The Songs Come From Dreaming

Make Camp with Week 3 of SONG CAMP

Welcome to week 3 of SONG CAMP! This is a spring digital songwriting intensive over 6 weeks. WE ARE CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN, AND WRITING SOME SONGS. TOGETHER. We won’t be the same when we come back. A trip into the wilderness always changes us. We’ll explore and unite two practices, music and writing, and make something that combines them both.

In week 1, SONGS ARE A HUMAN THING, we packed our backpacks for the trek. Last week, we got on the trail with A SONGPATH.

This week we are making our first camp.

You feel the buzz of carrying a backpack when you take it off. The weight leaves your back, and you almost float away. It’s an elation to open it up and take out fresh socks. You’re done moving, you’re where you meant to be, and you can set yourself up with some comfort.

Getting to camp is a flurry of activity: pumping water, stringing a bear wire, setting up a tent, getting the sleeping bag out of its stuff sack to decompress, and boiling salty cous-cous with rehydrated vegetables which raises my eyebrows when I think about it normally but is somehow delicious when you are eating it straight out of the cookpot with a spork.

When you finally have it all set and tucked up for the night, the tired washes over you, but it’s a warm tired. It’s a body-tired, and I will take a tired body over a tired heart and mind any day. Tomorrow will be another day of moving these bodies up this mountain, so we rest now to prepare for what’s coming.

It’s different out here. We don’t stay up late. We’re not “getting things done”. We don’t even need entertainment.

We take a good look at the stars, tuck ourselves into our sleeping bags, and close our eyes...

Sleeping In The Forest

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

- Mary Oliver

The songs come from sleeping- a sketch idea for a print

When I’m working on a song, I spend the day gleaning. I'm gathering up details that sparkle. I try to think in song and filter my life through the lens of song. I fill my pockets with observations, rhythmic and melodic curiosities, images, and emotions that are bigger than a deep breath can handle. I collect it all, with all the attention I can muster. Then I put it all down.

It takes alot of energy to pay attention to the world with your sensitivity knob turned up high. Sleep is as much a part of the creative process as action. To regenerate, of course, but also to process what you have. Sometimes I dream up new pieces or combine what I have been collecting in some bizarre and delightful way when I am sleeping, or almost sleeping. Sometimes I just put down all the effort and rest in order to keep my eyes and ears open.

This wasn’t an easy thing for me to learn. I grew up with a generational story that defined rest as laziness. We Raymonds take our status as “working” class very seriously. Naps were never endorsed, and it was a generally unspoken rule that if you were not engaging in some effort that was more hard than pleasant, and then grinning and bearing it, you weren’t on the right side of the story. Your worth and goodness were woven in with your ability to demonstrate that you were always working hard. I also had undiagnosed ADHD, which is usually misinterpreted as laziness when it’s actually expending twice the effort to do 1/2 the work. Papers that my classmates wrote in an hour took me 5, but I got it done at the expense of rest. In my family, rest was something you earned, and the less you took, the more righteous you could be.

When I left Vermont and went to college in North Carolina, I hit the late nights hard. I would have to force myself through morning classes, and then in the afternoon, I would go to the practice rooms on campus. If you’ve never been in a practice room, imagine a closet with no windows and a piano, and put it in a basement with about 50 other closets with pianos. My own dorm was too far away to go back to and take a break, so I would lie down in my little practice room, turn off the light, and take a nap in complete darkness with a sweatshirt rolled up like a pillow while the scales and stop-and-go melodies of student practice blended together in my ears.

I was far enough from home to have that little rebellion, and that’s where I wrote my first real song. I woke up with the cacophony of musical sounds woven in my head. Instead of practicing the art song I was supposed to be practicing, I got out a notebook, sat at the piano, and tried to get out something that was whispering to me from inside. I give naps credit for my songwriting obsession in the first place, and for helping me start to untangle the knots I had tied so tightly around sleep and rest.

We make camp to rest. To process what we have collected and to prepare for the work to come. I’m not doing this essay about resting at the end of our camp. I’m doing it right in the middle. I’m doing it in the middle because that is where rest belongs. I want the kind of creative practice where I find the right balance between effort and ease. I don’t want to pretend that there is no sweat to art making. There is. There are pushes. Making things takes mountains of effort, but it also takes disciplined resting. When I’m not trying to hard. When I just have my pockets emptied with all that I have been noticing, and I try to see if any of those bobbets would like to play together. Sometimes, I don’t even do the work. I just go to sleep and let them figure it out.

SONG CAMP WORKSHOP

Music

Rest is part of music. Groove is both sound and silence. The notes we don’t sing are as important as the ones we do. This week, we are going to intentionally play with the rest.