Meditation 020 | A Little Window

Thank you for being here for the 20th installment of this newsletter, and a very warm welcome to those who are new — it’s an honor to have you here. Click here to learn more about this project, or explore the archive and listen to the other 19 songs I’ve released here so far.

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🎵 This month’s piece is in C minor.¹

My wife and I are fortunate to be expecting our first baby any day now (!), so I imagine the next few songs will take a similar form — simple-ish piano pieces — as we find our footing.

It’s been raining here for what feels like weeks, but today has broken clear and bright. We’ve been enjoying the soft quiet of spring moving in, slowly, hesitantly, blossoms cautiously opening. I’ve been absorbed in reading poetry — Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Ada Limón, Tess Gallagher, Gregory Orr, William Stafford, Frank O’Hara — and listening to Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal (RIP) on vinyl. In the afternoons I’ve been watching bald eagles soar above the river, sweeping for food, and just this morning I watched a blue heron fly by my window — a good omen if ever there was one.

For this little waltz, I got the main cascading little melody stuck in my head while I was working on it, and I kept coming back to it over and over again. Ultimately, I ended up playing it throughout the piece, creating a sort of echo effect.² The field recordings you hear are from a recent trip to the wilds of central Oregon where we spent a couple of nights among the trees, creeks, and, of course, rain.

📷 I took this month’s photo on film in Mt. Hood National Forest in Oregon.³

I invite you to sit with this month’s 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.

---

A Poem

by Gregory Orr⁴

Knowing life grinds us,
And dust
Is what we’ll become.

Sensing, likewise,
That the moral
Of our story
Has to do
With being mortal.

Yet love grounds us.

And the beloved
Grows in us:
We are her slow cocoon.

And the poem is a door;
The song, a little window.

---

Currently

Reading

• Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins (Powell’s)

• Lincoln in the Bardo by

  George Saunders
  (Powell's)

• Letters from a Stoic by Seneca (as is

  Austin Kleon
  ) (Powell's):

  To be everywhere is to be nowhere

Listening to

• For Sure by Future Islands (Listen)

  • Note: I put all the songs shared in the newsletter into this Spotify playlist

• What have you been listening to? Let me know:

Sharing

• I’ve been fortunate to be featured by The Good Trade on a couple of occasions over the last year or so. For those of you who don’t know, The Daily Good is their short, 30-second newsletter delivered each weekday morning — where you’ll get soothing playlists, sustainable recipes, inspiring articles, and much more.

  

  I’ve been reading the Daily Good for a couple of years now, and I always find it calming and meditative. Check it out and subscribe below:

1. A Little Window in C minor / Written and produced by Fog Chaser / Recorded in Logic Pro

2. Nothing too much of note theory-wise with this piece. Being in the minor key, I do borrow the V7 from the key of C major, which has an B-natural instead of a B-flat, to create a little extra pull to the I (C). But otherwise, it’s a pretty straightforward piece. Questions? Corrections? Lemme know.

3. A Little Window / 35mm film (Fujifilm Superia / ISO 400) / Mt. Hood National Forest, Oregon, USA / Order a print.

4. From “Four Poems”, first published in Image (Iss. 66)