron Brooks.  In the course of my job, it’s always, “Oh good, I get to listen to Terron.”

One of my jobs here at Watchfire is to guide you to the right stuff, so please pay attention because I’m now doing just that.  Baby, this man can sing.  And when the music pours out of his throat and inner being, you’ve just got to listen to the effortless sound.

It’s so clear that Terron is an actor.  He seems to always know what he’s singing about and what he is doing.  I believe that is what makes him so appealing – besides his innate talent and musicality.

I went to his site the other day and found an interesting page on it where he answers some fan’s questions.  I thought I might reprint a few to share with you some insights into this most charming and sincere young man.

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This past weekend out of the ravages of time emerged Tom Watson.  “Who’s Tom Watson?” some of you might ask.  Well he’s the 59 year old guy who darn near walked off with the British Open Golf Tournament.  Came in second, he did, ‘cause he lost at the very end to a guy named Cink because he couldn’t sink a final 12 foot putt.

Tom Watson

But he did just about everything else right for four days of history as he captured the world’s attention with the best Inspirational story of the past month.  Tom Watson was magnificent, not for a 59 year old guy, but truly magnificent no matter what his age.

And what struck me the most was that while doing it, he was havin’ a ball.

“When all is said and done,” Watson said, “one of the things I hope that will come out of my life is that my peers will say, ‘You know, that Watson, he was a hell of a golfer.’”

After watching Tom all weekend grace the world with his extraordinary story, I’d like to add to that, that Tom Watson is a hell of a man.  He had focus, he had smarts, he played with a refreshing kind of confidence and in the end, he had humility.

It’s made me think back on a few other athletes who defied their ages.

On May 18, 2004 Randy Johnson, a future Hall of Fame baseball pitcher, became the oldest player ever, at age 40, to throw a perfect game. He did so against the Atlanta Braves at Turner field.

Johnson was dominant, striking out 13 batters while throwing just 117 pitches, 87 for strikes.  Just how dominant was Johnson?  His final pitch of the game, a strike to Eddie Perez, hit 98 mph on the radar gun.

Then there’s Brett Favre who will go down as one of the greatest quarterbacks ever.  Favre has two performances worthy of acknowledgement. The first was the remarkable season he had in his final season with the Green Bay Packers.  Favre had the best completion percentage of his career (66.5), threw for over 4,100 yards (third most of his career), threw 28 touchdown passes, and had his third best year in terms of QB rating, all at the age of 38.  38 may seem like a young age to some of us, but not in Pro football.

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So there I was, about a year and a half into my fascination and exploration of my dreams.  One day while reading one of my myriad books on the subject I came across the following:

“Among the early independent students in the field of astral projection was a self-taught pioneer worker by the name of Oliver Fox.  In the early 20s there appeared a book written by Mr. Fox called “Astral Projection”.  It is now long out of print and copies are hard to come by.  In this book Fox teaches a system of Astral Projection which he calls “The Dream Method”.   Fox says that he discovered the system himself and experimented with it himself for a period of 30 years prior to the date of the publication of the book.”

This, of course captured my attention as an interesting direction for my newly learned knowledge.  I wandered the used bookstores until I found Mr. Fox’s book and then read it with relish.

The basic idea of Fox’s dream method was that a person could, starting with a dream, learn how to “wake” in the midst of the dream and, from that point of awakening, start a train of inner events that could lead to a type of astral projection.

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1.    The Heart That Beats – Why does the next beat take place? After all, it’s not like it’s bouncing.  Each beat, each pump of the pump comes because of this thing called ‘life’.  Do we have anything to do with this life essence?  Not that I know of.  I can locate no responsibility for this energy.  It is something that is given.  I do not engender it.  It’s there whether we think of it or not.  It’s there for us.  We have no clue where in space it comes from, how it got there, why it’s just always there.  But it is.  There is always the next beat of the heart.  And you have trouble believing in some higher power?

2.    The Breath You Take – (See above) Also, I think of the complex machinery that activates this life activity.  What a miracle!  We slap a baby’s bottom and it starts.  Then it continues with relatively no input from us for a lifetime. The average respiration rate for a person at rest is about 16 breaths per minute.  This means on average, we breathe about 960 breaths an hour or 23,040 breaths a day or 8,409,600 a year. If a person lives to 80, then that means on average they will take 672,768,000 breaths in a lifetime!  That’s you.  That’s me.  Cool.

3.    Those We Love – Why is this?  These are the folks we should appreciate the most, but seldom do.  These are the people we should count in our blessings every day.  But these are the people that we expect to love us back because we love them.  Perhaps it’s the nature of love.  We love and expect love in return.  And you know, it almost always does – return, that is.  In fact, I’ll bet that it always does when our love is pure.  That’s the nature of love.  It’s a circle.  Instinctively we know this and so we tend to take it for granted.

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Everybody mourns in his own individual way.  Some wail, some must crawl off by themselves, some need to be with others, some need to get drunk, others prefer to pray.  To each his own.

I prefer the silence of meditation and memories.  I prefer to mourn quietly.  I don’t want to do it for a long time as I’d rather celebrate the life, but I do honor the act of mourning even though I believe in life eternal — especially for those who leave us seemingly early.

I lost over a hundred friends in the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s.  Back then, when someone you knew was diagnosed as HIV positive, that’s when you mourned.  By the time they passed, you were grateful the ordeal was over for them.  It wasn’t fun and I’m sorry to say that I got used to it somewhat.  It became a regular occurrence in my life.  Who was next, one wondered, and it was always somebody.

Two wonderful people that Julia and I knew lost their son, Maurizio, in the late 90s Swiss Air crash over Halifax.  We went through this experience with these two loved ones and shared their grief.  Up until this point in life I pretty much left grieving to all the others and tried to focus on the positives of the life lost, but in this situation I got caught in the middle of it and fully experienced the parent’s powerful grief.

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OK troops, I need your help on this one.  Yesterday one of my life’s unanswered questions came up for me big time.  Once again I did not have a sufficient answer.  This morning I decided to turn to you, dear readership, to see if you might be able to shed a little light on the subject.

Muir Woods

You see, I took a walk in the woods – Muir Woods to be exact — one of Northern California’s great redwood forests.  My wife, Julia, and I had a rare day off and after spending the morning being tourists at Fisherman’s Warf in San Francisco, decided to get in a little nature — literally.  Neither of us had ever been to Muir Woods and I had never experienced our country’s amazing giant redwood trees, though I had certainly read a lot about them and seen the pics.

So we walked among these giants for a couple of hours in awe of their splendor, their majesty and their lives.  The day was perfect — cool but warm, one of those Northern California days that make you realize the God must live in Northern California.  By the end of our walk my neck was stiff from looking to the heavens, my feet tired, and my brain in a frazzle.

At one point I stood before one family of mammoth trees and wept at the thought of them standing together in such incredible strength, waving softly in the wind as the world went by below for the last 1100 years or so.  Time shrunk and then expanded and then simply slipped away as I tried to wrap my mind around the magnitude of their trunks, their bodies, their lives as trees, their time on earth living, standing, waving in the sun.

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We lay there on our backs in a line, I in the lead.  The water in the stream wherein we lay was only an inch and a half deep and had slowed to a trickle beneath us, but it was cold, icy cold.  It was so dark, there being no light whatsoever, that we had given up trying to see anything long ago.  The walls of the passageway in which we lay had narrowed down to a claustrophobic six inches on either side of us.  But it was the ceiling, the ceiling of that cave in which we lay, that was so overwhelmingly awesome in its presence.

That ceiling of dirt and rock had narrowed down to only six inches above my face.  I had had to turn onto my back and push myself forward with my feet, inching myself forward through the ever-narrowing tunnel.  I stopped and grunted, “Hold” to my other four companions, breathing in the dank, stale air of the underground passage.  I thought of the rope tied amateurishly around my ankle running back to the next guy’s ankle and so on to the next.  My buddies could always pull me out.

I did what no professional cave explorer would ever do.  I thought about it.  I thought about the walls, the floor, the ceiling.  I imagined the earth above me slightly shifting and the great expanse of rock above me simply settling to fill this narrow worm-hole, crushing my body beneath its weight.  The waves of claustrophobia began to wash over me.  I suddenly could see, but it was only an imagined redness of fear.

The single word “Pull” burned into my mind, but what came out was a blurt of panic, “Just a sec.”  One of my buddies, sensing my fear, called out, “Are you all right, Pete?”  I couldn’t answer.  The feeling of that ceiling pressing down on me had grown so that the words would no longer form in the tangle of my mind.  My fear began to spread among the other four.

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I believe it was in The Universe and Dr. Einstein by Lincoln Barnett that Albert Einstein said, “We think that an object is there and so we see it, but rather, the truth is, we see it and so it is there.”  I paraphrase this quote, but it’s a startling concept that has stuck with me for years since I read it.

Einstein

I’ve always been fascinated with this wonderful little man with the big mind.  He turned the world’s perception of ‘things’ inside out on so many levels.  I have read or struggled to read many of the books about him over my lifetime and though I nearly always get my mind blown by some historic revelation that he had, most of the time I’m frustrated because I can’t keep up with the mathematics.

But this one idea has always stuck with me — that what we perceive to be true about matter is, in fact, false.  It’s not that we see something because it’s there, but rather, it’s there because we see it.

So we’re each making this all up, this material existence.  This revelation by one of our foremost thinkers and physicists has been supported in so many ways by other great thinkers like Guatama Buddha, Lao-Tsu and Jesus over the centuries and now the discoveries in quantum physics also support the idea that we are living this life experience in an illusion that is being made up in our mortal minds.

I love to contemplate this stunning consideration and laugh at its consequences.  I am making this all up – all that I experience through the five physical senses.  What I see, what I hear, what I taste, what I smell, what I feel with my hands and body.  How does one even get out of bed in the morning?  What are we to do with this?

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