Moving Along & Keeping the Balance

As I continue reviewing and reflecting on my work, I see patterns emerging. Movement and change are regular themes in my music. Just look at some titles, opening lines and hooks of songs, for instance:

chase the sun rise and shine free fallin'

take me back

let's make religion (especially with the sweeping sound/movement)

no reason to stay/change (implied movement)

Movement has been a constant in my life on planet earth. My mother said when I was a baby she refused to let her mother rock me to sleep, because it had 'spoiled' my brother--stopping him from becoming able to go to sleep on his own. She told me I grew a habit of rocking my own self to sleep in the bassinet, skinny little legs in the air. I must have been dancing, or more likely trying to mimic the movement of me in the womb as my mother walked.

Growing up in Jamaica our family moved at least once a year, it seemed to me, though we did stay in Brown's Town about 4 years before moving back to Kingston for my second year of high school. When I went to college, mummy left for secretarial opportunities in the tourism sector (on the opposite end of the island). Again I kept having to move. This was a challenge because my grandmother had given me a piano--a small but surprisingly heavy (about 550 pounds) white Zender.

Overall, I believe moving was good for me. It cured any tendency to hold on to things too tightly, including emotional baggage. When I was leaving one of my favorite flats, up in Beverley Hills, overlooking New Kingston, I wrote this poem:

Moving

Bags and boxes and buckets of questions

sit dustily on our living-room floor

I could pounce--sleek and satisfied

with entrails--or else claim a tooth-for-tooth

and claw my bloodless way

to the rotting core of it

feigning indifference

How now comrade, can I truly disconnect

from the ends of things?

A cast-off shadow,

how would I move, or desire?

A lizard scrambles inside

its unlucky hiding-place.

I am suddenly glad to be free

of its rectilinear dilemma

and in a fit of mercy

upend the silly creature

with its spot-tailed sisters

and leave them

thrashing out their reasons across wind-swept tiles.

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

PS The lizard as a symbol is linked to sun, light, regeneration, and renewal. Lizards are patient, determined, and have the ability to blend in with their surroundings.