_{Reflecting on Love is a Place as a concept album about my experience during the COVID-19 quarantine}

STREAM: YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Music
BUY the CD.

It took a while to master the album because it was my first time mastering anything and that learning curve is steep. The process took place during the lockdown. There’s a way that these tracks help me remember and reflect some of my experiences of COVID. I acknowledge I am fortunate enough not to have personally known the sort of tragedy that others have known.

1. Creature Cry.  COVID hits.  Who is affected?  How do we care for each other? The reach and depth of our concern.  Human infrastructures (economies, technologies, institutions and their values) envelope the life systems on earth.  Will that envelope be loving?
2. Excess of Blessings.  No toilet paper.  The odd first wave.  The feeling that It’s here.  
3. Christmas this Year.  Makes me wonder: what is Christmas really about?  Toilet paper ran out because of breakdowns in supply chains.  We depend on a global system, but we know almost nothing about the people making that system function. What are we contributing to when everything comes from abroad? So many externalities…who can throw their hands in the air and forfeit responsibility?
4. Pilgrim’s First Step.  Going to the store is dramatized.  Going outside becomes a major event.
5. Space Between Mountains.  The difficulty of being cut off from those we love.
6. How to Make Love Stay?  This, too, is about love.  Where do we live these days?  Where, how are you?
7. It was Always in Me.  Finding the good again in the dynamic Ground of Being.
8. Fools Wait for Perfect, and Who is not Sometimes the Fool.  Had we been holding something back?  Are we waiting for something?  What world do we want to land back into?
9. Homestead Life.  It’s just you and me.
10. I’m This, I’m That.  Forced into isolation, forced to learn.
11. Apocatastasis, part 2 [“reconstitution of a primordial state”]  Go back to the source.  You must. Yes, through the dark.
12. Philosophy.  With kids.  A reminiscence of an elementary class I subbed for in Washington.  Gives me hope to remember the natural way kids learn.
13. Place.  There is nowhere outside this. Where can you go?  Surrender. This is it.
14. Story 2.  What is our next story?  What is your next story?  What is on the other side of this?  Of all this?  And how would you proceed?
15. Natural Law.  Some things are immutable.  What can be changed and what cannot?