Consumers of the World, Unite, live, with loop pedal, and purple hair.

OK so it's not quite as shocking as MIA's new video, but it does feature a minority hair colour. Got to be worth a few Youtube views, surely.

Here is the first video footage in support of the new album. There are more on the way, but for now, check out a live rendering of 'Consumers of the World, Unite!'

'Consumers' will be the first single from the album. You may be familiar with Karl Marx's famous quote: "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains."

Here we are in the 21st century and the workers are away in another country, where the labour laws allow greater profitability and there are no unions. So today it seems that consumers are the sector in society with the power. We can bring about change through our buying habits: "Consumers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chainstores!"

Opinion poll dancing (to music)

Have you ever bought a download? Do you prefer to buy CDs? Would you be prepared to buy a book with a download in it and try downloading for the first time?

Given that election fever is in the air (in the UK at least) and opinion polls are going to be coming out left, right and centre (hopefully more left than anything but I'm not holding my breath), I thought I would have my own.

I am hoping to release the album WITHOUT the option of buying it in CD format, because CDs are toxic and not recyclable, and 100,000lbs of them end up in landfill EVERY MONTH.

Instead I will produce a book of images, lyrics, illustrations and essays, with a download code for the album in it.

I have had mixed views on the feasibility this idea from friends in the industry. And I need to at least break even on this release and preferably make a little pocket money for what has been over a year of hard work so far.

So please share your thoughts, opinions and music-buying history. All wordage received with gratitude!

The Buddha said everything changes. I say fine, let's change everything.

I am now the proud owner of a full-body arctic camouflage suit.

I have decided to go with my gut. My gut is having visions. Last night's vision was me dressed as a soldier, standing in a forest for the photo shoot for my new album 'In Defence of the Wild'. Today I went shopping for an outfit.

As some of you will know, my first album came out on a UK-based indie label and had a few thousand pounds thrown at it. This second album will be supported by a couple of labels (one in the UK and one in Canada) but it will basically be self-funded. The upside of this is I can do what I like, promotion-wise.

So today I found myself standing in a shop in downtown Vancouver trying on army gear, while several young ladies from Mexico gave me fashion tips.

I am, in fact, a pacifist. A love soldier (the ladies in the shop found this amusing - I said it in order to justify my wearing multi-coloured sneakers with my arctic camouflage suit - a fashion no no, apparently).

But just because I don't believe in violence, doesn't mean I don't believe in conflict.

The current political and economic system is doing massive violence to this planet. For the benefit of all humans, particularly the children and the poor of the world, as well as the other species with whom we share the planet, we must say no.

We must get into active conflict with people who care only for their personal and immediate gain and we must force another way, non-violently, but effectively. I do not like to use force at all, but time is running out, and they will not listen to reason.

I am not talking about hatred for those in power. We must act out of love and compassion for all beings, including power-hungry, wealth-obsessed lunatics (sorry, that last bit just slipped out).

We must recognise the power we have as citizens and as consumers.

We can all make a contribution. My way is to sing, dress up as a soldier, and stand in a forest having my photo taken. And blog. And gig. And generally be in dialogue with as many people as possible on these important issues. And to come up with other solutions for living. And to live those solutions.

Right now, for example, I live in a cohousing community that recycles over 90% of its waste, uses greywater for the toilets, makes decisions by consensus, and is a multi-generational, multi-family 'village within a city' that is totally cool and I think is a good model for city living. Not only that, it's fun! (And it works - it's been going for over 10 years and there are plenty of others like it).

My cunning plan is to live in such a way that the current economic system is undermined (reduce, reuse, recycle, and practice mutual generosity with your friends).

By making active choices about the way we live, we can make a government that does not care enough about this planet and its people quake in its communal boots, as it is made irrelevant by an electorate who increasingly take charge of their own lives, and joint-govern their own communities by participating in making the decisions that affect their lives.

Democracy is not just putting an X in a box once every few years. The Buddha said everything changes. I say fine, let's change everything.

www.padmaland.com

The music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life

I'm starting to look at booking a UK tour for later in the year. Where should I play? Who should I approach?

I care about music so much that most of it drives me insane. Most of what I hear on the radio makes me want to smash things up. So it is perhaps unsurprising that my music does not sit comfortably in the standard live music scene.

A room filled with beer-drinkers, chatting to each other about bugger all and checking out the opposite sex. While the musicians stand on stage and try to make an impression. They either play loud enough so that they can't hear what their friend is saying and are forced to jiggle in time to the drums, or look sexy enough or strange enough that at least half the audience look at the stage for a while.

What's the music like? What are the lyrics about? This is of secondary importance.

But sometimes you play a gig and the audience gets it. They are silent. They are concentrated and connected. There is what you might call a vibe. It's an amazing experience.

That is why I do what I do. At so many gigs I feel like one of those nutters standing about in Picadilly Circus, shouting my head off about Jesus, to people who don't even register that I'm there. But sometimes it's not like that. And right now I'm trying to figure out how to get more of those rare experiences on this tour.


My music is not entertainment (though it is hopefully entertaining). It is about communion, connection and change. It's about what we are doing to this beautiful Earth and why we should do it all differently. It's about my experiences of trying to walk a different path.

So I've decided I want to play outside of the standard circuit on this tour. If the mountain with not come to Mohammed, etc.

I need to be playing for people whose heart is open, who are not satisfied with the current state of the world and are aware that they are not satisfied. People who care about the planet and want to hear that they are not alone in this. People who don't want to yap yap yap about what was on TV last night, or what they just bought from Brent Cross (or whatever your local shopping centre is called).

If you are involved with a group or community that might fit this bill, please give me or my manager a shout (contact details are on my site at www.padmaland.com).

And just so you can get a sense of where I'm coming from, here is a snippet from the new album:

Zen mastering and Woody Guthrie

Since I'm pretty sure I am done with working on the album (hurray!), I have uploaded one song for you to listen to.

Please buy it and help me fund the release!!!! You can pay a dollar (the cost of about three mouthfuls of coffee), or more if you want to generate some good karma, or want to email a copy to a bunch of your friends without feeling guilty.

It's my version of This Land is Your Land by Woody Guthrie (I wrote new lyrics for it). It's the most stripped back, straight-up folk song of all the songs on the album. Got that down-home country feel, yee haw!

This week I have been getting my head around The Campaign. I met with Lauren (my manager-type person) to talk through all the various things we need to put in place over the coming weeks and months: photo and video shoots, lists of places to contact, press releases, electronic press kit, update website, work out what to release when (and how), where to tour (and how and when) ... the list goes on and on. It will be loads of work but I'm really excited to have the freedom to do it exactly as I want.

I also had a final crack at mastering the album.

When we made the first album I had no real idea what mastering was. I couldn't see why you would need mastering on top of mixing. I mean surely once it's been mixed, it's ready to go, right? Wrong.

Mastering basically means taking a bunch of songs and turning them into an album. You take the final stereo mixes of each track and make sure all the volumes are right - both within the song and from one song to the next - as well as being comparable to other music in the same genre. You make sure the frequencies are balanced (not too bassy, not too top endy), and the loud bits are not too loud, and the quiet bits are not too quiet, while at the same time maintaining the dynamics of the song. And then there's the overall 'texture' or 'flavour' of the tracks - smooth or rough, warm or cold, bright or thumpy. There are a bunch of techniques and pieces of kit for making all that happen, and it is harder than it sounds! I have spent quite a few hours on it now (much longer than a mastering engineer would have spent, though with significantly less efficiency) and have done at least four versions, learning as I go.

With the first album, a mastering guru did the work. He has a beautiful studio designed specifically for mastering and has done work for everyone from Nick Drake to George Harrison to Depeche Mode. But now I am DIYing it and so I have had to learn fast (fortunately learning fast is something I have become quite good at - a bi-product of refusing to stay in one place or specialise in one thing).

And other news - I found out this week is that you need to allow two months from submission of your music before it shows up in digital retailers (itunes, etc.). I thought it would be, like, five minutes or something. So that was a handy find! Better get designing an album cover!

Tomorrow I am heading into downtown Vancouver for a seminar on digital music marketing set up by the nice folks at Music BC. Timely or what???

Until next week...

Padma

SITTING ON A GOLDMINE

“Basically we’re making a vessel, we call it, that deals with shelter, of course, energy, food, water and air. Almost like on Walden Pond – those were the things Thoreau said people needed. Well, we need them, but we need them without nuclear power plants, we need them without power lines, and we need them without destroying the earth’s aquifiers. We need to provide them in each unit that we build. And that’s the idea we’re dealing with here. And so we’re providing food, shelter, power and sewage treatment, all in one unit.”

Mike Reynolds, the architect who designed the Earthship, quoted in Chris Turner’s exellent ‘The Geography of Hope’.

Yesterday I was out trekking on Bowen Island, which is a small island off the coast of Vancouver. Amazingly beautiful and chilled. Lovely.

The sun was shining, the breeze light, birds singing, huge trees providing shade.

The bountifulness of the environment surrounding me reminded me of something Mike Reynolds (quoted above) said about when he first started making earthships. He was talking about harnessing wind power, solar power, collecting rain falling on the roof, and using thermal mass in the walls to keep the house cool in summer and warm in winter so you don’t need heating or air conditioning.

He said that he realised that, with all this freely available power all around, we are sitting on a goldmine. All we need to do is harness it.

It’s funny how people think of oil and natural gas as being really precious, but ignore the wind and the sun. Building huge coal plants and nuclear plants while ignoring what is right in front of our noses – everything we need is available in our immediate environment. A house needs no power lines going in, no sewage pipes going out. It can regulate its own temperature, provide its own electricity and collect its own water.

Incredible that we are still using that old, dirty, expensive stuff that is owned by a few companies holding the entire world to ransom. People fight wars over it! Astounding!

Anyway, my life in the city is going fine. I am happy. The older I get and the more I move on, the clearer it is to me that one's experience is largely mind-made. Wherever you are, your mind projects itself onto the world and that is fundamentally what you experience. Still, if I was in a war zone, I would move...

Went to a zen group last week which was fun. Lots of meditation and a drink of tea. (Jasmine tea, not proper tea. I like jasmine tea but when someone tells me there’s going to be tea after the sit I’m expecting tea, you know? Anyway, moving on...)

A very cool independent record store (there are so few of them left) has agreed to stock my album. So if you’re in Canada and you want a copy, buy one from me! But if you’d rather get one from a record shop, go to Recat Records.

Got a nice email, as I do from time to time, from someone who had read one of my articles and is living off grid. It’s great to hear other people’s stories. One guy sent me an email explaining how to make felt (for yurt lining) out of local sheeps wool. Actually the area where I live in Spain is mostly goats, and I have vegan leanings (though not the strength of will for 100% compliance), so I shall stick with using blankets, but nice to hear anyway. Another guy got in touch who was living in one of those funky yellow American school buses. There are many interesting people in the world, tucked away among the trees, up mountains, and in the remote places of the world.

I am very behind on emails but do enjoy hearing from people and do get back eventually, so feel free to drop me a line and share your story.

The other interesting news is I have decided to include a book with the next album. It will be about my time on the mountain, where most of the songs were written. Working title for the album is ‘Wild’, though I do tend to change my mind on these things. I originally thought of ‘Wild ‘Un; Or, Life in the Yurt’ might be good, but I have a tendency to turn everything into a joke and ruin the vibe, so, probably will just leave that as a private chuckle between us.

Hasta luego

Padma

PS The pics were ones I took yesterday of and on Bowen Island. Nice huh.

FREE MUSIC!

Dear All

A little while before I went off to the yurt there was a period when I was left utterly alone in my studio. After about 48 hours I emerged, exhausted, hungry and squinting into the daylight. The good news is I had given birth to a beautiful bouncing baby song. It was a fairly painless delivery and required no drugs. But it's not like my other kids.

It's called 'The Bloke Downstairs' and is utterly different from anything else I've been coming out with. The lyrics are pretty political and it contains no guitars whatsoever! I know!

I've been scratching my head as to what to do with it and figured the best thing might be just to give it away.

It's available exclusively to people on my mailing list. You can join my list, listen and download it right now from www.reverbnation.com/padma.

Happy bopping.

Padma

ANYTHING THAT EXISTS CAN HAPPEN

The community where I am living recycles 95 per cent of its waste. They are almost at the stage where they don't need the garbage truck to turn up. In fact there was a strike a while ago and no rubbish was collected for six weeks. It was piled up all over the city, but this community was fine.

I bump into people on the stairs and have excellent conversations about vipassana meditation or art or Vancouver before there were any high-rise buildings. People set up in the communal areas and practice their cello or guitar. Someone cooks for everyone once or twice a week. I am digging this place.

I’ve been reading a book called ‘The Geography of Hope’. It’s by a guy called Chris Turner, who stayed in this community for a few days when he was in town. Basically the guy went touring for a year and found a bunch of places where people are living sustainably, and therefore are part of the solution. The quiet revolution that might just save us all. He mapped out a vision for a post-fossil fuel world. And like he says, quoting some economist dude: ‘Anything that exists can happen’.

The book is journalism with soul. Kind of like Lester Bangs or Hunter S Thompson writing about climate change. Highly recommended.

I also read up on the Whole Earth Catalog, after stumbling on a quote that turned out to be from it: ‘We are as gods and may as well get good at it’. Too true.

Musicwise I am waiting for my stuff to arrive by sea before I can do any audio recording. Sitting in front of the computer twiddling my thumbs and checking my watch. Right now I am confined to midi. So I am programming drums and making backing tracks with soft synths and playing along in my own private karaoke. Kind of doing live demos to get my head around the direction of the next album. I think it will be vibrationally similar to the first album but I think it’s gonna have a bit more of a groove.

The working title is ‘Wild’, after the place where much of it was written. But I’m also trying to get across a sense of what the mountain and yurt life was/is about for me.

Been listening to Elliott Smith a lot recently. Anyone can write a song, but hardly anyone can write a song. Humbled as ever.

I don’t seem to have as much time here as I did in the yurt. Which is weird since it takes much less time to do anything and it’s not like I have a TV or anything. I guess cities just suck time out of the day. Surrounded by a whirlwind of busy-ness, destroying everything, just so we can get by.

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one ... I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amidst the mountains.” Thoreau, Walden.

Captain’s blog. Stardate: Spring 2009.

Six months have passed already. I can’t believe it. What a ride.

This shall be my last post from the mountain. I’ll be here for a week or so still, but that time will be full with packing down and saying goodbyes. When I have time for thinking, I’d like to be free just to think. And I’d like to say goodbye to the place privately.

But do not be alarmed! I’ll be keeping up with the blog. The world breathes a sigh of relief. Or was it a groan?

I’ve enjoyed having the blog as a focus and a forum for sharing ideas and opinions. And I’m sure I shall have as many opinions in the heart of the city as I do from the top of a mountain!

It will be difficult to say goodbye to this life. I am already trying to work out how soon I can return. But, like Thoreau, I have other lives to lead, and have no more time for this one. At least for now.

I am looking forward to recording the music that I have written while I’ve been here. There is well over an album’s worth. I’m also looking forward to a horizontal floor, a hot shower in the morning, and a 24 hour shop around the corner (I keep strange hours).

I’ll be in the UK for about ten days, and they will be a busy ten days. Aside from looking in on friends and family, I will also be doing a couple of sessions for web TV channels in London (Balcony TV and Get Closer), and doing a live web chat for Gigwise, where you will be able to write in and ask me questions. I’ll post more details on those as I have them.

Earlier today, as I sat watching the river run through my kitchen (see video), I was reflecting on how quickly I have forgotten how to be in a city. This yurt life has become normal now, and it’s rhythms and relationships are where I feel comfortable. This place allows an opening of the heart. Cities demand a cutting off and closing down.

I remember getting back to the city after attending Glastonbury festival for the first time. Filled to the brim with peace and love, I was mugged within a few hours. Oh Manchester, so much to answer for.

All was not lost though. I was penniless so had no presents for the muggers, and even managed to put my arm around one of them and ask him why he was being so nasty. The knives remained in their jeans and I lived to hug another day...

The Spanish words I have learnt here are indicative of the life I have led: firewood, countryside, spring, olive oil, chainsaw, rain, sun, wind, stove, stars, village, friend, electricity superhighway. I wonder which words I would know had I moved to Barcelona?

Still, I will be going to a city that I have never lived in before (Vancouver, Canada) which is hemmed in by mountains on one side and the sea on the other. So things could be worse! I’ll also be living in a co-housing community which was built using lots of reclaimed materials, has a communal meditation room and recycles its greywater. I’m interested in exploring potential solutions to the environmental crisis that can be lived by everyone, so am excited to see what a city-based community like this has to offer.

We are on this planet for a brief time, and this time seems to be a pivotal one for humanity, and for the planet at large. This is a responsibility, but also an exciting opportunity. I hope we will rise to the challenge. This involves a change of thinking, a change of values, and a change of behaviour. The change is already beginning to happen, but this is one situation where we do in fact need bigger better faster more.

The good news is that it doesn’t require everyone in the world to get it. If five or ten per cent of us change our lives, great change will happen. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mandela. History is full of the names of people who got a crew together and changed history. They were always in the minority, but a minority is all it takes.

Change is inevitable – we just need to steer it towards a future that works. Don’t wait for the governments of the world to get with the programme. And don’t wait for big business. We are the power. They will follow us.

Thanks to all of you who have read the blog so far, for the many words of encouragement you have sent, and for the sharing of ideas. See you when I’m back in the world!

Perhaps it is fitting that I should end this chapter of the blog with Thoreau’s final words in Walden:

“I do not say that John or Jonathan will realise all this; such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

Or, if that doesn’t do it for you, perhaps you will resonate more with the succinct sign off of the great (though perhaps a little Bush-esque in his approach to inter-galactic relations) Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise: “Kirk out”.

DREAMS AND DIRECT ACTION

This week I’ve been writing an article on music and commercialism, which has just been published on this website. So this week’s blog is going to be a short one.

As you can see from the video, I’ve spent a little time involved with the anti-autopista campaign. It’s excellent to see how quickly they are organising. Two people had been doing research into the health and environmental effects, and they did presentations. Someone else handed out the company’s proposal document for attendees to take away, and a whole host of awareness-raising actions have been planned.

In general, these are not political activists, just ordinary people who love this place – many of them have lived in the area all their lives, as did their parents, and they don’t want the autopista here.

It’s not as if the electricity is even for this area. As far as I can work out, they are trying to create a Europe-wide network of these things, and there are people protesting about it all over Europe. Interestingly, the nuclear power station is going to be located in Africa. Leave them with the problems, again, and take the goodies so that us Europeans can keep living like this.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. I spent an evening talking with a friend about transition towns. Don’t know much about it yet, but it seems like a really positive approach to bringing about transformation at community level, in order to hopefully avert the imminent environmental catastrophe. It doesn’t strike me as The Answer, but definitely as one of the answers.

And I’ve spent a bunch of time on the mountain of course. I’ve been doing quite a bit of yoga now that the weather has improved and I can do it outside. I’ve been practising yoga for years, but for the few months before coming here I was taught a new style – more meditative than what I had done before – and it has transformed my practice. Loving it!

By the way, if you want to comment on anything raised in the music article but don’t fancy registering on the site on which it’s published, feel free to leave comments here.

Right. I’m off to do some more yoga!

SPRING, AND THE ON-SITE/OFF-SITE INSIGHT

“The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the blue-bird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations?” Thoreau, Walden

Spring has arrived (though a few days ago we had more snow) and I am enjoying watching the seasons change. The sounds of the mountain are different now – bees buzzing, migratory birds singing and squabbling, lizards darting out of sight as I pass, farmers doing the things farmers do in springtime (which invariably involve tractors – it’s like the tractors have come out of hibernation).

I am starting to spread out. Winter was spent largely working, moving at a pace, or sitting within a few feet of the stove. Now I am bathing, preparing food, lazing around, doing yoga, meditating, reading, all outside. It’s great!

One of the big draws of this lifestyle for me is that, while I find it beautiful, it is fundamentally a celebration of substance, rather than of style.

Conversely, the rest of the Western world is fast becoming a cathedral to style. If something, or someone, seems a certain way, then that is apparently all that matters. It is of much less importance what that thing, or who that person, actually is.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this is that it will soon be time for me to leave this wondrous mountain. In a few weeks time I will be heading off to the big city in order to set about recording some music, which will hopefully become my second album.

I am looking forward to this. I have all these pent-up songs that only exist on voice and acoustic guitar, but in my head I can hear the full production and am beginning to salivate when I visualise a recording studio.

But, for all the reasons mentioned so far in this blog, I am also a wee bit trepidatious about heading back down into Babylon.

The city too hot
I-man got a cool life
Upon the hill top.
(Lee "Scratch" Perry)

This feeling reminds me of the end of festival season. I used to work at festivals and when you’ve spent a couple of months traveling around, basically living in a big moving festival, where everyone around you is muddy and celebrating and being the most loving and happy and inspired that they ever get, the idea of walking back out into everyday life is a bit daunting, even depressing.

I remember airing this reticence to a friend in a festival once, many years ago. He was a few years older than me and had been around the block a few more times. His reply has stayed with me. He said, ‘On-site is on-site, and off-site is off-site’. Then he shrugged.

These days though, I am increasingly interested in what makes on-site on-site, and what makes off-site off-site. Really, all that is different is people’s attitudes. Their state of mind. An optimism and a letting go.

Maybe, if we all put in a bit of effort, we can turn off-site into one big on-site!

Coming back to my style versus substance rant, one of the ways I think that people get opened up and happy at a festival is that by day three, everyone looks like shit. On the first day everyone arrives in designer hippy gear – specially bought decorative wellies, newly dyed (semi-permanent) pink hair and so on. You can feel the paranoia in the air, as everyone tries to look either like they were born in a festival, man, or conversely that they are absolutely not festival people, unlike you sad twats, and are just here for a laugh.

But by day three everyone’s forgotten what they look like. They haven’t seen a mirror in days, they’ve had no sleep, they’re covered in mud, and they’ve been high, they've been low, come up, come down, drunk and hung over, a whole bunch of times in such quick succession that this psychic washing machine has transported them to some kind of parallel universe where, no matter what’s going on, everything is ok. And in this parallel universe, what kind of wellies you’re wearing (if you haven’t lost them by now) has somehow lost its significance.

The trendies, the hippies, the punks, the goths, the ravers, the sporty types, the sloaney types, the hoodies, the business types, the geeks... man we are so consumed with this need for an identity. Like shapeless ghosts, we drift around, lost and frantic, until we find some shape to wear so that the world, we hope, can finally see us. Actually, we don’t even want them to see us, because we feel too ashamed of who we believe we really are. So we hope that people will see the form we have taken, and mistake it for us.

On this mountain, who cares? There is no dress code. The birds and the trees don’t recognise human subcultures. The earth is happy for me to walk on it, no matter where I bought my shoes. I sometimes spend days in pajamas. I haven’t noticed a single vulture scowl.

Don’t get me wrong – I love style (as opposed to ‘fashion’). Walking down the street can be art. Why not dye your hair pink? I love pink hair. Humans have decorated themselves since before they got up off all fours and declared themselves homo sapiens, to a universe that cares nothing for Latin.

It’s not style that I am against, so much as lack of substance. Even the arts are riddled with this inability to spot the difference. Where has all the soul gone??? I listen to the radio on occasion and find myself swearing until I turn it off. I flip between anger and despondency as I scan through the stations. Inevitably, silence soon resumes its residency in my ears.

Music can be so healing, so inspiring. It can remind you of who you really are. Why is so much of what’s out there just sonic chewing gum? It might keep your ears busy for a while, but it has absolutely no nutritional value.

[For those of you who listen to radio on the internet, I would like to give a quick plug at this point to: www.gimmenoise.com and www.belowzerobeats.com, both of which are run by people who actually like music].

I have a few more mountain tales to come before heading off and am trying to be as ‘in the now’ as possible, while at the same time working out how to pack down this life once again and leave it stable, so that when I return there is (hopefully) a yurt still standing, a spring still running and clean, and a stack of wood for my first night’s fire.

OLIVES AND OLIVE WOOD

Sorry, the inverter packed up a week or so ago so this video blog is a little short and a bit out of date. Got a new inverter now so the next video blog should bring us back up to speed. Anyway, here is the yurt as it was a couple of weeks ago...

OLIVES AND OLIVE WOOD

“Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I loved to have mine before my window … they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.”
Thoreau, Walden

I am sitting in the yurt right now. It’s dark, except for candlelight. The wood-burning stove is crackling away beside me, filled with old olive branches just cut from a dead tree about 20 yards from the door of the yurt…

For the last two days I have been climbing trees. Olive trees. It is olive-picking season and two of my friends look after a whole bunch of olive trees. There is a man who lives in a shanty-style shack at the top end of the olive grove. Panoramic views of the mountains. He built the place himself out of bits of wood, old windows, and a ruined stone cabin. It is decorated out front with a tangle of functional oddments – a spare wheel, an old radio, and so on. He appears also to have satellite TV.

Apart from the satellite on the roof, the shack looks exactly like one of those places where the ‘old timer’ would live in a made-for-TV movie about an old timer who lives in the woods. He would hate strangers and be very grumpy. He would threaten schoolkids with a shot gun and a vicious dog or two, but when the kids persevered, he would turn out to have a heart of gold. And the dog would inevitably be a softy too.

I don’t know whether the man here has a shotgun or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Climbing trees is great. Picking olives off a tree all day, moving from branch to branch, you get into a meditative rhythm. Your mind quietens, you notice the olives more easily, your body moves into position and holds it with the minimum of effort. You get to know how much you can bend a branch before it breaks, and how thin a branch can be while still being strong enough to support your weight.

It made me think about how a meditative state of mind is actually a natural state of mind. Though I sit in formal meditation in order to get mine most of the time, actually, much of one’s life could be (and perhaps would have been) quite meditative. Building and tending a fire, picking berries, hunting, fishing, weeding the vegetable patch, gathering honey, milking the cow, making cheese – so much of this kind of activity requires a certain amount of concentration and skill, and yet does not demand so much of you that you end up stressed. Neither hurrying, nor tarrying, as the Buddha once said of walking the path to awakening.

It is odd that today’s city-based life is so stressful really, since there is actually little real danger involved in it. If I fall out of a tree, I break my bones. If I lose concentration while cutting wood I lose a finger. But if I miss the train, I just wait for the next one. I’m home half an hour late. Big deal?

I think a lot of the stress of city life is due, firstly, to sensory overload. There is just so much to cope with that you can’t process it and are constantly in a state of agitation, so it doesn’t take much to get your back up. Your system is just not designed to deal with All That Stuff. Secondly I think it is about lack of autonomy. The bank can take your house, the boss can take your livelihood, the gas and electricity companies can take your heat and light. Deep down, you want them all to go fuck themselves, but you don’t even know who most of them are. And you never get to de-stress from that because it’s always there, waiting for you to miss a payment, or turn up late to work one too many times…

There were a whole bunch of us out there this weekend. They built a big fire and cooked food, drank wine and celebrated the beginning and the end of the working day like this. It was an all-round beautiful experience. I felt a bit like a giraffe – the glee at reaching those nimble shoots at the top of the tree. I wanted to eat them but didn’t. Giraffes are also rubbish at speaking Catalan…

We have electricity again. A new inverter (which converts the voltage from your DC 12v battery to an AC 220v current, so that you can plug in everyday items – the American-sized fridge freezer, the plasma flatscreen TV, the playstation, the dishwasher). Inverters have got LOTS cheaper since I bought the first one, and much quieter too…

The goatherder herded his goats past the top of our land a few days ago. El pastor. An incredible clatter of bells and the thudding of a thousand hoofed feet. I was feeling a bit romantic about it initially (remnant of a more gentle time when people were at peace and enjoyed their simple lives) but the way he shouted at his dogs snapped me out of it. He sounded like he wanted to jump back into his 4x4 and be back in town as soon as possible. Perhaps the football was on or something…

Wood is increasingly the subject of my ponderings. And chainsaws. Everyone around here has a heavy duty chainsaw. They wander out into the woods, spend half a day cutting up dead trees and throwing them into the back of a trailor, and they have enough wood for a month or more. Warmth is not an issue.

So far, I haven’t bought a chainsaw (I had a trailor but as you know it died en route and is buried somewhere near Toulouse). At first I thought I would have to get one, but reading Thoreau, I was reminded that chainsaws have not been around forever, and people used to cut their firewood by hand. So maybe I can do this too (though I am looking forward to some friends coming with a chainsaw to help us get ahead!)

Walden is increasingly becoming an instruction manual for me, rather than a window on an alien world. I read with interest the point in winter at which he decides to plaster his cabin – since insulation is becoming of great interest to me too, and we are always thinking of ways to hold the heat in the yurt for longer. We have tucked blankets around some of the wall, and taped up some of the gaps where there is a draft in the floor.

Mongolian nomads use felt to insulate their yurts, made from the hair of their own animals. I haven’t got any animals, although I was offered a dog the other day. It was an incredibly cute puppy, but I am trying to act with head not heart on this particular occasion. I will probably not shave it to make wall insulation even if my heart wins out. The dog is very small, and I have yet to learn the art of felt making…

I read also how Thoreau has to break the thick ice on the pond in order to get his water in the morning. The water here freezes every night now, and we have to keep a container in the yurt as it stays a little warmer in here, so we can have tea, brush our teeth and so on in the morning. In fact, when my neighbour offered us the dog, he was just heading down to the spring to get water, as his pipes had frozen up in the night…

And I read how Thoreau gets excited when he finds an old fallen log in the forest and drags it back. I know that excitement. But I have yet to do much splitting with an axe. And I haven’t got a wood pile yet. We are usually just cutting enough wood in the day to cover the evening. It’s tiring just to do half an hour of sawing up trees, so how you get a wood shed full of logs I have no idea. The other thing I note is that he tends to keep the fire going for most of the day. He lets it burn out in the afternoons, but the rest of the time (i.e. evening, through the night and into the morning) he has a fire going. That’s a lot of wood. And he cuts it all by hand! There must be some technique to this.

The nights after the fire has died and the mornings getting up are the worst here. It’s a totally different experience from the days and the evenings, which I love. It would be great to have a fire going all the way through the night, then to just stick a couple of logs on the embers in the morning and have it nice and cosy, and have the kettle boiling on the stove while you slowly come round – ahhhhhhh. Nice. Well. It would be. But how to do this without a chainsaw? Answers please!

JULIAN LENNON CHOOSES 'ENTRYPHONE' AS HIS PICK OF THE WEEK

I am SO excited! It's like getting a pat on the head from God's offspring. Who I guess would be Jesus. Or Mohammed.

http://www.belowzerobeats.com.

I have just arrived in the mountains in Catalunya, Spain, from where I will be posting videos and written blogs as part of my Thoreau-esque project, 'Here; Or, Life in the Mountains'. Regularly. Promise.

A BIT ABOUT THE ALBUM

I called the album Here for a few different reasons. Firstly because I had a brain haemorrhage in 2005, and the odds of me still being here right now (and in a state which would allow me to make the album) were by no means in my favour.

But also, if I had to distil the Buddha’s teaching into one word, that’s the word I would choose. Being fully present, in this moment, where we are right now, is to be truly alive and awake.

And finally, I move around a lot. I’ve lived in so many places. Sometimes I’m driving a car and I can’t remember which direction I should turn because I can’t remember where my home is right now. Or I go looking for one of my books and then remember that it’s in a box on a mountain in Spain. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and there’s a couple of seconds where I have no idea even which country I’m in. Where am I? Here.

Some of the songs on the album [e.g. Throw My Drugs Away] have been in existence for 10 years or so. Many of them were written in the last year. So the subject matter is pretty varied, though the overall texture seems to me to be pretty constant. There is a kind of melancholy, which over the years I have realised is my ’default setting’, and seems to be based on a view that rests deep in me: Life is futile and in the end meaningless. This view was not even shaken by my near death experience. At the same time, I passionately believe that life is beautiful, the universe is amazing, and all humans have incredible potential. This paradox is at the heart of my perspective and therefore my music.

I tend to write on a personal level, from the point of view of how things affect me in day-to-day life, since this, in the end, is the most real and direct. I don’t really choose any particular subject matter consciously – I don’t usually start out thinking ’I’m going to write a political song about the inherent sickness and alienation of city-living’ [e.g. Firelight Dance]. I just mess around on the guitar, and ideas roll around my head, and this is what comes out. Like one day I was driving up the mountain in Spain where I live sometimes, and we stopped to collect cherries from a tree by the side of the track. And I thought ’Wouldn’t it be nice if food just grew on trees’. And that became If Friends Were Neighbours 2. Sometimes I write a love song, sometimes it’s a song about opening my eyes after meditating and watching the sunrise. And sometimes it’s a song about my own experience of the vibrancy of the ’natural’ world, or my own lack of satisfaction with consumer culture, or the generally bland offerings of mass media and international corporations. I find that everyday life offers stories that have worth in themselves but which are also symbolic of something deeper. Life as a metaphor for life. In general that’s my approach to songwriting – write as simply as possible and let the words point beyond themselves.

There is a Zen story about a guy who wants to paint bamboo. So he goes to a master painter and asks to be taught. The master says, "If you want to paint bamboo, first you have to see bamboo". So he looks. He looks in the morning and the evening, in the summer and winter, day and night, when he is happy and when he is unhappy. Eventually he sees the bamboo. He takes out a brush, and with one swift movement he paints the bamboo. This was his path to Awakening. Hopefully it’ll be mine too.