“There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

-Will Rogers

The great American music producer Jim Dickinson once said that the best songs never get recorded, the best recordings never get released, and the best releases never get played. As a musician who has spent countless hours in recording studios around the world, I can affirm that Mr. Dickinson’s statement is a stone cold fact. Oh, the songs I have heard ever so briefly, that will never be heard outside of those sacred walls….

I could also make a parallel statement that the best stories are never written down, those that are never get published, and those that are, are never widely read. I think it might be because storytellers, like musicians, often share their best stories between close friends and colleagues, never thinking to write down or publish any of them. It’s much like the World War II veterans and pilots that my grandfather served with, those cowboys of the Greatest Generation, who would parse their stories, smoking, talking quietly, and occasionally laughing as they stood in a circle at the municipal airport in Olympia, Washington where I grew up. I was privy to some of their stories as a kid in the 1970s, and for whatever reason, the idea of telling a good story has stuck with me ever since—that, and the symbol of the American cowboy.

And by cowboy, I don’t necessarily mean someone who is always on horseback, a Stetson on their head, a six gun on their hip, herding cattle across the plains—although I’ve met that type too. I’m talking about that ancient archetype who lives on the fringes of the conventional world, yet sees it clearly for what it is, while still holding a reasonable and compassionate view of humanity. I’m talking about the original Zen master of the American west, that salt of the Earth prophet who had the capacity to absorb the full wildness of the country without ever being overcome by it, who saw the worst in men, and also the best. The ones who stood for what was right and true and whose honor was worth more than any amount of money could buy. These beings are exceedingly rare and very hard to find, much like an authentic Zen master—only a handful are alive at any given time on this planet. They are both men and women, they come from many different backgrounds, and I am fortunate to have met and worked with a few of them. Their spirits are embedded in these stories.

When I released my first book, “The Singing Earth,” I was telling the stories of my musical adventures around the world, across 6 continents, and over the course of about 30 years. Many of those stories could have been much longer, with additional storylines and side plots, but that would have made the book less about music and more about adventuring, which although not a bad subject in itself, adventuring is not what I wanted to focus on for a book about global music.

The book you are reading now is not neccesarily a sequel to “The Singing Earth,” but it is perhaps a parallel narrative. These are some of the stories that I left out for brevity’s sake, yet when I wrote them down as separate stories, they seemed to hold up well as stand-alone tales. There are only a handful of stories about music, whereas the vast majority of these 35 tales are organized in a particular way, so as to convey 7 themes that I feel are most important in the development of a person, those being: The cultivation of a spiritual practice; the development of one’s character; the appreciation of music; a deep reverence for the environment; the importance of an astute political mind; the appreciation of wisdom; and the beautiful, ephemeral essence of the human soul.

The main idea for these stories came to me in a flood of creativity in the summer of 2018, immediately after I returned from a meditation retreat in upstate New York. Being an ordained Soto Zen practitioner, my wife had asked me to help her initiate some of her Tibetan Buddhist students, which is a parallel path to Zen. Also because, who wouldn’t want a wild-eyed Zenist lurking around a sacred initiation, sweeping and cleaning, chopping fruit and vegetables, teaching Kung Fu, all of it in complete silence?

After returning to Seattle, the stories for this book flowed forth and were realized in a few months of writing, after which I refined and edited the manuscript in Santa Fe, New Mexico through the winter of 2019.

The majority of these stories are short and often humorous, but a few have more difficult political and environmental themes because that too is important, especially now in these challenging times. Without exception, all of these 35 stories are based upon my personal experiences, my observations on people and environments around the world, unusual situations I have found myself in, and some plain old, down on the farm wisdom I have heard from indigenous and non-indigenous elders alike—the cowboys. Of course being a Zenist, there are more than a few Zen reference points, and that generally keeps my writing pretty straightforward and to the point.

In addition to this book, I was also inspired to write 20 instrumental compositions, which I recorded with my long-running world jazz band, the Barrett Martin Group. This album, titled “Songs Of The Firebird,” is directly related to these stories, and I would say that the songs inform the stories, and the stories get a little bit of a soundtrack. When you start reading the words and listening to the album you’ll know exactly what I mean. You’ll find a link for a free download of the album at the beginning of the book, and there is also an ancient, cumbersome compact disc for the luddites among you (of which I count myself as one), as well as all manner of digital and streaming platforms to chose from.

Finally, I recognize that my readership consists mostly of people who have followed my musical career since the early 1990s, although I hope it has grown a little by now. I know that I have both progressive and conservative readers, as I have had countless conversations with both after shows and book readings around the United States. As much as I disdain labels, especially when placed upon human beings, I do understand that people may have different spiritual or political beliefs than I do. I consider myself to be a progressive thinker, and a Zenist with a fairly down to Earth, working-class ethic. These are perspectives that will reveal themselves as these stories unfold, but I would also like to say something at the outset that I hope you will take to heart.

We live in a world with a radically changing climate, severe economic injustices, and political polarization that is not only unsustainable and precarious, it is also highly dangerous to us as a species. When any of us holds too firmly to a hardened belief system, to the degree that we are no longer able to learn or grow as a human being, then we are truly harming each other and this planet. I hold myself to this same principle—I am always trying to learn, always listening to other people’s perspectives, and trying to improve my knowledge of our world and her many peoples. I write these words as an American man, a musician and writer by trade, and one who has personally visited all 50 states in the United States, most of Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, a good bit of Latin America, and parts of Africa and Asia. I’ve played music in almost every major city in these places, and I’ve met people from all walks of life, different religions, and various socio-economic backgrounds. Heck, my own extended family covers most of these categories.

If my writings provoke something inside of you, I ask you to continue reading and see if there might be something that allows you to go deeper into the conversation. Perhaps one of these stories will allow you to understand another perspective, even causing you to change your own views a bit. I certainly have, changed that is, because as a Zenist, the one constant in the Universe is change—everything is in a state of perpetual transformation. Thus I can say, unequivocally, that I am a man of no rank, yet I am a man for the entire world, for all people. I am always transforming because nothing in this world is fixed or static. Everything is highly complex, full of circumstance and nuance, and the world we share is constantly reinventing itself in a myriad of shapes and forms, opinions and perspectives. It’s really just one giant thing, a tapestry if you will, and each of us is a voice within it.

It’s just like that with individual people, too—once you get to know someone you begin to see the connections, and then it’s hard to hold any prejudices or biases. We all become human, sacred, each with an amazing story to tell, and that is the real purpose of this collection of stories: To liberate the mind, illuminate the heart, and offer the courage to carry a sword of fierce, discriminating wisdom.

SONGS OF THE FIREBIRD

“Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.”

—Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

Fire has many different qualities—some creative and some destructive. I would argue that its most powerful aspect is that of transmutation in that it serves, elementally, to turn one thing in the Universe into something else. In Buddhist cosmology, fire is the very thing that gives us life, since we are, after all, made from the atoms of exploding stars. Fire is synonymous with the warmth in a person’s heart, as well as their conviction to honor goodness and strong character. Fire can also be wrathful yet uplifting, burning yet embracing, scorching yet also enlightening. Such are the qualities of many things that can give life or take it away, and also give life meaning.

It is fire that forged the first tools of man and it created the very alloys that have made the modern world as we know it. Metaphorically, the forge of life indicates a person who has survived many challenges, earned many scars, their character heated white hot in the furnace, hammered on the anvil, and then plunged into the icy waters until they too become like the sharpened blade on the sword of wisdom.

Fire is the element we most frequently use in our development of technology, because fire is also electricity, as the Ancients knew. The saw lightning as fire in the sky, which is also why lightning is the prime element for some of the greatest gods in history like Chango, the Yoruba god of battle who throws lightning at his enemies, and the Olympian high god Zeus, who uses lightning in much the same way. In one of the Australian Aboriginal dreaming myths, a firebird gave early humans their fire sticks, much like Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and gifted it to mankind out of compassion.

Fire is also the most common element in many of the world’s indigenous ceremonies, largely because of its transmutational qualities. When I practice Native American Red Road ceremonies, I trained as a fire tender for the Lakota Sundance where fire is seen as the engine of the dance, as well as the sacred element that heals everyone it comes in contact with.

It is also around the fire that the heart begins to open, songs are sung, and the best stories are finally told. When I was a kid growing up in the forests of Washington State, we constantly built fires—when we were clearing and burning brush, in our fireplaces and woodstoves during the cold months, and in the outside firepit for weenie roasts. Our cowboy neighbors across the road, the Pederson Brothers, were masters at this craft, where they would cook giant sourdough pancakes, thick slabs of bacon, and strong black coffee over an open fire, all of which was served up with a toothy smile and a slap on the back. I think I was drinking coffee by the time I was 10 years old, and those are some of the first memories I have as a child, and where I heard my first real stories—cowboy stories. As we grew into teenagers and began to build our own fires, we attempted our own storytelling, which was usually full of exaggerations and sometimes outright lies, but teenagers being what they are, that’s how I learned to speak and tell a story—around the fire.

We also see fire as power manifested in the hearts and minds of people when they take up social, political, and moral action, because wherever an authoritarian uses fear and intimidation to hold power, the people use their own fire, transmuted into a social justice movement, a political philosophy, or a popular uprising that overthrows the tyrant. We have seen this around the world for centuries and always it is the same principle in motion—the use of fear and intimidation against the people becomes the very thing, which they transmute into action. When tyrants oppress, the people rise, and the tyrants fall.

In the modern era, we are literally seeing fire become a destructive force, where ancient forests are burning to the ground at the same time as global warming is heating up our planet to unlivable conditions, destroying trees, plants, coral reefs, and wildlife in some of the most important ecological systems on the planet. Ironically, most of this is because of our ignorant and wasteful harnessing of fire through coal, oil, and natural gas. Those fossil fuels, which are both toxic and inefficient, are the main cause of our political and environmental problems over the last 100 years. Entire wars have been fought over the control of fossil fuels, the ongoing wars and conflicts in the Middle East being the most recent example of our greed for oil and our desire to control its fountainheads.

One could make the argument that the authoritarian regimes of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and even at times, the United States, are fueled by this lust for the control of “dirty fire” and the fossil fuels that propagate it. These calcified, soulless men who rule this realm are killing our planet as quickly as they can murder the political opponents and journalists who expose their actions. Perhaps in the future, in a more evolved understanding of global energy, we can transmute dirty fire back into its clean version, electricity. With an electric-powered future, created with renewable energies, we can be done with fossil fuels forever, and this is progressive thinking, this is enlightenment, and this is the future, inevitably so. If not, then we will certainly perish as a species long before the oil dries up.

The main question we should be concerned about then, is how do we change ourselves from being tepid, subservient followers of a generally disastrous way of life, and transform ourselves into dynamic, innovative, progressive revolutionaries? My hope is that these stories will inspire some of those questions.

I chose the title of the album that comes with this book for a specific reason: “Songs Of The Firebird” implies a series of songs that are born of fiery inspiration that the listener can contemplate. My firebird is based on the European myth, which, like its Greek counterpart the Phoenix, is a mythical bird that emerges from its own ashes, reborn each time, as the fire burns away all impurities and forges the spirit to fly anew.

The firebird is also known for its magical feathers, which when they fall to Earth, can be picked up like a wisdom story to enlighten the darkest night of the soul with a blazing luminescence. It also can mean the fiery fierceness of an authentic spiritual practice, which awakens the mind to become like Manjushri’s sword of discriminating wisdom, the blade of which is alight in flames. Much like a powerful meditation or a Zen teaching, the mind awakens into this fire, it merges with the heart, and we come to the realization that there are no two things in this Universe—it’s all One Thing, expressing itself in a myriad of infinite ways. How we live within that realm becomes the real challenge, because those very challenges are the things that awaken and evolve us into higher states of being.

The most important thing I hope you will gain from these stories and songs is a sense that you too are an extremely valuable and important person, both in our shared world, and to everyone who exists around you—you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. However imperfect we may be, we are all sacred beings, and the thing that matters most in this world is not what you earn in wages or salary, it’s not whether you become famous or not, and it’s not about how many things you can own or posses. It’s about how we live, on a daily basis, with honesty and integrity, showing love, courage, and compassion to all the beings in all the environments in which we exist. This was the mind of the Buddha, of the Christ, of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, of Ghandi, of Martin Luther King Jr., and all the saints who have come before and after us. How we live on a daily basis, and the choices we make therein are what forges our souls over lifetimes.

Like a Firebird that is reborn in its own fire, we rise, and we rise, and we rise….