What is your dream?
Published: Tue, 06/30/15
You tube is dangerous, so easy to waste time watching stuff that really has no value. On the other hand it does have my talk on taking responsibility for your training up there so I have tried to contribute something worthwhile to the trivia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fMTErhG1ug if you want to watch it
Something that has attracted my attention is that someone has uploaded a series of programmes called behind the music. These seem to be American made within the last ten years. Each episode focuses on the life and career of an individual or group who have contributed to popular music in the past half century (if they got started in the mid 1960s it is half a century now). The format is very well thought out and nicely executed with a good blend of contemporary interview and comment and historical footage. I suppose I am interested in the relationship between business and artistic success, luck and character and how it plays out. Some groups had almost instant success, such as the Monkees then threw it away almost immediately. Others took years of playing small clubs before they more widely recognised such as Foreigner. Some had major tragedies nearly destroying the group such as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crash in 1977 in which three
members died and others were badly injured. Others seem to have had pretty charmed lives such as Hall and Oates who found themselves a little out of fashion at one stage, income dropped and they had to sell second and third homes and private air planes.
I know there is a debate to be had on the actual value of popular music. Some of the groups and individuals I had never actually heard of (MTV completely passed me by) and even though I enjoyed the business and human interest aspects of their story I am still at a loss to see why their music actually had any appeal, Pat Benetar for example, who seems like a very nice person but even having watched the programme and heard the sound track I would not recognise anything by her if I heard it on the radio.
The point is that these are people who had a dream and went out and did something about it. Sometimes the dream found them and took them along as was the case with Cher. (The Cher episode is both inspiring and very sad). Sometimes the dream belonged to someone else altogether as in the case of the Monkees where the dream belonged to Bob Rafleson and Bert Schneider of creating a popular TV show for children. That bit worked but the four actors recruited to play the band in the show could never really work together as a real band and split up very quickly.
The point is that the programmes were made, I watched them and am writing about them now because these people got out and did something. They had a real desire to create and express something and eventually made it happen. Yes, there is an element of time and place being a factor. The post war developments in electronics and recording technology, then the arrival of channels such as MTV are all factors which gave opportunities which had not been present before. But every generation provides some kind of opportunity whether it is military leadership, exploration, the printing press, painting, the pulpit, politics or building a railway. A popular reason for raising a rune stone in memorial was that the person commemorated had built a bridge. Probably not a spectacular bridge by our standards today but it certainly wasn’t something that everyone managed in medieval Scandinavia.
What is clear from studying people who have created something of their own is that they are nothing extraordinary. Special yes, in the sense that it seems to take a special person to make an impact on the world. However, no particular talents and abilities that are out of the ordinary, just a willingness and determination to do what they wanted. Being special is actually a choice we can all make if we want to do something interesting with our lives. What is your dream?
Looking back over my life mine was to explore the body, mind spirit relationship as it made sense in my own cultural context. I have tried to do this in many ways but it was in discovering Stav that I found a tradition and framework that I could really work with. That was over 20 years ago. Next week we have the camp in Somerset where a few of us will meet up with Ivar Hafskjold and learn more about Stav and share our experiences of making Stav part of our lives. As I said, it looks like being a few people, there is room for more but that is down to you. If you can’t be there then you can pre order the DVD of the talks and training. See http://www.stavcamp.org
regards
Graham