A small offering

Hello 

I am writing again, finally, because today my album Heaven is a Place I Can’t Stay comes out, and this is my newsletter so I get to talk about it and you get to decide if you want to hear about it.

It took me about four years to make this album—not because it is especially difficult to have written, or particularly complicated, but because I had to move through some stuff to feel like I could really say what I was trying to say and actually mean it. 

Physically, my voice dropped when I started writing, and I had to relearn how to sing. This meant I had to relearn how to write music, because vocal harmonies and a choral root have always been at the center of my writing process. Singing was hard all of a sudden, and this was really painful. So there was that big change, a big loss honestly, happening in the background of all of this, from the beginning.

But the bigger changes were internal. When I started writing this I was confused, struggling, and deeply sad. I was angry at whatever I believed God was, and myself. I was confused at how hard I was trying to heal from painful patterns, and how I never felt any closer to pushing that big rock up that hill. I felt like every time I found something beautiful, and made a safe place for myself, it broke away from me, either by pure circumstance or by my fault. I didn’t know how to keep beautiful things or even if I could. I didn’t know if this was my doing or some horrible cosmic lot in life that was simply mine to live, passed down from my family who are also deeply unhappy people. I didn’t know if I was someone who got to experience the things I hoped for, or if that was for other people. This is sounding so incredibly dramatic, but I can be incredibly dramatic, and this is how it felt. I wanted family and connection so badly, and banging my head against the wall to get it or trying to shape myself into someone who could keep it just wasn’t working. 

It was around then that I found the work of Emmanuel Swedenborg, who wrote about Heaven and Hell being places we choose, whether we realize it or not. In his writing Hell is a place with no gates, no guards. It is a place you can leave, but those who choose to go there do so because it’s what they know, and leaving isn’t something they know how to do or even know how to desire to do. I don’t really believe in Hell as a real afterlife thing, but I do believe in it as a concept or a space we can exist in here and now, and I saw my family in this idea of it. And I saw myself too. I saw deeply struggling people who choose what they know, and choose it again, and feel drawn to it like home. I started to forgive us a little.

I began to understand my experiences as cyclical; I began to look at my emotional movements as inertia, and I began to understand that I am inclined to move a certain way, that inertia pulls me toward what I know.

So I started there and kept going. I found the work of Simone Weil, who writes of this experience as one of affliction. She writes of affliction and suffering practically as sacraments, not because we deserve to suffer but because in accepting our pain and suffering even at our most desolate moments, that is when we find ourselves closest to God. It’s Christian mystic, it's Buddhist adjacent, it's facing your pain head on and saying yeah, that’s there, and letting it move through you.

I wrote this album to try to thank loss, to thank grief, to thank pain. I am a better person through them. I am trying to see them as teachers. I let my voice be raw and dry in the recordings and I asked for a lot of help. And I wrote this album for me but also for anyone who feels like this, which, I know now is most people. My sadness is not special but it is mine and there is a line of burning fire that connects me to you and both of us back to God or the universe or whatever it is you think is at the heart of it all. And we are all here dying and being born again and again in the same inextricable process and it's very painful but very important and to me that is God.

I am currently in a period of my life that I would say is Heavenly, and I am savoring it. I know it will turn the corner, that I’ll find myself moving down the crest again, that I’ll step on the metaphorical rake and find myself with a sore forehead, laughing that I could have forgotten once again that I am here to experience, that I am here to learn, that suffering is a medicine I must take and that no matter how much I resist it it is coming for me, for all of us. And that if I learn how to float that at least I will rest my muscles and see the sky and it’ll all come a little easier.

I can write all I want (and I sure will) but this is the passage I think sums it up best:

“The beings I love are creatures. They were born by chance. My meeting with them was also by chance. They will die. What they think, do and say is limited and is a mixture of good and evil.

I have to know this with all my soul and not love them the less.

I have to imitate God who infinitely loves finite things in that they are finite things.

We want everything which has a value to be eternal. Now everything which has a value is the product of a meeting, lasts throughout this meeting and ceases when those things which met are separated. That is the central idea of Buddhism (the thought of Heraclitus). It leads straight to God.

Meditation on chance which led to the meeting of my father and mother is even more salutary than meditation on death.

Is there a single thing in me of which the origin is not to be found in that meeting? Only God. And yet again, my thought of God had its origin in that meeting.

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.”

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Anyways, some really incredible people worked on this album with me and helped make it exist, and I am so grateful for these finite creatures and I hope you can take some time to hear what we did together.

Thanks for reading and for listening. It’s anywhere you listen to music.

<3 Jude

beautiful album art by Sam Kemmerer