Meditation | 008

Thank you for being here for the eighth installment of this newsletter.

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Getting the chance to send these new songs to you every month is a gift.

April arrives, forcing everything into bright bloom — seemingly the opposite of grief, and yet for all the feelings of renewal, I find grief reemerging like a leaf bud. For now, I’ll wait for it to flourish and ripen until it becomes just another part of the landscape, blended into the sun-bleached haze of summer.

Is it a new grief when it returns? Or is it the same grief, just rocking a new outfit? I was thinking on this when I serendipitously stumbled across this month’s poem, The Trees, by Philip Larkin.

🎵 This month’s song is in F-sharp minor.

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I really wanted to keep this one simple, like last month’s piece, and it was very meditative to write. I limited myself to piano, a touch of bass, and a little ambient noise. (Special thanks to Chad from Sun Rain — one of my favorite musicians and inspirations for wanting to write instrumental music — for recommending the main instrument used in this song).

📷 Today’s visual is an overexposed photo I took on film in Big Bend National Park in West Texas.

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I’m not entirely sure what happened to give it this feel — this is unedited — but I love how these happy accidents come about when you shoot on film.

I invite you to sit with this song, photo, and poem and make them a small part of your day, whether that’s your morning ritual, afternoon break, or your evening wind-down.

As always, if you feel like it, let me know what you think in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.

Thank you again for being here — hold fast to your hope.

A Poem

The Trees

by Philip Larkin (from High Windows, 1974)

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Currently

Admiring

• Tupac Shakur (YouTube)

Reading

• In the Cafe of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano (Powell’s)

Listening to

• I’m Alright In The World by BC Camplight (Spotify / Apple / Bandcamp)

  • Reminder: I’m putting all the songs shared in the newsletter into this Spotify playlist

• Everybody’s Hustling by the talented — and hilarious — Lail Arad, aka Foggy Notions (right here on Substack)

• I’ve created a few Spotify playlists for folks to follow who might be interested in discovering more instrumental music:

  • Spring Meadow

  • Fall & Winter

  • The Writing Hour

1. If you’re wondering whether or not there is any rationale to the order of these songs, I promise you there is. I’m making my way around “the circle of fifths” in music, which basically places the most closely related key signatures next to one another in a visual format.

This just provides a logical order for me to move in, so that’s what I’m doing — following the well-traveled path of musicians before me who have written pieces in all 24 musical keys. For more, check out my about page.

2. Florescence in F-sharp minor / Recorded in Logic Pro / Written, recorded, and produced by Fog Chaser

3. 35mm film (Fujifilm Superia / ISO 400) / Big Bend National Park, West Texas / Available as a print