Ep. 14: He Found Himself/Sailing
What are you willing to throw your life away on With Andrew Reed and The Liberation. It's a serious question, one worth pondering. Am I living the life I want, an intelligent life, or something else? How can I have a better experience of life? These are some of the questions explored in this series of messages without the brag and the advertisement.
Speaker 1:Getting beyond even human institutions and society into the wilderness, nature, the reality of how life actually operates on this planet. These messages range from intimate recordings from the awakened forest to concerts, national conferences, and broadcasts on a wide array of philosophical topics.
Speaker 2:This
Speaker 3:is another music podcast, and we're gonna explore songs from the very first album, Search for Significance, and we're gonna talk about He Found Himself and Sailing. Now He Found Himself is really my beginning or my awakening, And you look at the first lyrics in the song, he woke up one day at a traffic light, they say. The thing is, we all have these awakenings in our life. And so often they happen in unplanned and when we're unsuspecting as such as regarding time and place, but they just happen just like in nature, just like the flower blooming. You can't set your watch by it.
Speaker 3:Here I am sitting at a traffic light in reality and going, what kind of life am I living? Living in Australia, I just got off tour in Europe. I married this bombshell. I'm spending at least half my time down under and then the remaining time usually in The United States, And I'm doing my music thing because I had a number of songs that were recorded by American artists as well as Australian artists at that time. And of course, you have to put out the album.
Speaker 3:But I'm running back and forth and it's just wearing me out. And I had purchased the cabin after my first divorce. Of course, I was wiped out, and I got this piece of property that probably no one else would appreciate. It had like 14 broken windows, it had water, mold in the basement. There was graffiti.
Speaker 3:I mean, you could mow and find a car, but I loved that place. This was my hermitage, my retreat. And so with my own two hands, cause I didn't have much money at that time, I fixed it up and of course Daphne helped me and now it's just the most cherished place ever. This is where I'll die. So he found himself.
Speaker 3:It's really my song or my story really in about three and a half minutes. It brings out the philosopher. Thoreau is referenced in the second verse much like Walden's Pond where he goes to isolate to get in touch with himself, to find himself, his true feelings about life. Because, again, this isolation idea is just so critical. I find you've gotta get away from society at some point to be surrounded by the truth, and this has been done by so many shamans, holy people, philosophers, because nature is our master teacher.
Speaker 3:And if we take notice of how it operates, again, the more success, the more life we have, and all of us want to feel alive. And that happens in nature. Third verse, it talks about the natural renewal of nature, that is life and death, up and down, the process of life that we are here today and tomorrow we will not be or at least in the same form. Now the video for He Found Himself is filmed around the cabin so it's all authentic. It's just us going around with the camera.
Speaker 3:So I'm up on top of the mountain in the sun, the wind comes up, blows my hair, and it's just a delightful video. Then, of course, I'll just mention this, Alex and I went back in the studio because we had listened to the original recordings and I thought, you know, I can sing that better. And Alex said, you know, we can add some more orchestration to it and really make it a bit more epic. And so that is what you're hearing here. So without further ado, here is He Found Himself.
Speaker 2:He woke up one day at a traffic light to say, and he wondered how we ever landed here. He packed his bags, but he packed no left his responsibilities. What he left behind wasn't with 1 damn dime he found himself. He's searching for his answers, making sense of life's great mysteries. How he spends his time made a concern of yours and mine he found himself.
Speaker 2:Now many days have passed and the months have turned years and there's not a trace that Henry was ever here. He's been replaced, his name has been erased, yet that figured out the day disappeared. And he did what we all want to. Have the balls legged up on his secret dreams. He's way up high.
Speaker 2:He's riding in the sky. He found himself. He found himself. He found himself.
Speaker 3:Sailing. This is perhaps one of the best songs I feel I've ever written and it's the second song on Search for Significance. It's just got such majestic imagery. This idea of going through the water, which is so beautiful, and the fact that we're on a journey and it is a journey song. So many of my songs tend to be journey songs because in essence that's what it's about, riding on the waves with the wind upon my face.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's how it feels to be on the ocean. Although sometimes when it's raining and blowing, it feels like BB's hitting your face. But riding on the waves with the wind upon my face, the sun sets in the distance off my bow. Sailing as a sea might be the way it ends for me, but it doesn't really matter now somehow. And so here we have the sailor just happy to be on the journey going towards a destination, but there's this element of risk that things could go bad.
Speaker 3:But the point is we're all throwing our lives away every day even when we're trying to conserve it, even when we're trying to play it safe or live cautiously. Your life is being fritted away moment by moment. And, you know, a lot of people, they're looking for meaning in life but life is its own answer. Life is its own reward. You already have it.
Speaker 3:And so that's really the zen of this song. I remember it came to me. I was living in Australia. I'd come off this European tour. I'd married this beautiful woman and was living half the time down in Australia and I was way out in the bush and along the coastline and again sand dune so large and numerous you could get lost in it and I kept thinking about all my years on the ocean, on this violent beautiful thing that's so big that it makes you feel miniature, that can swallow a man, a ship, a city up without hesitation and not even feel it.
Speaker 3:So I was thinking about Alaska and this song just popped out and it was just like magic and I thought this is this is what life is really about. It is the journey. Life is its own reward. And then there's the line or the second stanza, I built her for myself and with care she carries me out of reach of the worries of the land. I put her in the yard once when some glitter caught my sail and I found myself far from where I planned.
Speaker 3:And here the ship takes on almost a human characteristic. We consider the ship or the vessel alive, thus we give the ship a name just like you might do your car or like I do with my guitars. And this has to do with my suspicion that all things are alive, that all things vibrate and thus should be held in some reverence given respect because your life is in quote the hands of that ship or vessel. And then of course back in town I noticed that the weather changed and all my maps and plans were washed away. As they are so often in life, we can have all of our visions, our plans, and we need a vision, we need a destination.
Speaker 3:I mean even though we're talking about the journey itself, we've got to have that motivation that drives us forward. So that's critical, that's important. But to postpone happiness till a future date and time is ridiculous. Why not watch the islands go by? Why not enjoy the wildlife?
Speaker 3:Why not experience the storms full on and say I have lived? And then we come to the chorus which is very significant and there's a lyrical statement. I'm heading for shore that may not be there anymore but I don't mind. I'm sailing so any shore is fine. So great emphasis what on the journey.
Speaker 3:That's the forgotten aspect. But obviously we still need the destination. We need the vision. We need the port that we're going to to give us motivation. So really it's another one of those both things in life where you have the destination.
Speaker 3:That's great but you have the journey and really perhaps they're equal. And then you get to the very end of the song. And I'm sailing so any destination is just fine. So really whatever course in life, whatever destination we have is probably sufficient as long as we're enjoying the scenery, enjoying the ride. And perhaps this is the real art of living.
Speaker 3:Now the videos for this song were shot in Super eight during the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties by my uncle Chuck. And really a lot of my family's in it. There's uncle Chuck, there's uncle Earl, there's uncle Wally. Of course, uncle Chuck and uncle Earl pretty much settled the town of Anchor Point, Alaska. But you get a vision into the past before Alaska was a state and you see kind of how rough and gritty it was and that these were real pioneers in every sense of the word and how we would work twenty hours a day and we would destroy that boat trying to make the money in a short period of time, tearing up gear, busting lines, working with some of the roughest characters you can imagine, loggers, killers.
Speaker 3:You never knew where these people were coming from. And it was just a very exciting time, but you get a glimpse into that. And of course I get to be in a few of these, the late seventies and early eighties when I was growing up, when I started at 15 working up there. And of course we could handle 18 tons of fish a day and there's salmon fishing, there's images of herring fishing depending on the season. You get a real glimpse into some history here.
Speaker 3:So with that said, let's go sailing.
Speaker 2:Riding on the waves with the wind upon my face. The put her in the odd ones when some glitter caught my sail. And I found myself far from where I planned. Becking down, I Riding on the waves with the wind above my face, storm clouds in the distance off my bow. Maybe I might be another
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. If you need anything further, just go to mbi.life.