We are humanity. Opt-In music video.

Thank you

First, let me say thank you to all my friends, family, and fans. You continue to encourage me in creating this album. With the release of this video for the second-to-last song for “Dream This”, the goal of the whole album seems clearly within reach. Thank you so much!

Second, it is with a heart full of love that I say thanks again to the chorus, individuals, and groups of friends who provided recordings of their voices for the crowdsourced choir. You sound awesome and this would not have been the same song without your help. In your gift, you exemplify the spirit of generosity that I long to see in all of humanity. My deepest appreciation to you!

Humanity is cool

My longing to be part of humanity reaching its best possible presence has led me to change a lot of behaviors over the years. Above everything, I seek to live with integrity, understanding and sharing love in whatever ways I can.

While I continue to reach for these goals, there is much in life that seems trivial and occasionally useless. That seeming futility I represent in this video as mowing the lawn. So many of us do this repetitive chore knowing that very soon we will have to do it again. And even something as common as this is a choice. We could let our yards fill with weeds or we could replace them with anything else: stones, gardens, tile mosaics, or whatever.

Humanity is finite

Rainer Maria Rilke has this to say about our humanity in his Ninth Dunio Elegy:

…how much sorrow and grief become pure

in the end, serve as something, or die into something, and blissfully

escape beyond the sound of the violin. And these things of the world

that live only a short time know that you’re praising them;

transients, they want us to preserve them, and we’re the most transient

of all. They want us to take them inside our invisible hearts

and transform them into ourselves–whatever it is we finally are.

Reminders of the fact we’re only here for a relatively short time are everywhere. Change in all of its human forms stays right in front of us: health issues, aging, job loss, and so on. The list seems endless at times. But we don’t need to let this be the core of our being. The symbols for this in the video will be obvious as you view it.

Humanity

The call of this song — like the “message” of the falcon in some cultures — is to rise above this sense of futility. We can choose to see our lives in ways that are beyond that. For me, part of this choice has been to direct my attention to gratitude, creativity, and kindness.

What are the ways you have had a brighter sense of your humanity? How can we optimize our living in the time we have? Thanks for your support and feedback.

This song makes a reference to fuzzy logic and the video includes two quotes about it that may be difficult to read in the short time they’re on the screen. Obviously, you can pause the video and read them, but here they are for your reading enjoyment:

Humans have a remarkable capability to reason and make decisions in an environment of uncertainty, imprecision, incompleteness of information, and partiality of knowledge, truth and class membership. The principal objective of fuzzy logic is formalization/mechanization of this capability. (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Fuzzy_logic)

“Fuzzy theory is wrong, wrong, and pernicious. What we need is more logical thinking, not less. The danger of fuzzy logic is that it will encourage the sort of imprecise thinking that has brought us so much trouble. Fuzzy logic is the cocaine of science.” -Professor William Kahan (UC Berkeley)