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Natural Harmony

from If They Only Knew by The Mysterious They

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    Album art by Jasmine Co.
    Album design by Cruz Media.
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lyrics

Precipice.

We find ourselves on the edge.
There’s no going back,
Though we would be served
By discovering how we got here.

The way forward
Is perilous
And will require
A way of being most of us have never known.

As tired old men eat the world
In a cold fire of greed and fear,
And billions of beings realize its no longer safe to be here;

As the drums of war pound
In the echo chambers of our inherited mess,
We must ask ourselves again and again and again:
How do we pass this test?

With his dead eyes
And heavy foot on the gas pedal,
The one who feeds on destruction
Ensures he will draw his last breath alone and soon.
Will we choose to go with him?

What if we slow down?
Discover not another novelty,
Discover not another way of hiding or numbing?

What if we discover not another frontier to conquer
Or way of life to colonize,
But what it is that actually lives behind our own eyes?

What if we lean into the why of what we do?
The meaning of our lives.
What has brought us thus far
And what we actually want to leave behind.

Are you going to be a well-remembered ancestor?
Will our children’s children’s children’s children
Look back on you, on us,
As the ones who managed at 11:59:59

To make the choices and do the work
To compost, to transform,
To bring humanity back from the edge of our own destruction?
Or will we be forgotten in the sands of time
Because there’s no one left to remember us?

When I feel into why humans exist at all,
As trees live to hold the ground together
And offer their flower and fruit,
And bees exist to pollinate and create honey,
It is to reflect life back to itself through creation.

Not to consume everything in our grasp
Merely for the momentary illusory pleasure of eating,
But to metabolize what we experience
And offer it back as something which allows life
To see itself as beauty.

Resilience.
Learn this word well.
Resilience is the black heart beating at the center of existence,
The gold more precious than anything mine.
The nature of nature and the gift of time.
All which survives is resilient and adaptable.

We don’t need to dominate anymore.
Let us be like the trees with their mycelium woven,
Like the dandelion that can transmute poisons,
That knows of community and cooperation.

Let us remember what it is to play again
And offer our unique, essential song
To the harmony of creation.

Resilience, beyond even humanity’s existence,
Is that the salmon will find their way upstream again to spawn;
That however long and dark the night,
There will be a dawn;
That whatever winter we might create,
Spring will come again
With or without us.

And we might, we might have a chance to rejoin
The great chorus,
The core of us linked to the core of life,
Our intrinsic interdependence,
As we remember our coherence
And our own resilience.

Come home.
It’s one simple turn.
One gentle re-attuning.
One determined remembering
Of why you came into being in the first place.

There’s a part of you that has never forgotten
Your place within the web of being.
Become a good ancestor
And leave something behind.

credits

from If They Only Knew, released April 8, 2020
Bibi McGill: electric guitar
Jaskaran: viola, violin
Max Ribner: flugelhorn
Niema Lightseed: vocals, original poem
Sean Frenette: electric bass
Steven Skolnik: drums
Youssoupha Sidibe: kora

Jaskaran: composer, executive producer
Jack Yaguda: mixing engineer, electronic producer
Alisdair Lee: recording engineer, assistant producer
Mat Larimer: assistant engineer

Jasmine Co: album artist
Jaquelyn Cruz: album designer

Recorded at The Hallowed Halls in Portland, OR
Mastered by Shawn Hatfield at Audible Oddities

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The Mysterious They Portland, Oregon

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