Summer Mix 2009
Summer.
A time of activity, growth, and learning. A season of extremes, physicality, and healing. A moment of quickness, hurried passions, and attempts to emulate the wild chaos of the natural world in its life-throws. Through the haze of our seasonal Alzheimer’s, it is during the summer that we suddenly remember the massive white globe that hangs above us, floating horizon to horizon. We are all sunshine - consumed, processed, canned, and consumed again. You, me, those people over there - all pure photon energy.
And what of the psychological pattern responsible for “summer mania?” There will always be that dark, cold secret of winter tugging daily at our consciences, throwing our systems into overdrive; a frenzied rush to the end. Knowledge that triggers a need to expend and expel all the euphoric energy of our selves before the seasonal binary flips us upside down, into a snow globe of introverted waiting and wanting. But we only follow her example, mother Earth’s, running into July fresh with the vigor of long days and late-evening sunsets….speeding into August rabid with sunlight, sweat dripping off our faces, muscles tan and taught…..stumbling as we charge on into September, evolved into some strange biological form, over-laden and bulbous, waiting for a passerby to notice our beauty, devour our fruits, and look up at the waning sun…..
As I watched this mix export, the little yellow bar slowly approaching %100 in Ableton, I took a moment to sit back and breath in, deep. My windows wide open, the fan blowing cool, humid air laced with the remnant scents of charcoal grill and mid-season flower gardens, I realized that it is July 3rd already. Another year gone past.
In the summer of 2004 I was the driver in a car accident in which a very close friend of mine died. Since then, I have subconsciously charted the progress of time with that date as a starting point. Now, five years later, I still find myself anxious around the 3rd. Time seems to rush by a little faster, the linear pathways in my mind a little less linear. I never know quite what to do with these feelings, or whether asking “what should I do?” is a healthy way of approaching the situation. I remember clearly the day after the accident, watching fireworks with my family in Saint Peter. Each explosion in the sky shook me like an abrupt waking from a bad dream; the drop in your stomach and that sudden clarity of vision before falling back asleep. But I could not fall back asleep - I still haven’t. As pieces of firework ignited the smokey-black summer sky a kaleidoscope of burning colors, I was overcome by the sheer force and velocity of change in life. Up until then I had never considered how sudden we all are, how brief each moment can be. The firework is a eery metaphor for this sensation. Carefully constructed, wrapped in paper, packaged and sent out to be purchased by someone with an image or effect in mind, arrayed and prepared, and then in the blinking of an eye the fuse crackles, the mortar pops, and there is this moment of weightlessness, of silence, and everyone knows something is about to happen. And just before you blink, color and flame and energy explode into the atmosphere, oxygen igniting bits of magnesium and copper….light and patterns and for a split second everyone’s imagination is consumed with the shape of that brief creation. The deafening boom that follows adds emphasis to the display, as if to remind us, at the peak of our amazement, that “this too shall pass.”
Have I peered too intensely into this simple American celebration? Sure, if thats the way you want to see the world, go for it. But I will never look at reality the same way, as I did before June 3rd, 2009. I tried, let me tell you…. I went relatively crazy for a while doing so. You cannot deny the force of change in life when you have felt the full brunt of its brutal energy. Many people become depressed or full of anxiety when confronted with the true speed of reality, scared to dive deeply into anything or anyone for fear of losing that connection. Many others turn to religion and faith, letting the safety blanket of a higher power keep them warm at night. But none of this is truly comforting, there always remains a nagging unhappiness with your lot in the world. If you cannot let yourself love fully, why love at all? If you have to rely on faith to get you through the day, what happens at the end of the road, when you are left to confront this imagination as reality? Will you still keep the faith? And so the question still remains, what does one do with this knowledge? How should we walk through reality in comfort knowing that life is transitory?
Well, lately I have been looking upwards for answers. To the sun.
The embodiment of life’s brief but beautiful place in the universe, the sun is the omnipresent but often ignored spiritual center of our lives. If you consider the life span of the sun on the infinite scale of time itself, the billions of human years in which the sun burns is just blip on the radar screen, a split second of combustion and atomic energy. Its momentary existence is just a larger, more flammable, reflection of our own place in the scheme of things. Like the human physical, mental, and emotional radiation into space, the sun emits energy as well - pure photon energy - and does so without thinking why or what of it. It has given birth to life, love, and intelligence. And in the end, the sun will take all of that away, in one final, fiery cataclysm. The sun is truly the original human deity.
For our ancestors, living in direct contact with the land, the sun was the obvious creator of life. When the sun shone strongest and the days grew long, life abounded and food was plentiful. In the winter, when the sun dipped low around the horizon, the air grew colder, plants died or went dormant. The sun dictated the lives of everyone and everything, and so we created temples to the sun (Stonehenge, Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, ancient religious sites in India, Japan, China…. the list goes on and on) to honor and potentially influence its presence. As we learned to emulate the sun, with fire and later electricity, our reliance perceptively diminished. Over thousands of years we slowly grew more confident without the sun as a central figure in our spiritual lexicon and today, we find ourselves in a state of almost complete solar-denial. The sun has been stripped of its ethereal robes and broken into mechanical parts. We peer into the sun like a skin sample in a petri dish, looking for signs of illness or irregularity. We deny ourselves sunlight in the name of work and money, and demonize it in the name of health and safety. Most importantly our religions have come to deny or skew the sun-deity in favor of intangible, often destructive gods and prophets of asceticism and blind faith. Our ancestors’ spirituality didn’t require “faith.” The sun was obvious. Its presence was felt the moment you entered the world to the moment you left it. The sun was not some dictatorial creator, granting wishes and eternal life to the faithful. It was a silent, infinitely intelligent and powerful force, an energy to be respected and honored.
But in today’s world, with our knowledge of the sun’s biology, the temporal span of life and, ultimately, the universe itself, the sun has lost its omnipotent shine. We categorize and sterilize the things we fear most in life and the sun has not been spared. It hangs like a massive lightbulb above our heads, threatening to burn out at any second. And so we view it like any other threatening disease or organism. Our fear is irrational and has de-throned the sun from its rightful place in our collective consciousness. We too are just as transitory as the sun. No being is infinite, only time itself and the fractal of possibility that binds everything together can claim rights to that verb. The sun is still the center of our lives, the great giver and taker of life - we have simply stopped seeing it as one in the same as us. WIthout it, we would not survive. Why should we now, after all these years, stop worshipping the sun? Even with our scientific knowledge of its physical nature, there remains the simple fact that without its mysteriously enigmatic photon energy, we would not exist. It is the creator, the alpha and the omega, the one and only, god of sun.
Sun worship is simple. Go outside, look up. Do not question what you see. Do not think about the way you see. Just let the sun into your consciousness. In times of great fear or sadness, look up. Remind yourself that you are not the center of this reality. See that the sun is you, and you are the sun. In times of great happiness and empathy, look up. Revel in the feelings made possible by the sun’s energy. Soak in its rays and practice pure photon mindfulness. In places where you cannot see the sun, close your eyes and envision your field of vision full of the sun’s light. Let it wash over your thoughts, your breathing, your anxieties and your fears. Let it remind you of your five senses and the infinitude of stimuli around you. Find light in the darkness.
With this mix I have focussed on re-energizing the sun deity through a combination of music and quotes picked from a number of seemingly random but ultimately interconnected sources. Sun worship is alive and well today, you just have to stop searching for it, and look up.
‘Back From Where We Came’
01. Mylo - Sunworshipper
02. Rae Davis - Pyramids
03. Quantic - Sound Of Everything
04. Jef Stott - Funky Nawari (Drumspyder’s Midnight Snack Wrap Up)
05. Static Revenger - Happy People (Christian J. Rhodes Mix)
06. Supreme Beings Of Leisure - Sublime
07. Suphala - Transport
08. DJ Vadim - Talk To Me ft Sena
09. Laird & John Pickett - Ohhhh Ma Ma Ma
10. Roy Ayers - Everybody Loves The Sunshine (9th Wonder Remix)
11. Bob Marley & The Wailers - Don’t Rock My Boat (Stuhr Remix)
12. Yoshinori Sunahara - Spiral Never Before
13. Flying Lotus - Melt!
14. Stolen Identity - Hey (Omganic Mix)
15. Röyksopp - Eple (Original Edit)
16. Mr. Projectile - Sinking
17. Fisk Industries - On Thursday
**Audio quotes, in order of appearance: Swami Manasa Datta, George Carlon, Neal Conan, Paul Rao, DeeperThanTheSea reading from Robert Louis Stevensen’s “Summer Sun”, Logan Phillips reading from “The Sun Said Shine.”
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