The next day, I decided to try recording whatever it was by just opening myself to it. A 'song' did come. It was acapella and a jumble of lyrics that didn't quite cohere. I repeated the process the next day with similar results. (Both sessions can found in the vault.)

However, over the next several channeling sessions, the lyrics began to settle down, but the subject remained uncertain. The opening lyrics were philosophical, almost poetic.

---

Oh where is the man, the man in the moon
if you stop to think it through?
And where does the sun the sun go to
when you blink your eyes too long?

And where does the deer run to escape
the headlights of our cars?
We call it away, but what is that and where is that?
Or is it all just a dream?

---

Now I knew what the deer was about at least. It was a metaphor for wildlife. Not that great a metaphor as deer populations often benefit from the ways humans alter the landscape. But still, points for literary effort. Then the song took a darker turn.

---

When you find your forest home flattened
and you find your water poisoned
And you find your brother killed

Where do you go?

Where do you turn? where do you run?
Where is away? Where is that heaven?

And when the truth so slowly but
so finally dawns,
how do you warn, warn the others...

it's no longer there!

---

Now I knew the title and theme too. Away is no longer there, a four-part song posing questions about our relationship to the environment. With the deer as wildlife metaphor established in the first two parts, the last two parts essentially put the same questions unto humans in the context of the environmental challenges of that time. It ended with a rousing "we can do it together . . . maybe!"

---

For these are the questions we must ask
If we are to see our way through
Past the ills that we have wrought
to a future safe and green.

To the future of our children,
grandchildren after that. For those are the
stakes, make no mistake, but it's not
too late to turn it around. . .

If enough of us care to see the light
If enough of us care to see it right
If enough of care to set it right

There's probably hope. . .

for us and the deer,
and all this precious Earth.

---

I jest, well only sort of. It was a pretty song with a radical message. Sort of. For its day. But seen from now, the song reflected its times and its channel at that time. There was a hopeful naivety to environmental messaging in those days because . . . well, it seemed there had been an awakening by the general public, and all that was needed was a better angels approach.

Rah! Rah!

But paper (even when it's made of plastic or binary digits) beats better angels. Everytime. And did.

---

Not a digression, but . . .

A core part of the origin story is that I was living in Edmonton at the time and working as a producer-director at ACCESS NETWORK, Alberta's then educational television service. Through 'happenstance', I had come to focus on producing environment-related programs, and was working on a short classroom video about the need to conserve wildlife habitat. It was a co-production with the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS).

---

Sometime after Away started channeling, when I had the main body of the lyrics and song in hand, I experienced a sudden realization that the four parts of the song could provide the structure and theme for that wildlife video. I could see and hear it so clearly, but there was no way my home-recorded version of the song could be used to take it forward as a proposal to CWS. Gulp. I would have to get a demo made by a real musician and singer.

My first wife Leanne introduced me to Sandy Middleton, a folkish musician she'd met through volunteering at the University of Alberta radio station. Sandy and I agreed that he would arrange and sing a demo of Away. He did, with just voice and guitar. I took it to CWS, they liked the song and the program concept, and it was agreed to go forward.

---

Now Sandy became the producer, Wilf Kozub (a keyboardist I'd worked with on background music for another program) was hired and Sandy split up the singing duties for the four parts of the song. Sandy sang part 3 but another singer, Dawn Fraser, sang parts 1, 2 and 4. The song was recorded and mixed in the studio at the university radio station.

I am still amazed at how well the song I had channeled with my limited musical skills could be taken by real musicians and singers and turned into a real song. Watching and listening as it made that transition was a highlight of that first channeling phase.

---

To use the song in the program, we essentially created it as a music video first, and then chopped it into its (carefully planned) parts. That's the version seen here. (The program itself was called A Place for Wildlife and, yes, the client was very happy with it.)

---

---

I don't remember when I first laid the spokesong version of Away against Yanni's November Sky. I don't recall a 'magic' or eureka moment. But once I started placing the existing lyrics into Yanni's music, I found a rough fit in the structures of the two songs so I began working on it, expecting that the original lyrics would remain largely intact.

But I was wrong. Past the opening verse, the lines started changing. The lyrics about deer were becoming lines about humans in the face of superstorms, growing droughts, changing seasons and ice flows melting. I soon realized that this was going to be a new version. A very different version. Angrier. Sadder. More urgent. And focused on the impacts that climate change was going to have on human societies.

---

When you find existence shaking
As the walls fall around?
Or you find the soils cracking and
your future blowing away?

Or you find the seasons changing
faster than you ever known and the
shorelines are sinking and the ice floes
are farther and farther apart?

Where do you turn?
Where do you run?
Where is away?
Where is that heaven?

---

Where Away 1.0 was a bit hopeful, the 2.0 version was darker, more pessimistic, and more demanding of action. It was the work of a much older channel with a much longer view. Where the lyrics in 1.0 spoke of a 'future for our children, grand children after that', in 2.0 that became a 'future for our grandchildren, and their great grandchildren after that'. (Which turned out prescient; gordon became a first-time grandfather in 2013.)

---

For those are the stakes, make no mistake
we’re trashing the planet, plundering its
resources, poisoning its innards
but that's just "business as usual"

---

It was also a far more challenging song to sing. Yanni's music had a suppleness and complexity far beyond my vocal experience. Finding and fitting these new lyrics into November Sky took many, then many many months. It was a process of finding the lyric, working out how it fit with the music and then repeating and repeating it to train my voice into it.

And if you’re looking to the leaders and
system got us here and you’re hoping
they’re gonna fix it
well let’s be blunt, let’s be perfectly frank

That’s just the same as away
It’s just a dream it’s just illusion
Nothing’s gonna change unless we
make it so!

---

But it also took time because I had to accept and then grow into that more urgent, more demanding, more challenging voice. This was another case where my inner professional writer, shall we say, shrank away from expressing the song. I struggled with the lyrics as they grew more direct and less compromising because that went against an ingrained idea from my work in television news and educational television, the need for journalistic 'balance'. But, as usual, I had no direct say in the matter. The song came through as it would. The whole process took the better part of two years.

---

and it's time . . .

to occupy the future
to face the facts, accept the truth
look at the choices we gotta make
the changes needed

and get on with it

---

Once I had the song more or less mastered, I wanted to put it into a music video, with the lyrics on screen over a series of sunrise photos that I had taken on a small lake in eastern Ontario. It was a great project that took me back to my television editing days. The project took a few months, with most of that time devoted to the animation of the lyrics as they appear and disappear.

---

This was the first 'release' of the video to Youtube, from about 2013. The vocals are multi-tracked in this version of the song, my standard practice at that time.

---

Post-script

The casting for the Away 1.0 music video was a friends and family affair. My older daughter and several of our friends' children appear in the video. My younger daughter was included in the shooting but her shot ended up on the cutting room floor.

---

Like all the songs, I felt and feel strongly that my part of this aysnchronous collaboration, Away is no longer there 2.3, with November Sky by Yanni is not mine. It belongs to the song energies and to the world. So I give it to the world (my part anyways; I don't speak for Yanni) and I will give any proceeds that derive to me as lyricist to Bill McKibben and 350.org. He and they understand the urgency of the climate and ecological crisis we're facing, and deserve our support.