A Very Able Silence

Last year on the playa, riding with Maxa on the art car, I felt so alive—like the whole world had a groove. That vision carried me all year. Lately I’ve been spending time in my ShiftWave chair, which runs on heart rate variability—this rhythm of life between beats. It reminded me of making music in Ableton, how you have to nudge things off the grid to really find the swing. This poem is my ode to that aliveness, that variability, that groove between the beats.

(sung to the groovy swing of Dreams)

“Now here you go again,
you say you want your freedom—
well, who am I to keep you down?”

[Spoken to the groovy swing of Dreams]

But listen carefully
to the sound of your loneliness,
like a heartbeat drives you mad
in the stillness of remembering
(buh-buh-BOOM)

what you had
(buh-buh-BOOM)
and what you lost...
(buh-buh-BOOM)

Twenty years ago,
I wrote a paper no one read.
It said stories have two lives:
the letter and the spirit.
The letter lives in words—
but the spirit dances
in the silence between the lines,
alive and breathing
in the spaces.

Your heartbeat is like the letter—
steady, predictable. (buh-buh-BOOM… buh-buh-BOOM…)

But between your heartbeats
is the spirit—
alive silence,
variable silence—
a very able silence.

It’s Fleetwood Mac’s swing’n’groove in Dreams,
or better yet, sunrise at Burning Man,
our Maxa art car bouncing to the beat,
Carlita casting spells from the decks,
parasols blooming, beautiful beings swaying,
and Toki—my man Toki—takes it home,
dropping groovy rhythms, funk, and R&B,
music so alive it breathes
like the wind whispering through a Japanese forest,
like silence dancing between notes in Raga,
no meter, only spirit—
a very able silence,
the space where rhythm remembers itself,
and life slips in, softly, unseen.

Close your eyes now.
Feel your spirit dancing
in the space between beats,
moving between words,
alive and variable,
never static.

Because life doesn’t happen
on the beat—
it happens in the groovy silence between,
where your heart remembers exactly who you are.

So now here you go again,
you say you want your freedom—
well, who am I to keep you down?

[fade slowly into silence—
a very able silence…]