There are so many things in this world that I do not know.
Just in the past couple of weeks, an immense black hole was discovered by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. (I am not kidding, that is the real name.)
This black hole is just 2000 light years away, is 33 times the size of the sun and is eating up anything that happens to fall into its gravitational pull.
My mind cannot grasp this. That is, I can put those word down in a sentence but I cannot create an image in my mind that corresponds to those words.
Then there’s the tulips in the backyard. I planted them last year and they were exquisite.
But they have been cold, buried bulbs in the “earth as hard as iron,” to quote the hymn, for six months. Now, they are springing back to life.
How?
To use the word “God” here is inadequate. It’s too small a word, too human a word, a word too insufferably loaded down with political baggage.
Science? Yes, there are scientific explanations for black holes and tulips, I am sure.
But explanations are dry and shriveled. Where is the poetry, the mystery, the tingle of the unknowable?
I found myself back in Allston this week. I had a late afternoon appointment and, given the unpredictable nature of taking the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston, I arrived more than an hour early and had some time to kill.
As we all know, it is an Immutable Law that, if you go to college in Boston, you must live in Allston for at least a year. The rules are ironclad: you can do it while you’re in school or you can do it after, but you must do it. Brighton doesn’t count. Too upscale.
My appointment happened to be but a mile from where Kerry and I lived in Allston when we were Just Kids, as Patti Smith might say.
As you can see below, this was not glamorous. These row houses were built for meat plant workers, when Allston was a railroad hub for beef coming in from Chicago.
(If you’ve ever wondered why the restaurant on Brighton Street is called “The Stockyard,” wonder no more.)
But here is the unexplained part:
This was one of the most creative periods of my entire life.
What is it that contributes to times of heightened creativity? When I look back at that time, go through the notebooks from that time, listen to the cassettes from that time, it’s clear that I had tapped into something which I cannot explain. It was easy, it simply flowed.
Click on this short video:
Follow the camera front the front door to the window just above the arch.
Yes, that room up there. It was tiny, an oversized closet, maybe eight by eight. Deathwish Piano Movers removed the window frame and, with a crane, got my 600-pound Ivers and Pond upright piano into that room.
I woodshedded in that room for hours every day. Practicing, writing, learning.
My first “break”— getting a song signed with Arista Records (above)—was from something I had written in this room.
“Thin places,“ an idea that the poet John O’Donohue popularized, comes from ancient Celtic spirituality. It refers to locations or, even, times of life when the boundary between the earthly and the spiritual, the mundane and the sacred feels “thin” or permeable.
I might describe it another way.
I think there are times and places when the stranglehold that the conscious mind exerts on our thinking is loosened. As it loosens, all the dreams, ideas, intuitive connections that the unconscious is making all the time, rise to the surface.
And you get to pluck them, like fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
Whatever this is—thin place, something else—I can feel my heart ache as I walk down this street. But it is a sweet ache. Not just for the passage of time, not just for the ghosts that still haunt these locations, but in gratitude.
I was young and in love and my job was playing in clubs where my friends could come and drink and laugh and listen to the band I played in. It was a thin time. I was in a thin place.
But here’s the thing with thin places: you can’t create them. It’s out of your hands.
And that’s why most advice on “how to be creative” never works, at least in my estimation. You work, you practice, you wait. That’s it. That’s the formula.
And then, mysteriously, unknowably, the Muse may arrive.
Although my interests in music run well into jazz, Celtic, classical, and even some Japanese music, my taste in popular music is pretty much “pop.” I love a catchy hook, three-part harmony, musicians who can play well, and—the Holy Grail—the well-written 2:30 second pop song.
Sting’s “Fields of Gold” (so exquisitely covered by Eva Cassidy) popped into my TikTok feed the other night. (Yes, TikTok is addictive. I’m working on that)
Here it is by this young band:
They’re called Blackwater Draw (no idea why.) But not only do they sing this well, they each play at least a couple of instruments well (the young kid on fiddle is a phenom.)
Playing here, using the natural reverb of the stairwell, I listening to their harmony, I thought: music is in good hands.
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Thank you for reading! Apologies in advance for typos. (I am a dyslexic proofreader!)
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Loved this John.
Deeply moving piece John . As a creative, I often ponder why am I making this art ? What is its purpose? When I let that thought go I get connected to the process. We are like the root system of the forest, each of us making the connection that will create goodness in our world.