A Well Worn Welcome Home by Paul Russell

“As wide as you travel, 

as far as you roam,

As your old life unravels

and your new life unfolds,

Here’s a place to put your feet up; 

to rest your world-weary bones,

A well worn welcome home.
A place where we can simply be
At ease with ourselves & each other.”

Admittedly, my ideal home is pretty Hobbity. Hobbitesque, you say? No, just Hobbity. A cabin of wood and stone, it feels to me like home. Hot tea. Warm soup. Family. Friends. Home. Yet, for one reason or another, the theme of exile from home appears often in my work; exile from both an earthly sense of home and also a heavenly sense of home.

"Through the days

and the dark lonely nights,

When we lived in the shadows

and we begged for the light,

Where we wrestled with falsehood

in search for what’s true,

And wondered how

we’d ever come through. 

Sometimes I still do.

It’s so good to see you."

I wrote this song as the sun came out after a long dark night. I moved out of a cookie cutter suburban townhouse and into a tiny mountain apartment - a good move towards Hobbity. Contact with nature did a lot to heal my heart, and home is where the heart is. It’s a simple truth, and with this song I did my best to convey a sense of gratitude for an experience of coming home. I hope that the song itself serves as a reminder of and a guidepost to a similar place for all who listen deeply.  

Love, Paul @ paulrussellmusic.com

If You Don’t Get it at Home by Greg Brown

RIGHT CLICK HERE to listen to this song in new window

“If you don’t get it at home, 

you’re gonna go looking.

If you don’t get it at home, 

The need for love
Won't leave you alone,

And if you don’t get it at home, 

you’re gonna go looking."

Damn, Greg! Tell it like it is.

 “Children they don’t need a lot of stuff. 

Children sure do need a lot of love.

They need love to give them pride,

to make them feel real good inside.

If they don’t get it at home, 

they’re gonna go looking”

 "Lovers got to feel it 

real and strong.

One kiss can mean more

than making it all night long.

With no kiss and no embrace,

You get to feeling out of place.

And if you don't get it at home, 

You'll go looking."

Ain’t it the truth?! Looking back at my rebellious younger years and early love relationships, I can tell you that this verse rings true and hits home for me. I suspect that many rebellious kids, estranged lovers, and other lost souls can find solace and direction in this straight up folk wisdom.

 "It ain't down at the bottom of a jug,

and it ain't in the broke-down palace of drugs.

It's right there in our hearts,

That's where we gotta start. 

If we don't get it at home we'll go looking."

 


"As the branch is bent,
so shall it grow.

That might be true but even so,

A strong wind of real love 

Will straighten us right back up,

And we might find a place

our heart is welcome."

Heartfelt Folk. Music. That's what I'm talking about!  

Love, Paul @ paulrussellmusic.com

BeesWing by Richard Thompson

 "Oh she was a rare thing, fine as a bee's wing.
So fine a breath of wind might blow her away.
She was a lost child, oh she was running wild.
She said, "As long as there's no price on love, I'll stay.
And you wouldn't want me any other way.""

BeesWing is a touching character portrait sung by English musician Richard Thompson. It is a song that tells a beautiful and tragic tale illuminating something of the fragility and vulnerability of love and of life and how our human heart tries to bear it.

"Brown hair zig-zag around her face,
and a look of half-surprise.
Like a fox caught in the headlights, 
there was animal in her eyes.
She said "Young man, oh can't you see,
I'm not the factory kind.
If you don't take me out of here,
I'll surely lose my mind.""

I will guess that this woman is irresponsible but very responsive in love. And who IS "the factory kind?!" This wildness that I've seen in the eyes and felt in the hearts of a number of women can be maddeningly attractive and also quite destructive. What brings this about?

"We busked around the market towns

and picked fruit down in Kent.
And we could tinker lamps and pots

and knives wherever we went.
And I said that we might settle down, 

get a few acres dug,
Fire burning in the hearth 

and babies on the rug.
She said "Oh man, you foolish man, 

it surely sounds like hell.
You might be lord of half the world, 

you'll not own me as well""

One longs for stability and the other for motion, yet both long for love. In this song, never the twain did meet as one ends up longing for love lost "I miss her more than ever words could say" while the other wastes away "...they say her flower is faded now, hard weather and hard booze." It seems to me like they could have been reconciled in finding a healthy, fertile, and undepleted soil both to nourish their desire for connection and to satisfy their desire to grow and expand into new experiences.

Where can we find and experience this today? What do you think? 

Love, Paul @ paulrussellmusic.com

Iron and Wine (Postal Service) - Such Great Heights

I am thinking it's a sign
That the freckles in our eyes are mirror images
And when we kiss they're perfectly aligned.

These lyrics are so sweetly romantic as the lyricist edges shyly toward the mystic. It brings me to stop and reflect on the beauty of love where two long so deeply to live as one. Where else in the ordinary life do we get such a strong sense of longing to penetrate through the appearances of separation into the unity of things. Every wedding ceremony that I’ve been to, no matter how immersed in trivialities the surroundings appear to be, I've felt a window of holiness open. A flash of lightning in the dark of night. A momentary ascent to such great heights. Tragically, it doesn’t seem to me that our culture supports these openings in any substantial way, and the descents appear to be coming ever more hard, fast and frequent.

And I have to speculate
That God himself did make us 

Into corresponding shapes
Like puzzle pieces from the clay.

I’m currently reading the wonderful book Inner Revolution by Robert Thurman. A significant portion of the book chronicles the spiritual ascent of Tibet around the middle of the second millennium. The outer form the ascent took the shape of a culture that held the spiritual development of the populace as the highest priority. The culmination of the year was a prayer festival where it is said that a spiritual world of unity (like puzzle pieces from the clay), love, compassion, wisdom, and infinite joy was clearly manifest for all to participate in to their deepest heart’s content. It seems to me that the bizarre shadow of this celebration of divinity manifests in our materialistic swampland of a culture in the form of the drunken mindless glittery tinsel confetti strewn descent of a giant disco ball. I miss the prayer celebration.

They will see us waving from such great heights,
“Come down now,” they'll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away,
“Come down now.”
But we'll stay...

To me, this sublime chorus lucidly and radiantly defies the dictates of a soul dead culture. I hope this couple will stay at such great heights forever and ever. For bringing this song to the world, I think they deserve it.

Love, Paul @ paulrussellmusic.com

Back at the Scene of Our Beautiful Crime

 "I went back to the scene 

of our beautiful crime,

A sweet insurrection

in mythical time.

The atmosphere steeped

in the colors of dreaming,

Our silence was deep

and it quivered with meaning.

 

  We tore down the artifice 

and took back the art, 

Stripped off romance

and dove deep in the heart, 

Shattered the masks

and our faces did shine,  

Back at the scene of our beautiful crime."

Many elements of our so-called culture appear to me to be mad. Mad as a fucking hatter. Upside down to the extent that many acts of sanity have come to be regarded as criminal. I submit that acts of sanity in an insane world are not only not criminal, but are indeed beautiful. Beautiful crimes!

  

We tore down the artifice and took back the art,

Strong among the influences of Our Beautiful Crime 

are the writings of Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous 

Zone especially. In this seminal work, Bey gives widely 

and wildly varying examples of ethereal free spaces ranging 

from pirate enclaves to quilting bees, but the common root 

of every TAZ is an unmediated exchange.

We stripped off romance and dove deep in the heart,

I think that many of us share a disdain for the mass marketed hallmark holiday. Fundamentally, in our heart of hearts we 

reject any substitution for love. Many a beautiful golden 

ornament has been spurned, not for its lack of beauty, 

but for its subterfuge in acting as a stunt double 

for the immediacy of our unbridled affection. 

 We shattered the masks and our faces did shine,

What can account for the radiant beauty of a person’s

countenance after naught but a week of sitting meditation? 

What can account for how humor and sublime delight

can flow without impedance when a psychedelic loosens 

the laces of a rigidly “socialized” personality? 

And how about the way love can break us open? 

Back at The Scene of Our Beautiful Crime.

This is where our artificial needs are released and our 

true desires realized. This is where a scattered smattering 

of apparently random encounters connect and reveal a 

meaningful design. This is the hidden enclave where the 

musician meets his consort, his Daemon, his Muse.

"People said we’d gone mad, 

that we’d lost our way,

That our dreams we’re unreal

and our lives lived in vain.

But we followed our hearts

as they ached and they strived,

And emerged from a dark

with a light in our eyes."

 
 Artwork by Banksy.
 The artists website:
 http://www.banksy.co.uk


___________________________________________________

BEaUTiFUL CRImE Roll Call!

Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia

His beauty and truth lab is 

an insurrectionary institution. 

Long may it thrive!

http://www.freewillastrology.com

Hakim Bey’s introduction 

of the TAZ into our culture 

gave birth to Burning Man. 

Read it here: http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html

The Continuum Concept

by Jean Liedloff about

the ancient wisdom of

raising sane children.

A very beautiful crime!  

Find it here: http://www.continuum-concept.org/book.html

______________________________________________________

Commit and submit your beautiful crimes

and suggestions for the roll call, y'all!

Love, Paul @ paulrussellmusic.com

Leonard Cohen - A Thousand Kisses Deep

 

“The ponies run, the girls are young, 

The odds are there to beat.
You win a while and then it’s done,

Your little winning streak.
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat,
You live your life as if it’s real,
A thousand kisses deep.”

I walked into a “family entertainment center” yesterday and my senses were assaulted by clanging bells and whirling lights in an environment more overtly disorienting than a Las Vegas casino. In this vortex of confusion, kids petition adults for metal tokens to feed hypnotic machines that promise the reward of paper tickets to traded in for plastic toys. As a matter of course, the real “reward” ends up being depleted energies and fragmented attention.

http://www.slimeworld.org/bardotown/

“I’m turning tricks, I’m getting fixed, 

I’m back on Boogie Street.

You lose your grip,

and then you slip into the masterpiece.

And maybe I had miles to drive,

and promises to keep. 

You ditch it all to stay alive

  A thousand kisses deep.”

The Soul’s Code by James Hillman is one of my most treasured books. In it Hillman speaks of the Daemon, a kind of guardian angel or inborn sense holding our deeper purpose; our “promises to keep.” But, oh, how we forget. How we lose our way amongst the metal tokens, paper tickets, and plastic toys. Now after two verses that portray our forgetfulness in a strangely familiar wet dream of gambling, blossoming sexuality, prostitution, impotence, and maybe a drug fix, what can the soul do but desire but to escape from this “family entertainment center.” Masterpiece? Ha!

 
“And sometimes when the night is slow, 
The wretched and the meek,
We gather up our hearts and go

A thousand kisses deep.”

But now, with impeccable craftsmanship and bodhisattva spirit, Cohen begins to radically shift our perspective regarding what it means to live a thousand kisses deep. Where once we saw only a quagmire of meaningless pursuits, now we see an intentional act of preparation to enter into this same realm.

“Confined to sex, 

We pressed against the limits of the sea.
I saw there were no oceans left 
for scavengers like me.
I made it to the forward deck, 
I blessed our remnant fleet, 

And then consented to be wrecked, 

A thousand kisses deep.”

Leonard Cohen is no world denier. He doesn't deny the beauty of our sensual world, but it seems to me that he's gone to the edge and understood how even in personal fulfillment we're left thirsty. Our time here is limited but our soul longs for an experience of limitless meaning. Here we come to the crux of a great paradox of how the limited and limitless intersect. I don't see a big answer, but I appreciate how in this song deeper meaning is found in the same place where it was lost so many times.

God bless Leonard Cohen.

Love, Paul @ paulrussellmusic.com 

Colorado by Darrell Scott

"Give me old souls 

with a healing hand.

The misunderstood, 

Surely they will understand.

It takes a goddess touch

To reach a godless man,

And get him back to believing"

Martin Balgach, a friend and fine poet, introduced me to A Crooked Road - the latest album by Darrell Scott that includes the beautiful song Colorado. Martin told me in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t find something revelatory in this collection of songs, then he’d never recommend anything to anyone again. It turns out that on repeated listening the whole album seems revelatory, but this particular song was the key that opened it up for me.

I’m not going to go so bravely out on a limb as Martin, but I hope that the heartfelt folk music of this humble craftsman touches something deep and real inside of you. 

Love, Paul @ paulrussellmusic.com 

By the way, this is the man who Darrell Scott is singing about in the song.

Gaffer http://thatharpguy.com

 "I heard an uplifting sound in a downtown park

Playing his own tune on an Irish harp.

And he played with just one hand 

as the august sky grew dark.

The other hand was for a lover"