A mindful solstice season friends. Here is "Discontents," a song featuring Kate Rears Burgman’s cello, Shawna Potter’s singing and a symphonette of rock and electronic instruments. I’ve held on to it for a time, thinking what to say. “Discontents” takes place in a European city where stress and violence coarsen an activist couple, perhaps no more than their own anger and faults.
These weeks, beyond the dramatics of the proposed border wall, Brazil inaugurated a president of even worse impulses, a man publicly nostalgic for the days recent in his country’s memory when one could simply torture the opposition.
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There's much for us to fight. Yet our alternatives, including progressive governments which rose this century to embody people’s long-held dreams, often fall to corruption or, more commonly, hubris.
These are our discontents. We criticize the world without, necessarily, and yet in part because it is frightening to improve the world within. I am tired sometimes, due less to struggles with the other side than to fighting sisters and brothers in social movements.
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Silence is a salve. I want to reduce my own tumult; seek open spaces and people prepared to lay down arms. I scarcely can say how grateful I am for each of you, most especially when we are mindful of what one another needs.
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Van Gogh’s colored nights
Remind you of Soviet times
And will we ever find
A respite. – “Discontents”
Recent songs are on streaming services and available with these letters, here. Thanks, Peter
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