Micro Essay 1: "Peace Piece"
Welcome to a new thing. Inspired by Yard Dragon's Tiny Essays (yarddragon.substack.com) I submit my own version.
“Peace Piece”
Bill Evans Trio
Everybody Digs Bill Evans, 1958
Outside a raging tempest is brewing. Inside, in the shadow of books and house plants Bill plays softly.
Just a dot and a dash. Melodies in search of the right space, the right placement on just the right beat. It’s a meditative wondering—a butterfly sputtering for six minutes in the same key as the rhythm hand. Old books seem to melt into the piano notes.
Today is my brother’s birthday. And while he is a world away, grey creeping on his temples, I remember the little kid running around our parent’s house. That was a million years ago. He broke some bones since then. So have I. Age does not bring wisdom, it would seem. Experience does. But what does anyone really know?
I can build IKEA furniture faster than the average Swede. But I know nothing of making a chair. Anyone man can sire a child. It takes work to be a father. Anyone can call themselves a strong leader, but good leaders never do.
That tempest I mentioned, it seems unstoppable. As most storms are. We are bound to the rules of nature, no matter how strong we are and no matter how removed we become from the natural place of wonder we begin. Fires will rage on and purge as they are meant to. And the wind will blow. And mountains will crumble and rivers dry up. And all will seem desolate and helpless at times. Then hope will rise. And with it, new rivers and new mountains. There will be new trees to replace the ash. These are the cycles of our nature, the mother. What we never can see—the perspective we so often miss—is how big time is, and where we are in a cycle.
Earlier this evening, I was thinking of a feeling I once had. It’s that feeling you get when you’re sitting around a fire with friends talking, drinking the night away and you have a playlist of your favorite songs on the bluetooth speaker. At some point in a lull in the conversation, your crush, sitting across from you, compliments your playlist. I suppose somewhere in the middle of that feeling is validation. It’s acceptance as well, but mostly, it’s hope. It’s a dangerous, wonderful drug to dream of what it would be like to have all the things you want.
Experience has taught me the truth and what I hear echo and echo is “be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.”
Rage on dear tempest. You cannot touch my peace tonight. It’s built on fluttering notes skimming across a Cmaj7, G9sus4 foundation.