Sparks from the Fire

I’ve always loved Christmas songs.  Who hasn’t?  They are iconic references and symbols of one of, for most of us, one of the real highlights of childhood – and then we get to repeat it all in a slightly different fashion as parents years later.  These songs take us through these enchanting times and play in the background like a movie score.

Previous to this month I had only ever written one Christmas song – a song recorded by the Jenny Burton Experience called Christmas In My Soul.  They say, in the music business, that the month of June is the month to write and begin one’s Christmas album, the preparation of such to be around 5-6 months.  Who can write Christmas songs in June?  What a silly notion.

This year the Missus has come up short in her search for the perfect Christmas song for her Christmas Day performance in church.  She had decided to employ a terrific Boston harpist and together with her organist, Bryan Ashley, keep it small and delicate in accordance with the spiritual implications of the morning.  Last year she used a brass quintet plus the church four manual pipe organ and blew the roof off, so this year she wanted to do something completely different.

But no song came to mind to fit the criteria.

While watching her go through her turmoil, I happened to mention one day several weeks ago that perhaps I could write one for her.  This was said in a fit of compassion for her plight while I was in the middle of the mad dash of the final throes of my own CD, Goin’ Home.

Seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, she grabbed at the offer and signed me up.  At first I thought, “Oh no, what have I gotten myself into?”  Where would I ever find the time to do this? (more…)

It will come as no surprise to anyone that Inspirational music comes to us as a result of thinking.  Before it is expressed through the fingers or gets jotted down at the end of a pencil, it first originates in mind.  I’ve learned, as a composer, that when I’m stuck and the music is not pouring forth, to take my hands off the keyboard and let mind imagine it first.

This always works.  It works because I’m going back to the root of creativity – mind.  I’ve always said that my best work comes through me figuring that the best ideas come from God or a higher power or source, but the portal that the ideas come through is mind.  Perhaps they don’t originate in mind or brain, but they exist somewhere out there or ‘in there’ already and we’re just here to provide the portal.

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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

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Christmas in Central Park

Christmas in NYC!  There’s nothing quite like it.  Truly beautiful, but sometimes a bit too much about Santa and not enough about Jesus.  Each year I go back to the same moment years ago when I first wrote this song to try to rediscover the essence of Christmas.

I’ll share it with you now:

Christmas In My Soul

Music and lyrics by Peter Link

It looks as though

There won’t be snow on Christmas

And the holly and the mistletoe

Were sold out long ago

The midtown rush was just a little too much

And this year Santa and his reindeer

Never left the pole

Suddenly it just don’t seem like Christmas

Suddenly it don’t seem so natural

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In the long run, what does it matter?  Christianity’s biggest split seems to me to be was he or wasn’t he.  Was Jesus God?  Just doesn’t make sense.  To me it seems like he was not.

Don’t mean to stir up a hornet’s nest here (or maybe I do), but I think a ton of people here got it wrong.

For my money, Jesus was the way-shower, the exemplar.  He was sent here to be an example for us on the subject of how to live our lives.  He was a human being just like us and that was the point.  He showed us our potential – what we could be if we knew what he knew and practiced what he practiced.

He taught us how to think, how to treat our fellow man, how to heal, how to live.

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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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My mom was a healer.  As an adventuresome boy, I gave her many opportunities to pull off some doozies when I was a kid.  For her, healing was not a miracle – it was just the natural order.  That understanding was one of the reasons why she was so good at it.

One fall afternoon this 11-year-old boy was out playing flag football.  Now in flag football each player wears two foot long pieces of cloth or rag stuck in his belt on either side of his waist.  A “tackle” occurs when you’re running with the ball and a player on the opposition simply pulls the “flag” out of your belt.  A lot less injuries that way.  Or so they hope.

So here I was running pell mell around right end heading for a touchdown.  An older boy, faster than me, not only caught up to me but somehow decided at the last second to tackle me, rather than simply pull my flag.  Off balance, I wasn’t expecting the tackle and fell forward awkwardly holding the football out in front of me rather than tucking it in to prevent a fumble.

When I fell, I fell chest first on to the top of the ball and the force of my unexpected fall and the weird positioning of my hands on the ball knocked both of my thumbs out of joint.

Ouch!

When I got up from the ground in extreme pain and looked down at my shaking and already swelling hands, the base of each thumb was about an inch closer to my wrist and both hands were extremely disfigured and terrifying to look at.  The skin was not broken but there were two large lumps where there shouldn’t have been any, and each of my thumbs basically pointed in the wrong direction.

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I don’t get it. I know, it’s the $64 question, but I must not have the $64 in my pocket, because I can’t figure it out. If we are, in fact, spiritual man, right here and now, and if we are one with our Maker in His image and likeness, which I deeply believe, then how did I get here, sitting in this chair on this material earth still struggling with my mortality in the first place? Why do we need to go through this earthly experience at all?

I can’t opt in to the “be a good boy and when you die, you’ll go to heaven and live with the angels” concept. It’s just a little too human-fairytale an explanation for me in this digital age. I’m more for the “we have our own opportunity to make our own heaven here on earth and it’s up to us to work our way up the ladder (proverbial) back to our original (and ever-present) state of grace.” Whew!

I believe in a God of pure goodness, not a punishing God. I believe in a God of love and the Bible supports that when John says, “God is Love”.  So I figure if God is love, He, She or It is just that, love.  So I tap into that source whenever I can.

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