05: A child weeps as her father beats her mother 32:53
06: Spring 42:37
07: Hello girl 51:05
08: Goodbye girl 57:08
09: Breath 1:04:51
Within Spring, I continue to explore indie rock and pop music while remaining connected to my love for ambient composition. The album is inspired by my journey of healing personal and ancestral family trauma; I use the following analogy to describe what this means to me:
I imagine myself as a tree. My branches represent all of the different aspects of myself, whether that be the aspects of myself in relation to my internal world (my physical body, my behavioural and thought patterns, my emotions, my beliefs, etc) or the aspects of myself in relation to my external world (my physical and social environment, the relationships I have with other human beings, my relationship with nature, how the external world perceives me based on what I present to it, etc). As the years go by, I start to notice that one branch is growing rotten. The rot then begins to spread to other branches that are near by. Before I know it, the majority of my tree is rotten. As a result of this entire process, I begin to experience great amounts of pain and suffering. I try to ignore the pain, but no matter what I do it doesn’t go away. It begins to impact the life around me, birds no longer perch on my tree and bugs vacate the premises. This is not fun and I do not wish to spend the rest of my life experiencing this pain, so I dedicate my time and energy to healing the rotten branches. The problem is that the moment I heal one branch and begin to work on another, the branch I just fixed begins to grow rotten again. This continues to happen time and time again, I am making no progress. I am running in circles. I begin to reflect on the problem at hand. I take some time to meditate in nature, breath, and slow down. I stop looking for the answer and simply let the answer find me. Boom! The insight hits me head on, I realize that all I am doing is managing the manifestations of an underlying problem. I realize I could spend my entire life tending to one rotten branch after another without ever truly figuring out why the branches are growing rotten in the first place. I take a step back and begin to see my tree as an entire whole, an interconnected system. My intuition tells me to begin digging underneath my tree, and so I do. I begin to dig beneath the tree and see that the foundation on top of which the tree is standing is rotten, that foundation being the soil. The type of soil I am using is called, Unresolved Personal and Ancestral Family Trauma. “Strange,” I say to myself, “that which I was not aware of was actually the root cause of my suffering.” I dedicate my time and energy into healing the soil and with time the rot on the branches ceases to be. Birds return to perch on my tree, bugs find a home in the soil, and life once again returns. I smile for my suffering has dramatically decreased, however I do not forget that at any moment my branches can once again begin to rot if I do not routinely tend to the well-being of the soil. “It’s okay,” I say to myself, “If they begin to rot again, I’ll know what to do. Tend to the root of the issue at hand rather than seek short term relief by managing the symptoms of the issue at hand. This is healing” I take a look around a notice that the season is now Spring.
Composed, mixed, vocals, album art by Gohj-ji (Navin Sahjpaul)
Mastered by Joshua Mattson (mic-kai-yale.bandcamp.com)
