Music for Earth and Spirit Podcast

Hello Friends, This is a personal letter. I already vented about my new West Coast situation. It’s all doing fine, actually. The vaguest suggestion of rain happened yesterday, the only precipitation in the month I’ve been here. I’m surrounded by opportunities to exercise, and that was a big factor in the choice of this community, but that exercise bicycle I had back in Massachusetts didn’t get use...

I’ve never felt ready to talk about spiritual beliefs, my own, anyway. Belief in a deity, or not, is such a controversy for humans, polarizing. That bearded old man in the sky is too much a stretch for me, and I think maybe for most people. But buying into that poetic image gives us a personification that’s hard to let go of, and hard to say it’s something else. What then? OK here’s a try. If it’s...

I’ve been saying to friends there’s no excuse for this. But maybe there is; humor it seems is under attack. I try to be funny at the right moments, and I have descended to this level at times. Ordinarily, I try to write songs and poetry that will last. On rare occasions I have tossed off a song taken from the daily news and I’ve had a sort of policy to sing it only once, at whatever concert it was...

I’m calling my First Wednesday concert for May 6 “Harmony,” because we need it. Maybe a song of gratitude can help heal our current political, cultural and emotional angst. Everywhere I’m going lately, I’m saying we can’t be divided. But first: I’m going to tell you the end of this right in the beginning, taking a cue from Caity Weaver, a wonderful writer who I discover is a staff writer for Atlan...

In 1970 I was riding the bus with the Army Band, reading Life Magazine, I believe it was. Pictures of rivers foaming with detergent, and perhaps the one that caught on fire framed the announcement of the first Earth Day. It was not a light family celebration, that first one, it was activist. I went the Earth Day celebration, I think in College Park MD, and read about others. On that Army bus, I wr...

Something is happening. Not sure what yet. Words like “transition” sound trite, shallow. After marveling at Boston Harbor and then Baltimore Harbor and a view of what was once a bridge and will be again, I’m starting to write this in Thurgood Marshall Airport. In the midst of the mess our criminal occupant is making of the world, I’m negotiating a personal uprooting – again. My grownup son and I h...

When we get through the destruction of democracy and poisoning of the world, and I believe we will, how will this all go down in history? I am an optimist and I think we will survive this attack on humanity. I see the glass half full, in process. Then there are those pessimists who say half empty. Then there is the government, who sometimes says the glass was too big in the first place. (I know, t...

I had some skin taken off my nose, and have a big bandage - facial recognition doesn’t work. That leaves me glad to spend some time at home, no gigs this week, catching up with travel plans and finally filling out Google Calendar. Here we are in this context of harvest (and our privilege) in the midst of such inequality, corrupt leadership and an unsustainable war on our life support system. I won...

There are four sheet music versions of this song available to paid subscriber in the Library section of my Substack - you can find them here I’ve discovered that there are a lot of versions of my song “The Oneness of Everything” online, on YouTube. It’s kind of an adventure, going through different musicians’ takes on what I have written down. It’s probably not my place to say I’ve been culturally...

(This recording captures Jim in a house concert in Wisconsin during his September tour.) Everybody loves the hero’s journey stories (in the end). You know, “It was hard, dangerous, scary, but I made it - to the prize” - winning the race, maybe even finding peace - all those good things, happy endings. But reflections on the journey while in the middle of it all? “Things are hard” – well, that’s ju...

For some time, I had been thinking I needed a good gathering song for all the church services I played for, mostly at Unitarian Universalist (we call it UU) churches. The phrase “gather the spirit” was something that had lurked in my head, and it was something I talked about, that this word “spirit” was not something “woo-woo,” but quite down to Earth. It’s how you’re feeling, it’s what’s happenin...

Hard to see it as anything short of evil. It feels as though I’m witnessing what will be the eventual death of Earth, or maybe just humanity. A big, armored case I have, for some electronic equipment, has been padded inside by what’s now 40-year-old foam rubber plastic that used to be solid foam. But it is decaying, dissolving. It’s horrible stuff. A handful of it is at first like angel food cake,...

This past Wednesday August 6th, in Worcester by Lake Quinsigamond, we held a vigil, commemoration, memorial, expression of remorse - and a resolve to make a more peaceful world. I sang this beautiful and poignant song by Rev. Fred Small. I left out a verse (sorry Fred) but the message is there. The culture of war and its profiteers has been around a long time before some current administration. We...

This song and talk is from the “Good Trouble” rally in Northborough, Massachusetts on July 17 2025. Also a reminder that I will be doing a special live stream concert tonight (Wednesday, July 23) at 8PM EDT in my usual places. The theme is “In Our Hands - Holding Peace in Divided Times”. YouTube Channel Facebook personal page Facebook musician page I am waiting in the silence I am waiting for the...

This is a post July 4th 2025 message. There’s a lot of them out there, and I’m going to try not to repeat what all the pundits are saying. We need to stand up to the theft of democracy, equality, justice. And we need to stand up to the criminal, that we all know is a criminal, and to the men in the shadows. This is taking us apart, division, confusion, adrenaline of anger, cynicism, fatalism. The...

(Sheet music in various formats is available for paid subscribers, and can be found here. ) With the Paul Winter Consort I was a part of creating a big choral work called the Missa Gaia/Earth Mass . James Lovelock had recently written his book the “Gaia Hypothesis” He used this Greek goddess Gaia, kind of a Mother Earth figure, to personify for us the idea that the Earth is one living thing. There...

I live on Federal Highway 20, more or less, and I’ve lived near it before. It goes from Boston across America to Newport OR. I’ve experienced pretty much the full extent of it in my traveling years. If you look it up, Wikipedia will tell the story West to East, through Oregon, Idaho, Montana. But the real history is, coming from the East, it stopped at Yellowstone Park in Wyoming and only years la...

Okay, you can see I got my “weapon of melodic dissertation” here. Now - so it was April 6th, (I got my notes). Reverend Shuttlesworth and 45 people kneel at City Hall, they're arrested. April 7th, 1963, 65 people led by A.D. King, Martin Luther King's brother, get arrested. April 8th, 85 people arrested. April 9th, 130 people arrested. Soon there's a thousand people in jail, and the business owner...

Given the events going on now and our feelings of disempowerment, maybe now turning to motivation, I recall a period and place in America where a similar “law of the land” denied people’s very humanity. Where power and violence were used to keep people oppressed, there came a breaking point, and it woke up the country, including me. In the spring of ’63 Rev Fred Shuttleworth perhaps started it all...

Hello, friends. I'm enjoying my new house, still a bit disorganized, here in Wayland, Massachusetts. Welcome as well to my new communications on Substack. I guess I'll sit in front of this bookcase, one of three that have mostly music, classical, jazz, folk, popular music that I love. I hope to share with you though, primarily the music I've made. And there's poetry and stories that are not necess...