This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about the beauty and power of Old Solar’s version of the Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2022 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.
This is one of two posts in preparation for the 2 days of Post.Festival 2023, the largest post-rock festival in the US and an event I’ve been dying to go to in recent years. I’m going to cover two bands that have been crucial to my love and experience of post-rock as well as difficult touchpoints on my healing journey of the last couple years due to difficult associations.
This is a sweeping album. The concept of it feels like a post-rock version of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, and I think they capture the sentiment of each season well. You’re likely to be moved by one or several of them. Favorite track: Autumn Equinox: A Winnowing Fork in His Hands.
SEE flows through the ebbs and flows of the seasons, the highs and lows of abundance and lack as the course of beautiful, heart-rending change. It is nothing short of a glorious album. Although I suspect the band are deeply Christian, the well-captured experience of the vibrant change of presence and absence remind me of Taoism and my own deep interest in it; this album captures the resonance of something like an I Ching-esque progression of yin and yang through the seasons.
I’ve found the track: “Autumn Equinox: A Winnowing Fork in His Hands” particularly haunting. My first connection with this album was a brief obsession, a spring dalliance of sorts. Months later, I woke from dreams with this song stuck in my mind, hearing it over and over on repeat. I fastidiously dug through my album collection to recall where it came from, niggling in my subconscious until I rediscovered this album. I’ve never had that experience prior or since with any other song.
The song represents my favorite season, fall, and it expresses that shift into a pensive mode of fullness slowing down, being harvested and brought in before the cold. It also feels pensive as though a high feeling is now on the edge of loss – that transition of connection into withdrawal and repose (Hermit – Virgo) and an independent vibrance of compassion, growth, and abundant harvest despite this (Empress – Libra). It also feels like a time of things balancing out, the decisions and efforts of the year being weighed out into their results, karma playing out, and the symbolism of all that balance in the equinox (Justice – also Libra) just before the strong transformation of the reaping and movement into quiet (Death – Scorpio).
As far as I’m concerned, if you can listen to this song and not feel its poignancy, your heart is completely cold. It pulls strongly at a variety of emotional depths like few songs do. Returning to this album has been a slow and difficult process for me, but it’s one I have relished listening to again recently. Old Solar is one of the main bands I’m thrilled to see on this trip to Post.Festival.
NOTE: Use the time stamps in the YouTube description to jump to the song
This session returned to the experience I only got to the edge of exploring in my recording a couple nights ago and delved in deeply alongside some loving admiration of passages from Shunryu Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” and Dogen-zenji’s “Genjokoan”. I really tried to express some key ideas of non-attachment and sitting within calm presence, even in the heart of painful desires.
I recorded this session with a much different target in mind, an exploration of the sense that “This isn’t the way it should be,” a damning felt sense of samsara. I get to this topic very briefly at the end but speak at great length about how we can’t choose how we feel, and the small space we have in awareness to change our patterns to move towards different emotional and perceptual patterns.
I also reference this element of the famous painting, The School of Athens, by Raphael (retrieved here from Wikipedia):
This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about Nietzsche’s philosophy as an inspiration for an energetic/emotional stance towards life, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2022 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.
I’ve written about Russian Circles a few times on this blog, and in many ways, this won’t differ much, as I find the same refrain of empowerment and an abundant life force that grows above and beyond challenge, oppression, and calamity.
This post won’t differ greatly in that sentiment, but I’ve wanted to express my passion about this song for some time, and the feelings I have around it line up well with another post I just wrote on my other blog – the ending passage of it with an Empress riding her sea turtle Chariot off across the seas of self-doubt in the Moon (yes, all tarot allusions). I’m hoping that this will act as an accompaniment to that other post, offering a different expression and media around it.
If I had to guess, the song I’ve listened to most in the last few years has been “Micah” from Russian Circles’ original album, Enter. There’s something about the progression of this song that haunts me. It’s so simple and complex at the same time, so slowly intentional at first with an uptick in the middle of smooth virtuosity and energy. It feels empowered on every level – a sense that my forward movement is a growing, unstoppable force, but not one of any animosity, rather determination. At the same time, it rests in between movements, taking that considered tone again and regrouping – an open heart that relishes being on this journey without ever giving up, despite the melancholy edges to the tone. The second uptick of the cymbal play with the guitar creates one of the most epically driving and cataclysmic builds I’ve ever heard in a song – to me, it is truly riding that Chariot (the card of agency, crushing obstacles, rushing ahead unimpeded, and reaching one’s goals).
A couple months back, I walked through the dark of my neighborhood – an exercise loop of a weighted vest and climbing hills, while listening to this song on repeat. Somewhere near the end of the walk and the 7th or 8th time of listening to the song, I flashed on those tarot cards and associated meanings as a whole – the Empress (abundant life force) riding the Chariot (the fast, unimpeded forward movement) as a Hermit (finding connection to deeper inner truth – that inner light of compassion revealed, learning on the journey and that learning lighting the way forward).
Truth be told – that combo is currently an inspirational view of myself or who I aspire to grow into/presence as. That’s precisely the feeling of awe and empowerment I take from this song, and I can only hope music like this touches others in a similar fashion.
I started this a while ago, and I left it aside, doubting my creative voice here, and it felt more dramatic than I could write in a way that resonates with me yet still feels like a fitting tale. However, various events of late have brought back past memories and feelings, a sense as a friend has said of the universe throwing events out that echo elements of past occurrences – asking the question of me: “Did you learn the lesson at hand?” As such, I thought it worth finishing this little fairy tale story about resilience in the depths of pain and growing beyond those experiences. It is fiction and yet represents learning and catharsis with an emphasis on the lessons learned, as poor as I might be at expressing them. For me – it was almost like a journaling exercise to strengthen my own understanding. I can only hope it speaks to someone else out there across the ether as well.
What is love?
It’s an easy question. People speak about it confidently, certain they know and can express it simply. She, however, thought that the apparent ease was deceptive, uncertain the answer was simple or readily uplifting. The thoughts congealed into thick globules of disbelief in her mind as the Empress bled out on the floor.
Months prior – he swept her off her feet. She resisted at first, having come to believe that love didn’t matter after many a life adventure. He spoke of connection. He understood her in ways that others didn’t. He valued her for more than just her looks or her charm. He was captivated by her mind and heart, and he eventually captivated her in turn. The King of Fire wooed the Empress with charisma, confidence, charm, and passion.
Then the drama. On. Off. Up. Down. I love you. I love someone else. You’re the one. I prefer someone else. At first she was somewhat at fault too, but as it dragged on, any “both” or equality long went away. She was no longer seen. No longer valued. No longer understood. She was a nuisance most of the time, a shiny bauble to be remembered when wanted, and yet, she did everything she could to calmly and glowingly exude: “I love you,” to let it permeate and radiate out of every pore of her being. In seeing his darkness, she leaned into compassion, care, understanding, acceptance, and patience.
In truth, she was an Empress no more, beholden to desire, a reversal of energy, a misplacement of her way in the world. She had lost her self-worth somewhere along the way, the golden glow of the Empress.
Finally, he made it clear that she was no longer wanted, never again. He made it clear that he felt angered by her lack of respect for his other commitments, even though those activities and behaviors were precisely the last iota of self-respect she had: not willing to say that it was laudable to her that something and someone else would lead to the diminishment of and poor treatment from this former King who was no longer anywhere near such. That was the one self-abasement and self-negation too far – a stamp of approval for treating her like garbage. Something that leads people to be worse versions of themselves is not deserving of respect, especially at one’s own expense.
The last of this was separation followed by brief reconnection and an unwillingness to even take accountability to the extent of accepting that he no longer had or deserved her trust and that he had lashed out at her for her last grasp on self-respect, for her struggling to make sense of his slowly escalating self-righteousness. He twisted events into self-righteous dismissal and told her she was obsessive and lost in her own mind, while also lecturing her on topics she had studied for years and he had not studied at all. Even when the lightest of points were made that she no longer trusted him after such behavior, he puffed up and acted as though the need to rebuild trust was ridiculous and beyond the pale. He cut ties with an act as though their friendship’s ending deserved some sort of joyous funeral pyre and as though such a sentiment of joyous festivity would clearly be shared by her.
All of this left her questioning her feelings, her care, her intuition, the time spent, her openness to compassion and understanding, and most of all her ongoing connection despite being told she was wrong, confused, stupid, and lacking emotional depth. In short, she felt like she was mad – she not only didn’t trust others anymore, she didn’t trust herself – her mind, her read of others, and her own emotions.
The ongoing sharp pangs of this deep existential wound were why she decided to move into this moment of pulling out her sword of truth: cutting out the blackened heart of despair within herself. She screamed as she cut through her breast, bleeding everywhere, but she still reached into her destroyed chest to pull out her heart and passed out on the ground.
The Empress is a great being – one of abundance, of the ultimate power of love, not just romantic love – but the loving energy of life, of maternal nurturing, of the life force that loves to exist, grow, and flourish. As such, even cutting her own heart out may have ended her in a sense, but it didn’t really result in a final ending. Death, from her 3 to the 13, was a moving forward of the wheel of fate into an evolution, a transformation into something new.
She gradually, over the course of extended time, pulled herself off the floor, the hole in her chest fused closed again, and the doubts, creeping thoughts, and self-dismissal slowly faded, as the taint of the rot of a corrupted love, an addiction, passed out of her system. First, she gained her self-worth again fully, recognizing her own excellence and working again on growing it to its fullest. She lost her cares of worrying about outcomes or attaching to any intentions of trying to control. Rather, she began to flow with life again – the power of yin, rather than the selfish and short-sighted application of yang. Her doubts were last to fade, but in her healing growth, she eventually blossomed again, a lotus in the muddy waters – recognizing that she didn’t need to trust other people or seek their love again. No matter what, she was pure abundant joy in and of herself. She could give her compassionate love to others without clinging to them or to any story that dimmed her light or limited her.
Perhaps some day she would find an Emperor, balanced, giving, kind, empowered, and insightful, rather than a self-centered, power-based, controlling, egoistic king, but in truth, she knew the rarity of such a person, and would sweat not a single drop worrying, waiting, or even desiring that outcome. She would give her energy to herself, to the world, and to others – fostering compassion, patience, nurturance, and growth in all that she encountered to the best of her ability, listening and caring while no longer allowing anyone to diminish her.
She no longer sat in meditation, rest, and healing from her wounds. She stood up, walked out of her castle, gracefully strode down to the sea below, and rode off into the moonlit night on a giant turtle that surfaced in front of her as her feet touched the sand, her chariot to traverse the depths on her journey forward.
On the Way 
Recent Comments