I will be screening clips and speaking about this work-in-progress BEHOLD THE EARTH on Sunday at 2:45pm, at the Baird Auditorium of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Please come if you are in the Washington area this weekend and curious to learn what the production is all about.

The talk and screening is part of the US Environmental Film Festival, in its 18th year. For those of you who are enthusiasts for films about the people/nature connection, there are 155 diverse films screening between March 16th and 28th. Special programs exist for children and are marked by a family-friendly symbol in the festival program.

We shot a sequence with people in a field on a foggy day. Our production plan? That these visuals will work into musical sequences drawing on the rich tradition of a group chorale format from the 1800’s, called the Shaped Note. Tim Eriksen has performed and recorded with a few Shaped Note groups; most recently one in Amherst, Massachusetts. The singular focusing power of the breath and tone in concert with others, which is a basis for this tradition, has multiple expressions in many cultures around the world.

But here in Maine, this week, fog has three levels of engagement. Thin wispy fog is called “fog.” As it thickens a little, it is called “thick-o-fog.” When it really shuts down such that you cannot see the bow of the lobster boat before you, it becomes “dungeon thick.”

I asked Cal DeWitt to describe the role of music in his life and he began to talk about living his life as a psalm, excerpted in the clip below. He references his two-book theology, whereby the book of scripture is brought alongside the book of creation by the song in one’s heart. The integrated quality of Cal’s day-to-day experience is noteworthy. Everything is connected to everything else.

The anomie of America’s divorce from nature could result from the loss of livelihoods which involved being outdoors, like fishing or farming. Our film’s song composer Dirk Powell has two family recollections about this change.

DIRK: My great-uncle Clyde, another gifted Kentucky musician, used to talk to me about the days when subsistence farming was simply life. It wasn’t a matter of being poor. It was a matter of doing what you did. Though that type of agriculture is seen as vastly different from hunting-and-gathering, in some ways it is closer to that oldest form of human existence than to the modern idea of a career. For farmers like my great-uncle, as for our nomadic ancestors, life did not fall into compartments. Work was not a separate thing, and neither was the environment, the spiritual world, or any other aspect of life. “We were always telling jokes, singing songs, always right next to each other, always so close,” he told me. “It was better. It was hard work, but it was better.”

I understood. I hadn’t lived that way. It was easy for me to glorify a rural life. And yet, I knew that trading it all away for the material comfort of the American Dream was also wrong. I didn’t discount her, but neither did I discount my pappaw and my Uncle Clyde and the times when the family was together, in the fields, working hard but singing, laughing, praying – not spread out between California, New York, and Louisiana, as just my immediate family is today. I recall those times of being together, in one place, tied so deeply and intimately to that place that it can become all places. Being connected so deeply to that piece of earth that all the earth is known.

For this post, I am passing the torch to Dirk Powell,, musician and curator of songs for Behold the Earth. Dirk is introducing me to all sorts of musician friends who feel, like he and Tim Eriksen, that a powerful musical space exists in the mix of nature, scientific knowledge, faith, and American heritage.

DIRK POWELL “When I was about 12 years old, my pappaw played a very simple tune for me on his banjo and, unknowingly, changed my life. The music was sincere and egoless in a way that resonated deeply with me; but it was his comment afterwards that brought the moment to a point and tears to my eyes. As the last notes faded away on that warm Kentucky afternoon, he turned to me and said, “You know, people used to think that was just beautiful.”

“I experienced one of those instant question-and-answers that form the seeds of epiphany. What had changed? Beauty? No, beauty is unchangeable. So it must be that people had changed – and any change that leads people to judge and then reject beauty should not be accepted without serious questioning. It is that decision to walk away, not the artistic fruit of a culture that evolved in unbroken tradition for generations, that should be closely examined and weighed for its worth.

That moment with my grandfather, James Clarence Hay, made me determined to learn the music of those hills, not to preserve something from the past but to share timeless beauty in the present and, ideally, to pass on to others a medium through which to express their own feelings and thoughts. Tradition is a sustainable resource; you can’t take from it without giving more back. It’s a spring that never runs dry. Unfortunately, the more we’ve lost ties to nature, spirit, culture, family – the pathways of tradition – the more we’ve lost ourselves. But picking up a banjo and playing it puts you instantly back into the flow of the tradition. It evolved for that purpose and that alone.”

Not all nature is beautiful and without struggle. More of that in a future post from Dirk, reflecting on music and some of the life experiences of his great uncle and grandmother.