the brief

a conversation between the deeper beings of karma partners whose physical incarnations have just come together for a new experience as lovers, the 4th song in the karma partners track

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I was thinking a lot about karma partners while the song No plan 'B's 3.3 (with Tears of Joy by Govi) was coming in. Thinking about the roles they play in our lives, in our growth. Thinking about the hurt that so much karma entails, hurt between family, hurt between lovers, between friends. Hurt that I've inflicted on others. Hurt others have inflicted on me. And thinking about the purpose of that hurt on the deeper levels of our being, what role does it play in our spiritual growth?

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At the same time, I was trying to connect with an asynchronous collaboration featuring Oasis by Kitaro. The song, #37 in the official karosong count, had named itself during the 3.2 set, more than a year-and-a-half before, but gone no further than a lyric phrase that included the apparent title.

and just as the pheonix must burn
before it can rise from the ash
so the heart must first break before
it can heal and be whole

It was a powerful image, but I had no sense of what the song would be about until I "direct channeled" it some months later, meaning I was fully immersed in the channeling space and 'heard' the song in its entirety, lyrics and delivery. I have had several of these direct channeling experiences and they are powerful but ephemeral. By the time they end, they are already disappearing out of conscious memory. I retained nothing except that it was powerful.

Nothing changed, the song stayed stuck. Had another direct channeling the song experience about a year after the first. Same results, except I did remember the song was about spiritual growth. Of some sort. No details.

(Remind me, What was it Einstein said was the definition of insanity? Apocrophally at least.)

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The song nudged forward a bit at the start of the 3.3 set, the period going into the first pandemic winter on Lake Erie when I'd just started the subvocal channeling. A few lyrics seemed to come, enough to leave a sense the song would in fact be another karma partner song, one partner talking to another. But that was it. The song 'went away' while the first four 3.3 songs came through.

But like its namesake, and the cat for that matter, Phoenix came back late the following August as I was finishing off No plan 'B's. (Or from its point of view, the song was finishing me off. Who can say either view is incorrect?)

For real this time. Finally. And for sure a karma partners — as in plural — song. A duet it turned out.

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the first time i saw this you
i knew we'd been together before
i knew we'd spent lives and ages
exploring karma together

and i knew in those many lives
we'd been many things each to the other
like mother, brother, wierd uncle, rival,
confidante, and hairdresser if not already listed

and of course not to forget lovers

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But what was it? Was it a 3.2 song because that's when it had named itself? Or was it a 3.3 song because that's when it finally started to active channel? (And how many angels can dance on the back of a frozen iguana anyway?)

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and i knew that as those lovers
we'd broken each other's heart
so many times

and i'd often wondered
just what was the point of all that hurting
well i've come to see it this way

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a brief aside

It was a long 'gestation' from first connect to active channeling. The better part of two years. Why? And was it actually gestating? Was it actually being created during that period? I don't know. I'm just the channel, a lowly employee of the Universal Broadcasting Service. But I've been through the rubbish bins and sense there's several parts to the answer.

To start with, I had a reluctance to channel the new song. Oasis was more than nine minutes long. My first asynchronous collaboration with Kitaro was just over half that long and took two years to channel. Too, I couldn't see how it would be possible to fill that much time with lyrics. I even dreaded the task.

Further, Oasis was the "wall of music" type async track I struggle to understand (see on singing). My musical impediment means I can't differentiate their verses, can't grasp their musical structures, can't get past always getting lost in their sound. Oasis was simply impenetrable for me. (Until it wasn't.)

But even if I had got the lyrics way back then, I could not have sung it. I simply didn't have the vocal 'chops' to sing the song at that time; it was slow and required drawing out notes, and holding the lyrics in ways I'd always found difficult, if not near impossible.

And finally, I think No plan 'B's had to channel first, in order to finish setting the content framework for Phoenix to rise from.

So why did Phoenix name and number itself first? Dunno. I'm just the guy empties the bins.

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Bloody asides. Always getting in the way.

But once Phoenix started pushing forward in late August 2021, I suddenly 'got' Oasis, understood its structure, and could track the soloing instrument(s) that lead my vocals. That insight triggered the big picture of the emerging karosong coming forward, including that it would be a duet between the deeper beings of two karma partners, and that their conversation would be spaced out by instrumental solos between them, almost like a conversational threesome. (With the bonus that it reduced the length problem.)

The two deeper beings in question are re-encountering and recognizing each other when their physical incarnations meet. Their conversation is on their shared karmic history and the purpose of hurt in spiritual growth.

You know, just a silly little ditty (with a big bonus — lots of story-telling lyrics to fill time).

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i knew it was you too
and i knew we'd been in this play so many times
that we knew all the roles, all the plot twisties
all the ways it could go right

or of course and more often go wrong

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And by then, I pretty much had the vocal chops to carry off the needed slow delivery. I had reached the point in the lessons that I was singing out of the whole/full karo most of the time. (I'd even come to consider myself an actual singer, albeit limited, and not just a wierd backstory.)

The final piece of understanding for the song came when I saw that each partner would offer their own understanding — in the form of an image — for the purpose of hurt in our experience. And those 'core' images, I saw, would evolve as the song progressed through its five parts. The first partner's image started with the rebirth of the phoenix from its own ashes; the second partner's image as the process of cutting raw gemstones into jewels.

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lately i've come to think it's like making jewelery
it takes a lot of friction

and just as the stone must be cut
before it can shine as a jewel
so the heart must be shaped
for love to shine into

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And from there it was off to the races. Well, the turtle races most karosongs go through. Weeks and months of recording the song over and over while the lyrics and delivery clarified. But it wasn't tedious.

Not at that point anyways.

Like all the other 3.3 songs, Phoenix was coming at the time the singing lessons of all those years were finally bearing fruit. In fact, each song in that set was an expression of the whole/full karo vox coming into being. The melding of the song with the growing capabilities of my voice made for a marvelous new singing experience. It was joy.

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A special joy for me in this song was the way the lyrics left room for the instrumental lead(s) to be a part of the conversation. I'd only just come to understand the beautiful flow of the instrumentation in Oasis and I was thrilled it featured so strongly in the karosong. I had an increasing sense of the two karma partner voices as like waves in the open ocean, each rising in turn out of the (async track's) collective sea to speak as an individual, then merging back into the sea.

And there was another bonus: despite the song's length, the instrumental breaks made the song very relaxing to record (though not to channel sub-vocally as I would find out).

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i like your image it works really well
but what we're talking about here is the ineffable
that which we can't know because of
where we are in the levels

and if it's that hard for us here
what's it like for those down there?
you know all they ever get is just
the one chance to work it all out

you know unless we give them a few hints?
no, you wouldn't do that?

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By that November, when I closed up my home studio for the second lockdown winter on Lake Erie, I thought I had enough of the song's gist and lyrics to do an 'in progress snapshot' mix to share with a couple of friends. That mix was not a complete version, but I expected the song would finish off sub-vocally that winter.

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Wrong. Of course. The 4.1 songs started coming forward — taking most of my channeling attention — and I was introduced to my cardiac condition.

On top of that, this song's bloody turtle dropped out of the race for several months.

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There were several factors in play, including the sheer number of songs that were channeling sub-vocally that winter (ten). But the bigger factors for Phoenix were it's length and those long instrumental breaks. They were manageable when I was recording because I always had the visual feedback of the audio timeline to keep me on track. But I couldn't sustain the song sub-vocally. I kept losing the flow in the later verses. Session after session after session.

Which meant the song barely advanced across that entire winter of sub-vocal channeling.

That's when it got tedious.

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it seems we're running out of time
though we have all the time in the worlds
but it's they have to get on with the show
it's their play not ours

just the same, if this turns out to be
one of those lives where i break your heart
well i hope you'll forgive me
as i'll forgive you if you break mine

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I actually came to feel quite disconnected from Phoenix. Even after I'd returned to my home studio in spring 2022, it took the better part of three months to get past that disconnection and start active channeling the song again. Trouble was, it had barely got restarted before I'd sold my Sunday Lake property, packed up my recording gear, and started my rootless fall and winter.

So I was back to sub-vocal channeling, with all the same problems from the song's length. Phoenix was already the slowest ever karosong to come, and I began to wonder if it would ever finish.

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the core images finally evolve. . .

To this point, the core images in the later verses had simply repeated the first two. I knew that was wrong, that instead the core images would evolve across the song's five parts. But — other than a few vague glimpses — those later images refused to come into focus until after I'd set up for recording in Vancouver that November.

The Vancouver sessions that followed were exhilerating. They were the culmination of the 4.1 set coming forward. They were also the completion of the whole/full/on karo consolidating, and my singing was surging ahead, becoming fuller again, more confident, more nuanced. More performative.

Those changes affected Phoenix dramatically, and it's delivery started to feel more like a 4.1 song than a 3.3. It felt most akin to If i could be 4.1, which was channeling at the same time and was also based on a Kitaro async track. So I came to see Phoenix as more of a transitional song, bridging the singing lessons across the different sub-phases.

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So when that bloody turtle finally got back into the race during the Vancouver sessions, there was more than just the core images for the 3rd and 4th verses revealed.

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of course i wouldn't do that
that would be cheating because
everybody knows

just as the sword must be hardened
to take and hold a fine edge
so the soul must be tempered
to bear and be the whole

to bear and be the whole

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. . . and then the refrains came

Remember, those big instrumental breaks I'd loved when the song was first coming? They went away. Well, speaking accurately, the first four breaks filled in with vocal refrains based on the last line of the offered core image.

Which sounds simple enough, I guess. If you're a musician. But not easy for an idiot musant. While I could feel the refrains wanting to come forward, they weren't very clear, and even seemed a bit contradictory.

The first two refrains only wanted to repeat the last word of the offered core image three times, each slightly farther from the microphone, and becoming indistinct in the third repitition. But the next two seemed to repeat the entire core image, more like a chorus than a refrain, though it was unclear exactly which lyrics repeated when.

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and just as the stone must be cut
to define the facets that make it a gem
it's the beauty of the facets
defines the jewel

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I spent several weeks trying to understand how the refrains worked and was getting close (but no cigar) when I had to pack up my recording gear and leave Vancouver.

Yep, back to sub-vocal channeling, but not before the fifth section had finally revealed itself.

It wasn't the culminating core image I expected. It wasn't even the kind of deeply meaningful denouement I expect from this kind of karosong.

It was a joke, a bad one even by karosong standards.

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a cosmic egg walks into a monastery
looking for enlightenment
he finds the head monk in the kitchen
and says 'please make me one with everything'

the old monk squints at the egg
mutters 'it's your funeral buddy'
and scrambles it

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At first I didn't believe I was getting actual lyrics. I thought the joke was a wierd placeholder for the real — you know — serious lyrics still to come.

I should have known better. Everytime I tried to find those 'real' lyrics, I got the joke. Finally I just had to accept that was how the song wanted to end, even condone it (sort of), with a closing bit of funi-karo patter.

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what? did i spoil the mood?
sorry but bad jokes are like kids
or farts for that matter
you just have to let them go

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The song was only finally mastered in [date to be inserted when song mastered], more than four years after it first named itself. That's still the record for the slowest karosong to come into being.

Ever. The energies willing.

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Post-script

A big piece of the impetus for Phoenix came out of conversations with my first ex-wife Leanne during a two-day car trip in early 2019. That same conversation was also the impetus for karosong #38, Never-ending sunset, the first karma partners song since the second phase.

Despite that origin, from the beginning I understood Phoenix was for all karma partners — where-ever and when-ever and why-ever they meet. But it quickly became clear the song was also for a specific karma partner of mine — Margaret, who I lived with before I left Canada for China. (Where I met and married Leanne, then ended up in Australia where my daughters were born. And where I 'stumbled on' the meditation, which eventually led to channeling this body of songs.)

I had created much karma and much hurt for Margaret at the time, and again some years later. We had no contact for more than 25 years, until reconnecting through a common friend's Voldemort profile.

Out of that came a long-lasting text conversation that included much about the songs and the music, and led to Margaret offering her Vancouver area home as a base and recording studio for my rootless winter.

Though I hesitate to use the word, Margaret has been 'fortunate' to hear the world premieres of several songs, including this one before it was even finished.

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The karma partners in Phoenix recognize the need for forgiveness of hurt in their spiritual growth. And that is true. At those deeper levels, forgiveness is what sets us free from karma. Forgiveness from the other. Forgiveness from our selves.

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and if this turns out to be
one of those lives where i break your heart
well i hope you'll forgive me
as i will you if you break mine

for the more that i've grown
and the more i have learned
the more i see it's all about
the forgiving

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The same is true at the physical level. Feeling forgiven lets us forgive ourselves. I thank Margaret for that.