As we currently juggle the endless array of micro-details associated with the now very concerning scheduling issues and the increasingly alarming uncertainty for everyone involved in our upcoming series of communal concerts, which have erupted following yesterday’s Air Canada strike/lockout (which happens to be the airline we are flying with in just a couple of days), I decided to completely shut every possible exterior distraction down, so my heart can solely focus on the High Blooming Ritual tour spirit.
To do so, I’m still in the “furnace of intangibles” with the band, allowing myself to soulfully suffer from the scorching motion of my deep-diving intentionality towards the tour’s specific nature. Some songs are already brightly vibrating all over me… others are blazingly radiating within me.
Each rehearsal brings new emotional layers, additional colorful tints, and newborn perspectives to the flowing sonorities we are abandoning ourselves into, to every single word we consumingly embody with every scream and whisper, as if the songs’ inspirational sensations were being widely magnified by our willingness to surrender to their outflowing, vivid restoration, transforming us, personally and as a unit, a little more with each song’s incarnation, getting closer and closer to the invisible source of light we can now sense with our eyes closed, which makes all sensations burgeoning inside more significantly real with each letting go, with each leap of faith.
While it’s incredibly moving, it’s not easy... Not for me, at least, it isn’t.
Revisiting the highly personal pieces of poetry these songs have been formed from or have emerged from is quite an affective challenge for me. It would be much easier to simply stick to the songs’ initial shape and form, to act upon the term “repetition” rather than engulf my heart in the necessary deconstruction/reconstruction of my creative process… I could have performed them distantly and unengaged rather than inhibiting my soul through their liberating stream.
It’s truly spiritually exhausting, especially when I had to corporeally approach the song Snowflakes in July…
“A box, some ashes…” Those few words resonated like a sledgehammer in my whole body and soul, like having to descend into the abyss where I had confined the deeply intimate feelings associated with my father’s last “official” goodbye… They entirely choked me emotionally. It was like reliving, and reliving, and reliving again that self-indexed movie reel frame by frame, in slow motion, over and over again. I felt heavily dizzy, as if I was about to be sick.
It was distressingly demanding for me to even look at the dense and explicit lyrical identity of what ended up being known as Snowflakes in July to everyone else.
This song had another hidden title for a very long time. And the lyrics were essentially an excerpt from a much more extensive and emphatically dense text I wrote about one of the bleakest instants of my existence... Losing my father made me face mortality in an excessive type of somber and solemn way, nothing compared to what I ever imagined it would be before. And the underlying truth logically led to the conclusion that I was the next in line, the last of my bloodline, which was unbearable at best.
I know it was probably irrational — still is — but it shook my entire foundation, as if everything I thought was rock solid and settled for a long time wasn’t anymore… Who was I? What was my purpose? What would I leave behind? How would my story be summarized? Who would define the rights from my wrongs? What would I mean after? Would I mean anything at all?
It was as if my father’s presence had been holding together everything I didn’t want to address in my life… And suddenly, with him gone, I was left to face it all. Too busy was I trying to prolong the summer of my youth past the adulthood threshold… I never wanted that type of “conventional” journey. But suddenly, I had to deal with the fact that its “time” reality was now chasing me, hunting me, haunting me, after his passing.
That oppressive pursuit only ended when I eventually had to face the prospect of my own death and the troubling verisimilitude that came with surviving.
Playing Snowflakes in July brought it all back to me in one enormous wave of extreme disruption the second I heard the subtle rumbling sound of the first guitar slide Ben played in the song’s reconstructed intro. I wasn’t able to sing it initially… I was spitting the words out convulsively and far too fast. I didn’t like the arrangements, thought it was too slow, then too rushed, I was over singing the words, couldn’t hold a proper note, got lost in the sections, was vocally raging when the intangible tone wasn’t directing me in that direction… I was totally out of sync. Both psychologically and spiritually…
At some point, I had to pause, to regroup. I was losing it, in grand, catastrophic style.
Ben even came beside me to calmly reassure me: “Just live it, brother… And if you don’t feel it, we don’t even have to play the song. It’s okay. You don’t owe that song to anyone but you. And you don’t have to explain what’s going on if you don’t want to.”
Of course he was right. And while true, the point wasn’t about what I could or couldn't do. It was about what I wanted to share with others or not, how deep I was willing to go, how vulnerably I wanted to expose myself, how disposed I was to painfully bear my emotions in order to commune with you all… That was the whole point.
And it’s precisely because I can do whatever I want that I know I have to immerse myself deeper and deeper. That I wanted to tear out the liberation curtain I had refused to rip for years.
That is the key element of the transitional phase I am in. I cannot look into my recent battle with death until I’ve made peace with my father’s one. I could, in theory… But enfranchisement doesn’t operate in a theoretical realm. I want to be free, no longer pretend that I am. Not anymore.
And I know that a major part of that freedom passes through what Snowflakes in July is about… for me.
I guess we’ll have to wait for the tour to know how those emotions will unravel for real…
Life Creates Life
Your Brother and Friend,
Alex
PS: Having found just enough emotional balance to keep going, I later asked Stephanie to film a short excerpt of the song’s rehearsal as a form of deliberate taunting gesture towards death itself, but even more so, as a resolute embrace of the freedom I choose to be… life!
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