Goin’ Home
I have started a new and deeply personal Inspirational album project for Watchfire Music. It’s about death. It’s about heaven. It’s about the transition that I face. And it’s about ascension.
I’m not about to die. I’m not about to ascend. And I’m not really sure about the meaning of the word “heaven”. But I feel that it’s time in my life to put a little extra thought into the whole set of ideas and what better way to do it than in my favorite form of expression – music and lyrics.
“Is death and heaven musical”, you might ask? You bet. The concept of dying and going to heaven has historically transfixed the writers of the Spiritual songbook for centuries. Slaves had, simply put, a rough life. They had obviously lost faith in life in this world for good reason, so they fixed their dreams on the next.
Dying and going to heaven became the dream of a people. And so they wrote and sang song after song about it, working in the fields together and sitting around the campfires at night.
Heaven became a place in the clouds where all would be well – where all who made it would have shoes on their feet and halos atop their heads. It was a musical place of harps and wings and clouds and chairs situated right next to the big guy, the boss man, God Himself.
It’s not a place I’ve much considered. It’s not a place I expect to experience. But the whole concept of a state of grace, a state after mortality where we are not confronted daily with these mortal confusions and where we have a little time to sort it out, is of interest to me.
How do I know that this will be so? I don’t. But that’s the privilege of writers – to dream, to imagine. And so I’m in the process of letting my imagination wander, my instincts lead me, my learned truths come to bear.
How do you research heaven? Google it? Read about it in the Bible? See what other religions have to say about it? Meditate on it and see what seems true?
All of the above.
For me, I’ve discovered for one,
I DON’T BELIEVE IN HEAVEN
AS A PLACE UP IN THE SKY
A PLACE WHERE ALL THE ANGELS SIT
AS THE CLOUDS GO PASSIN BY
I SEE IT MORE AS A STATE OF MIND
SINCE MY BODY GETS LEFT BEHIND
I SEE IT MORE
AS AN OPEN DOOR
TO A LIFE OF ANOTHER KIND
In a daily book of Buddhist meditation that I’m reading there’s a story about a man and his guru. The man goes to his guru and asks, “Oh great one, why is it that every New Year’s Eve when all are celebrating and so happy that you sit and weep all the day long?” The guru replies, “Because I weep for all those who have not prepared properly for their impending death.”
I, for one, don’t want to get caught with my pants down. I’d like to go through that great adventure with my eyes wide open, alert, and with great expectations. I certainly am not looking forward to it, but when the time comes, I’d like to be as ready as possible. So I’m not going to put off thinking about it any more.
I don’t want to fear it. I’d like to sail right through it. Perhaps writing about the imagined experience will help me do just that. Perhaps musicalizing the emotions around the experience will help me foresee the experience on yet another plane, another angle, another dimension.
So I’m going to take some of these great spiritual songs and ingest them, turn them around, upside down, inside out and spit them back out again in hopefully new and original ways. This way we can all consider these new/old ideas, try them on for size and see if and how they fit.
I’m not an expert on heaven. I’m not an expert on dying. I’ve done neither. But I do have a vivid imagination and a need to explore the realms of mind. If any of you out there have a one sentence definition of heaven that is your own original thought, I’d be interested in hearing it. Something of it might ring true to me, might jog the imagination, might spark the fire. (Just don’t expect a piece of the copyright. :o)
I’m going to call this piece “Goin’ Home.” I’ve always loved the classic song. It’s rich in sentiment and a song that rings true to me in its portent. It is the essence of the experience that I want to write about, the center post of what I want to say. I’ll use the song as the “quest” of the experience.
I share with you now the simple, but profound lyric.
Goin’ Home
Words and Music by A. Dvorak & V. Labenske
Goin’ home
Goin’ home
I’m a goin’ home
Quiet like
Some still day
I’m jes’ goin’ home
It’s not far
Jes’ close by
Through an open door
Work all done
Care laid by
Gwine to fear no more
Mother’s there
‘Spectin’ me
Father’s waitin’ too
Lots o’ folk
Gathered there
All the friends i knew
I’m goin’
I’m goin’ home
I’m a goin’ home
Mornin’ star
Lights the way
Res’less dream all done
Shadow’s gone
Break o’ day
Real life just begun
There’s no break
There’s no end
Jes’ a livin’ on
Wide awake
With a smile
Goin’ on and on
Goin’ home
Goin’ home
I’m jes’ goin’ home
It’s not far
Jes’ close by
Through an open door
Goin’ home
Goin’ home
I’m jes’ goin’ home
For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
please visit Watchfire Music.
Jenny, thanks for all your deep thinking and additions to this subject matter. I like your idea especially about “let’s get the living right”. That’s really the key to this experience as we traverse this life experience. Amelia Airhead you are not!
When I think of Heaven at this time in my life it’s different than what I’ve considered it to be in the past. I’ve begun to feel that achieving balance, inner peace and alignment are some attributes of Heaven. As human consciousness has moved along and become less archaic, a pie in the sky idea of God sitting somewhere in the clouds, long white beard and cane, shooting thunderbolts at us when we do something wrong has long since fallen out of favor. To gain a true relationship with the sober truth of living and of transitioning, I think can be a bit of Heaven here on earth. To be unfettered by fear, enabling us to live life fully, to me, would be Heaven.
Metaphysical thought contends that Heaven is a state of mind, a good premise I think because we know that thoughts are things. What we conceive we can achieve, so then do we deduct that creating Heaven here should be our first order of business?
The French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne advised people to “practice death”. “To begin depriving death of it greatest advantage over us,” he wrote, “Let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it. A man/woman who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave”. By practicing death, Montaigne does not mean that we should set up shop on a sidewalk with a sign announcing the end of the world. He means that we can practice death by becoming conscious of the ways in which we resist life: we can practice death by approaching endings and partings and changes with more ease and faith. To practice death is to practice freedom!
Yesterday, a friend said, “Living is about saying ‘yes’, not, ‘yes, but…” I was reminded about how many Yes’s I still have in my heart that I’ve said, ‘Yes, but…’ to. Perhaps this was my moment to wake up to how I resist life.
Joseph Campbell said that “the conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy”.
Most of us fear death because of the ego’s strong and unrelenting seizing on what it think it knows and identifies with. Letting go and complete surrender are not attributes of ego. It is said that the ego is the last to go. Surrendering is about yielding the ego just enough to catch that train going with the flow. Ego has it’s place, but not as captain of the ship!
Ram Dass said, “ When we practice dying, we are learning to identify less with Ego and more with Soul.” Who would want to be an ego, when we can be a soul?
Some get to know when death will come; others are taken quickly so perhaps preparedness is something we should choose. I often marvel at us humans concerning our unreasonable attachment to the earth plane. We come in here with nothing and go out with nothing so it would seem the very best we can create, in between, is the quality of life that we’ve lived, so why not concentrate on that. We’re here to experience, to have adventure, to learn, to change. We’re here to master being in the world, but not of it! If we could take a look back at life from death’s vantage point, a little like “if I knew then what I know now”, we would certainly live every day differently!
Cause and effect, our inter-connectiveness, are no longer a nice new age thought; it is the reality in which we exist today. The note in the bottle that is thrown in the sea today reaches the shore a lot sooner and the pebble that cascades along the water creates ripples a lot quicker.
I must admit, I’m still just this side of scared about having to give up “Jenny Burton”,“Jenny from the Block”,“Storm” and “Amelia Airhead”, (just a few names I’ve been know by this time around), (don’t ask), but when I have to“get on up outta here”, my greatest desire will be to have fulfilled my soul’s purpose, to have embraced my transition and to have worked both out with grace.
It’s not willingly that any of us take our journey to death, but let’s get the living right, so we can get the dying right! I don’t think it’s about living or dying; I think it’s about both!
Peter, this blog really hits home. Perhaps when we have mastered and embraced dying we will have gained an ability to live every day better and even better on all levels. To embrace without fear this final day can be Heaven.
I eagerly await “Going Home”. I appreciate many of the songs you’ll be working with and I know you’ll bring your amazing and unique interpretation to each one, allowing us to see and experience them anew and also to look anew at this subject matter.