I live my life in growing orbits, 
Which move out over the things of the world. 
Perhaps I will never achieve the last, 
But that will be my attempt. 
I am circling around God, 
The ancient tower, 
And I have been circling for a thousand years... 
Still, I don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song! 
-	Rainer Maria Rilke, as recited by Tom Wisner at the Heron Dance Fifth Anniversary Celebration.

. . .

When I read that poem
I hear Tom Wisner’s deep, resonant voice
Resounding in my ears.
Bard of the Chesapeake
Friend of Heron Dance.

His message:

Live slow, like the oldtimers who made their living
Fishing the Chesapeake, and building boats.
Celebrate life
Live in close relation to wild nature
Live simply
Live thoughtfully.

He lived his message.

When I told him that Middlebury College was donating the use of their Golf Club auditorium to Heron Dance for our fifth anniversary celebration, and, “It's free. Middlebury College has more money than God.” He answered, “Well, that doesn’t matter because I have more God than money.” And he did have a lot of God. And not much money. 

He devoted his life to songs and stories of the Chesapeake.
The Chesapeake has a transcendent value Not only because of its natural beauty But because of the traditional culture that grew on its shores. 

Chesapeake Born

I'm Chesapeake born, I'm Chesapeake Free
I'm Chesapeake bound, flowing with ease.
I'm Chesapeake born, and bound to thee,
Indeed I am, Chesapeake free.

I'm the son of the rain, brother of the wind
I follow on the water, I got tobacco on my chin.
I seen forty years of sunshine, wind and rain.If I had a chance, I'd do it all again.

She's the mother of the waters and the people of this land
Forty river children reach to take her by the hand
And flow through Maryland and Virginia to the sea,
Atlantic born, Atlantic bound and free.

I hear your song so clearly and I know that down inside
The mother of these waters is flowing deep and wide.
Sons and daughters of the waters life within,
Gentle voices blending with the wind.

I'm Chesapeake born, I'm Chesapeake Free
I'm Chesapeake bound, flowing with ease.
I'm Chesapeake born, and bound to thee,
Indeed I am, Chesapeake free.

I used to drive around the country interviewing people. I was partly on what I thought of as a search for truth, and partly trying to find people who would tell me what I wanted to hear. Mostly what I wanted to hear was that our culture was going down completely the wrong road, that a fulfilled, satisfying life is found in simple things, in adventure, in the creation of work of beauty.

One January, my travels brought me to northern Virginia — Amish country — and to the doorstep of folksinger Tom Wisner. Tom was in his early seventies and living in a former hippie commune. The hippies had gone out and gotten jobs, and now used the property for summer getaways. Tom was living in his car, traveling around the area performing his songs for a few bucks here and there. When one of the ex-hippies learned of his circumstances, she invited Tom to live on the property, and he set up in a big old farmhouse. I interviewed him there in a room lined with hundreds of books about the natural history of the Chesapeake River. Every so often, during the interview, he’d start strumming his guitar and singing. Mostly what he talked and sang about were the lives of the old time Chesapeake River fishermen.

I was working on yet another of my theories — that the solution to the fundamental problems of our culture was a love of natural beauty instead of an obsession with the material. Tom seemed the perfect person to try my theory out on. He responded (Heron Dance interview, Issue 20, Spring 2000):

“You use the word beauty a lot. I would encourage the word pace. Rhythm. For me, the word rhythm has emerged above all other words. The word beauty is kind of ephemeral for me. I think more about peace. I long for peace. . .

“The people I have known on the water – the old timers I knew – eased with the winds. Do you think they live high stress? No. They lived simple. Their bodies even moved with it. They knew a rhythm and a tempo – different from this hard driving tempo we are into on the beltways. Wheels going to work. Drivin’.

            “I once watched an old guy adze out a helm. Adze it out. I watched his rhythm. I was blown away watching him. He worked that adze down that whole keel. Whack. Whack. All day long. When you talk to someone like that, or hang out with them, their whole rhythm of stories, of song, their segue from song to story, is all in that beautiful simple balance. So I try to get hold of that in my songs, and in the way I live. It is so important.”
            - from my interview of folksinger and Chesapeake River advocate Tom Wisner.

After our interview, I wrote Tom a letter and mentioned that his thoughts on rhythm had been on my mind. He responded, in part, with the following:

      Our modern world presents many demanding, schedules that simply don’t fit into mine. I need to be watchful always, that I don’t get trapped in someone's deadline. I believe your time is your lifeline! I have my own rhythms. They are deeply engrained; built right in at birth : a product of the life of the middle Chesapeake and the gentle repetitive cadence in the language of my mother’s people.

     The Rock Island creek runs down to James River, on to Chesapeake and out to the sea. I have spent my life writing my song out of those fundamental rhythms. Each time I return to them through my songs, I am home!

Here are my rough notes from the interview. Tom died in 2010, and I include the notes below in an effort to pay tribute both to the man’s spirit and his struggles.

I have been around water all my life. I relate to it. Even when I am up here, far from the river, I’m in the Chesapeake watershed. The Wisconsin glacier retreated about 10,000 years ago and left all this water that made the Chesapeake. First it made the Susquehanna River. Then, as the ice caps melted, it flooded the Chesapeake. So I want to live in the story of the watershed. I want to live in the 5 billion year story.

Heron Dance: What about that water captures your imagination?

Tom: Damned if I know. It is a mystery to me. Here is what captures my imagination to me: it is a mystery. It is a mystery. I don’t know why I love water so much. I just do. I just love it. It comes from – like in that song – childhood along streams, messing with frogs.

Tom Berry says that there is some meadow from his childhood – everything relates to that meadow. All of his concepts through time relate to that meadow land. I share that with him in the sense of that stream. If it is right, it was right for that little stream. And if it is wrong for that stream, it is wrong. It is just that simple. It is neat to reduce life to simplicity. In fact, it is not all that simple in terms of my relations with my children. Former wife, etc. But in the sense of my presence here, it is that simple.

Heron Dance: Have you lived in this area all your life?

Tom: I have been down in Virginia a lot – James River – these rivers – Chesapeake Watershed. Yes. Washington DC down into James River – the far south reach of this watershed. My mother’s people are all James River people. And they are the people I relate to the strongest. And feel the most kinship with. They are Andersons and Babers – Scots and English. I don’t have a whole lot of connection with my father’s people. Or my father. I loved him, but didn’t know him.

I was working on a PhD at Cornell – I was about 30 years old – I came out of Korea on the GI bill and did get to college. I got a nice fellowship at Cornell. My dad died. I was thirty years old. I had two children. I don’t know what happened. I just walked. I just left there. I couldn’t take all that – whatever that was about. Since then I have just followed my nose. Taught high school biology a while. I have taught some university even when I wasn’t fully qualified – I didn’t have all the degrees I was supposed to have.

Open university. All my students were over 30. Computer science students. They had an elective to take a humanities course. I made a lot of friends. It was like meeting the enemy in a way. I am very sophisticated about the waters – and the mystery of the waters – and making the land, and making a whole life system. But I am not very worldly. And my students were very worldly. Worldly in the sense that I don’t know how to make any money. How to keep track of that. How to put that together right.

One time I got a ticket coming to a class. One of my students just took that and said ‘We’ll take care of that. Don’t worry about it.’ They fixed me right up. I don’t do things like that easily. That is what I mean by worldly. They had the sense of the world. That’s what I mean. They had the sense of the world in the sense that they had nice cars, very nice clothes. Good incomes. Good families. They were living – not the way I would want to live. They were very tense. They didn’t have much time to do anything. To really do something nice. They didn’t have time at all.

I used to insist that we meet all over the Chesapeake at various places. Parks, and places like that. In those days, I had a lot of old friends. Watermen. Like old Captain Herbert. God, I mean. All you have to do is sit down and talk with one of those people for a couple of hours. They were home. Just home. He was just a wonderful old man. He would say things like, ‘You people. Look at you. Oh, boy. Look at you! You make a good livin’. I can tell. You make a good livin’. . . Down there on the Potomac River, when I was a kid, we didn’t make a good living. Sailin’ them boats. We just kept from dyin’.

When I took Moses Ash my first album, I said , ‘Moses.’ My first album was called Chesapeake Born. And it really changed my life. A friend took my music to Moses Ash in New York City. And Moses said, ‘Yeah, we do this. This is Chesapeake music.’ These songs have taught me a lot. They live with you and they resonate and they teach. It is not like some kind of linear learning. It is very round kind of learning. You can’t nail it down.

I tried to collect songs from the waterman. But I couldn’t get a single song out of any of them. I started writing my own, and singing them to them. And then I started learning songs from them. When you have your own, they realize that you know what are talking about.

I said Moses, this is incredible. I am not making any money out of the album. That is not what is happening. But my life has changed. I can almost see that if I keep on this track, I got a way to make a living. So I hand him this album. We’ve Got To Come Full Circle. And I hand it across the table to him. I have done all the cutting, all the work. All the art – the drawings for the cover – everything. And Moses, this great old, powerful Jewish man, wonderful old man, says “That’s good. This is good. We take this.” In his office in New York City is all this African Art. He has got a vault filled with all these disks by musicians from all over the continent. And he my music and makes it into an album and puts it out.

I said to him, “Moses, this is incredible. Chesapeake Born has changed my life. With this album – “We’ve Got to Come Full Circle” – I am going to move my life with this. Can you teach me how to make a living doing this?

Moses looked at me kind of funny. He sat there kind of still for a while. We went off talking about something else. Signing papers or something. Finally, he looked at me and said, “You know, you can’t make a living doin’ what you do.” That kind of tickles me now. It didn’t then. At that time, it devastated me.

I have never made any money. When I left the lab –- when I got tired of that too –- institutions suck. They just suck. They do something to you that suffocates you. You are not breathing. So I had to get out. I left. When I left, the director said, “Tom, I don’t know how the hell you are going to stay alive.”

I said, “Well, you know. I have $11,000 bucks saved up. I can stay alive a couple of years on that for one thing.” I kept singing songs in schools and working with kids. I always get along real well with kids. It doesn’t pay much. Actually, these days, there are a lot of musicians out there on the circuits doing songs about the Chesapeake, etc. A lot of them aren’t too good. But they are out there. So they are able to trade real well. They are real snappy, and they got a real good show. And the teachers can take off an hour while the kids get entertained. The PTA will pay, there are State Arts council monies around. You can do $300, $400 days. You can. If you can get lined up well, that is pretty good money. If you really get lined well. I have never been able to book into a thousand-dollar week. Which is what a person needs in this day and age. I never booked anything like that. Maybe at the top, I did a $500 week. But mostly $300 weeks. $200 weeks. Learning how to live on less. Then I am my own boss.

So I lived in a car for a while. I found a ratty hotel down in Lexington Park. I got a deal to stay there a little while. Then my friends discovered that was happening and said, “Get the hell up here and stay in our house.” I have a lot of stuff in storage. I got a lot of stuff. Do you have a lot of stuff? I don’t know what it is about stuff.

I actually worked the best and relate most with kids about 11 years old. It is a great age. They haven’t gotten cool yet. They are still animated and interested. And they have developed some skills. They can read, they can write. They can draw. They can express themselves. They can articulate things back to you. It is a great age. I especially like that they aren’t cool yet.

Heron Dance: So you are almost 70 – what have you learned about life?

Tom: I am not incredibly happy about being a human being. It is one thing I have learned – it is tough being a human being. It is really tough. I have hope for us, but it is thin. I look at the little stream I sing about. That has all houses on it now. All houses. That stream is gone. It is a concrete conduit going under the ground where these homes are. Up in DC. That is wrong. Really wrong. I don’t want to be part of that. I would really like not to be part of that. As much as I cannot be part of that, I don’t want to. So I try to live in this other story, and re-shape the reality with the mythic vision I have. Keep reshaping my reality with my mythos.

If I have learned anything about life, I have learned that I have to call on my best powers and exercise them and focus them. Focus my powers on what I am best at. And to hell with whatever the world is doing. To hell with them. You can really do that. You really don’t have to get out there and get on the treadmill and do what everybody is doing out there. You can actually do what you feel is right to do. And do it. And be okay. Provided you are strong enough to not look around at what a lot of folks have, and want it. That takes some doin’ sometimes. Sometimes that takes some doin’ for me. I tend to compare often. Some friends are pretty well paid, nowadays. Some of the scientists at the lab. So their homes are really nice. I’ll tend to think, “Goddamn, I wish I had ….”. But comparison sucks. It just sucks. You can’t do that. You have to be just be whatever it is you are and follow it.

Try to make a living, and not die. I have done pretty well. I am pleased with what I’ve done. I am pleased that I am for what I’ve been for. And I feel real unity with it. I feel great about that. I feel like, “Man, I am so about these rivers and about this Earth.” I look forward to becoming it. I don’t fear dying at all. I look forward to it. There is a lot of joy in me about what the future holds for me.

In terms of being apart from my children as they grew up, and not serving that too well. I am really ragged on that one. I am very ragged on it. I have a lot of pain about the distance that I have from my children. There ain’t a damn thing in the world I can do about that. Nothin’.

I built a house on this side of the river. A real nice home I built down there. When Joanne and I split up – she just insisted that we split up. I went to live at the Chesapeake research lab. It was hard to get back there to where those kids were. I was on the other side of the river. It was a two-hour run. And I didn’t have much time or cash in those days. So no, I didn’t see them a lot. Also, I did a number on myself. And them. And that number was – “Hey, I am not doin’ this well. So the hell with it.” Instead of tryin’ to find a way to do it better. Or work it out. I did a guilt angle. I did a thing of blaming my wife for the whole damn mess. And said, “Alright, so I’m out. So I’m out. So the hell with it. I am going to do the other thing.”

And I have had some wonderful loves in my life. Some wonderful women came into my life. Gosh. Blessed with the loves that I’ve had. But there is a hole with the kids. A big hole.

Heron Dance: And now that they have grown up, are you close with them, or in touch with them?

Tom: Not very close at all. In touch with all of them. In touch. Email. A comment. A phone call. Whatever. There is not a deep connection. Cat’s In The Cradle is a good song. It is like that.

Heron Dance: How old were you when that ended?

Tom: Sometimes I lose track. I don’t know. I moved to live at the lab. There was a dorm on campus there. I had been in the military, so here I am back in a dorm. Back in a barracks. Really. It was an open bay dorm. Men on one side, women on the other. And in the winter months, there were no more than two or three men living in that dorm on the island. But it was beautiful I had all windows all the way around. It was very bright with the windows. In the winter, with three of us up in a full open bay, with enough room for fifteen people to sleep in bunks, we had fair room. I did the first year of divorce up there. I was climbing the walls. Just climbing the walls. Because my kids … five children … so they were all over when I was home. Sitting in the evening watching TV, you got all these kids all over you. Suddenly you don’t have them all over you. Suddenly you are trying to do it another way. That was hard. But I made good friends at that lab. Lifelong friends. And ti was a community of men and women who knew a hell of a lot about that river. And its life.

My job was the educator. The guy who goes to the schools, and brings the labs story to the schools. Brings the labs story to people. The lab was the Chesapeake Biological Lab – the oldest marine lab on the east coast. I brought the story of the people that studied the life of the waters. The story of the estuarian creatures. Striped bass. Crabs. I was living with the top authorities. Eating lunch with them every day. So I learned a lot. I had a great director who encouraged me to talk to the schools as I am, rather than as the lab is. So when I started singin’ these songs, that was encouraged. That is unusual for a university professor. Director type guy to say, “Yeah, that’s great. Do that.” I am singing Puff the Magic Dragon or something like this. I didn’t have any songs.

There weren’t many songs about the life. In the sixties, Michael Cohen collected a lot of songs. He is a great musician. A folkie’s folk musician. Over five hundred songs he knew of the culture of this continent. Michael said that we wrote a lot of songs about lovin’ and leavin’ and killin’ whales, but there weren’t many songs that had a sense of love for the planet, or sense of empathy for the creation. I forget how many songs Michael had. Quite a few. There was only one that had empathy for the whale. Kill it. Get it. The Wounded Whale has a sense of empathy. The only other song that he said that had an empathy was “Home on the Range.” Can you imagine? This is the only song in North America. Coming into the sixties, this is the only song that really has empathy for the land and resonance. Most of these songs are about use. About timber. Get timber. Catch the fish. Kill this. Or whatever.

I have not ever really collected anything from an old timer that had empathy. That I know of. I have some stories that have empathy in them.

When I left, I got a little studio up the road. Rented a little place. Lived on the creek. I had a lot of school contacts from the lab. I worked my contacts some. Checked in with folks, let them know I am around. Let them know what I am doin’. That $11000 carried me two years. Without having any income. I went to schools and sang, and did programs with teachers. I could go buy food and pay the rent. Most teachers throughout this state don’t know anything about these rivers. There isn’t a lot of literature yet.

I worked at Smithsonian for a couple of years, as long as I could stand it. I took a similar job to the one I had down below. After the first year they said to me, “Come on, sell our research. Sell research. Sell the importance of our doing this work. We need to raise money to do our work. That is what we want you to do.”

I said, “Hell no. I am out of here.” In a lot of ways, I don’t believe in research. I think we know enough about these rivers to know what we need to do, but we are not doing it. They are still dyin’. Those guys down there at Solomon’s, God bless them, they have studied that river to death. For sixty-five or seventy years, and the damn river is going by the lab dying. It is damn near dead.

That is what I say. My friends who work there say, Tom, it is coming around. It is getting better. Well, it ain’t better enough to make a living out of it. You can’t make a life out of that river.

This summer I would like to go and do some haul seines. It is against the law. You need to have a license to do that. But I think could find a friend or two to try in few places that I knew in the sixties, and see how many fish fill them seines. In the sixties we would take a haul seine and sweep it down the beach. It would be a thirty foot net. The mesh would be no larger than that – and then a very fine bag.

You walk out in the water with the net. One person on each side, parallel to the shore. And run it a way – maybe 30 yards and then start the net – the guy who is outboard from the net. We would fill those nets. Twenty-five, thirty species. The net would be so filled that we would have to pull the floats down and let the fish out over it before you put it on the beach or you would kill them. And it would be hard, hard work to pull them in. And the kids would all come and pull the lead line at the bottom and help pull it all in. And the kids would all go bananas. When you would open that net up, there were all of these wonderful fish and animals. And they would think it was incredible. And you would too. Every time I would look at this water, I couldn’t believe how much life in it, and there is. It is just wonderful And the children’s eyes would just light up. You could see the joy in their face. I thought, Boy, this is a job for me.  I am going to do this job for ever. But as time went, I haven’t swept a net for a long time. But I am thinking I ought to go try and see and what it is like right now. I don’t think I want to see. I have swept some nets, when I was teaching that course, from 1980 to about the late eighties. I swept some nets a fair number of times, and I was pretty disappointed with what I saw, compared to the sixties. I hit the rivers with so much stuff. Overfishing them. And then hitting them with so much stuff coming in. Endless amounts of run-off form farms, runoff from cites and places. Street stuff. And all these industrial facilities. We have near 15 million people living in this 64,000 square mile shed.

The years ago, it wasn’t half that. I don’t know the exact numbers.  

I grew up in Washington DC as a kid. Old tree lined streets. You would wake up in the morning and hear those old push lawn motors. No motors. I used to make a lot of money pushing those little hand mowers around.

I have built out of my interpretation of the waters out of the elemental people – more than the scientists. It is really nice to have that balance. Balance of knowledge. I was encouraged to do that by a director I was working with at the time. I have some fair good friends  Amish, but I haven’t been able to connect with them like my own people. They sing. The Amish sing beautiful. They sing on Sunday nights.  I tried to get in there and hear it. I asked my friend Christie Fisher to get into – I said, “Christie if I could just get in the house, and be close to that singin’ once.” He said, “No, we don’t want any outsiders in there.” And Christie is a pretty good friend.

For the last few years, I’ve tried to grow a circle of corn down here in the field. It is 32 foot or 40 foot diameter. Or 40’ diameter. Somewhere in that neighborhood. I have these rows into a center. I lay it to the four directions. Like I keep a circle out here of stone. Just a practice of staying aware of what is happening in the skies.

This morning I was trying to get some order here for you comin’. I am in a real mess. I went downstairs and sat at the table – I been messin’ with a song called Sing Chesapeake. For this new album. And it started coming. Hell, I stayed there and did it. When it happens, I stay there. These songs don’t make any money. This is not the way you make money. That isn’t entirely true either. The fact that I have these songs, people do hire me to do things. But you have to be available to it. That is the bottom line. There is no two ways about that. When the song comes, you have to sing it.

I wrote down some nice stuff today. But it’s not like I have it. I don’t have it. I have it written down. Sometimes a song comes in a way that you’ve got it. It is there. It is so good. It is workin’. And you don’t need to write it down.    

Some people think Chesapeake means Mother of Waters – but some people think the Algonquian word  means Great Shellfish Bay. That leaves me kind of flat. So anyway, we had the mother of waters in this play. God, I loved writing that. I loved working with that. In fact, I am going to do a puppet show with it at St. Mary’s College in April.

Snails that are twenty to thirty million years old sit on this bookshelf. If you dig a hundred feet deep here, you start to hit the fossils of creatures that lived here when the Miocene creatures lived under the sea. When the sea intruded into the continent all the way up to Washington DC. The sea was tropical. We were pulling away from Africa. Near the equator. It was a good warm sea. Great whales came in here breeding. Right where we are now. And great white sharks feeding on these young whales here. So there was a lot of action in these waters here.

I don’t think as much about beauty, as I think about peace. I long for peace. I long for a sense of contentment, like I had when I was a boy by that stream. I wish I felt at peace with our process with this planet. And that I could be part of the culture that was living at unity with the system.

I am at peace with what I am doing about that. I am very much at peace with that. I am not very much at peace with my fellow beings. What we are doing up the road – you drive down out of here and you go to Lexington Park – they are building this big colony. It is amazing. Damn near ten acres bulldozed flat, building another damn mall. We don’t need these malls. I don’t want to get on that much, but I long for peace from that. In some ways, I would almost like to get away from here. I am not going to do that, because I have work I want to finish. But I don’t know where I’d go. What is happening here is happening everywhere. The economic boom. So peace.

he songs are for me a source of peace, a source of sense of unity, a connection with the flow of things. If that is beauty, I could talk about that. The peace that comes to me in that. It is interesting to me too, when I was a kid, I made things in clay. I started drawing right away as a kid. And I have been drawing all my life. I wrote a lot of my songs out of imagery – like out of photographs or drawings. I get into drawing, or into photographing, and then looking at the images, pulls forth the words.

That song came out of a lot of contact with oystermen, and drawing them. And photographs as well. These days, I still draw. But these days, I draw mostly in McDonalds –- people in line, or sitting around the restaurant.

I haven’t drawn the Amish a lot. I have drawn some. I am intrigued to do that. Their authenticity, and relaxed relationship with time. I have a lot of concern about authenticity. A lot of concern about it.  

I haven’t been able to be authentic on someone else’s time. I know that.  In fact, every time I was strapped into someone else’s time schedules, I was miserable. I wasn’t who I am. If being at peace with who I am, if that is what authenticity is, I can’t be on someone else’s time, and be authentic.

Heron Dance: If we accept for just a moment that we are put on this earth to learn something, if we came here for a purpose, and that purpose is to learn a certain lesson, what do you think you life has been about.

Tom: My job has been to call the heart back to the mind. It is not a complex thing. My heart is alive, and always ahs been. It has more to do with my mom than anything else, and her people. She brought my heart alive somehow with the land, and the waters, and the culture. So I walk into a laboratory when I was in my thirties, and it was a good training. It is a mind place. A place of the mind. Studying a river system. And I brought heart to that. Every scientist that knows me and my work, and what I’ve done, they know that I have brought heart to it. They claim it. They affirm it. 

It has been my simple role to attend to that. To say as close to the heart of the waters as I could stay, and to serve it. When you do that, you are in a good flow.

The people I have known on the water. Do you think they live high stress? No. They lived the old ways. The old-timers I knew eased with the winds. Their bodies even moved with it. They know a rhythm and a tempo – different from this hard drive tempo we are into on the beltways, those wheels going to work. Drivin’.

I watched an old guy adze out a helm. Adze it out. I watched his rhythm. I was blown away to watch that rhythm. It is not the rhythm of our time. He was working that adze down that whole keel. Whack. Whack. All day long. When you talk to someone like that, or hang out with them, their whole rhythm of stories, of song, their segue from song to story, is all in that beautiful simple balance. That is so important.

It is about pace. You use the word beauty a lot. I would encourage the word “pace.” Rhythm. For me the word rhythm has emerged above all other words. Or focus. When you ask me a question about beauty, or I see that question asked, I think, “We don’t know beauty much. We are not as immediate contact with beauty. We are in contact with rhythm. Rhythm leads to beauty. I am thinking off the top right here. Rhythm is one of the fundamentals on the pathway to beauty.

That is what my songs have taught me. A lot about rhythm, pace. That is what they do for me constantly – returning to them everyday. I don’t go through a day without song. You bring the whole process of you being with others into another form.

 I love that song so much. It amazes me that I wrote it. I keep returning to it. These songs teach me. Do you feel that? There is a learning in that that is beyond the writing, or the picturing. It is a learning that is deep and rhythmic. If you don’t come to that song with rhythm and pace, it is blown.

A rhythm close to the land is so different from the rhythm of people separated from nature. The artificial rhythm.

We need to go back into this country and find the roots of the mythic vision of this land. This land has a lot to teach. It is immense what this land knows. Look what it taught the native American people. And their visions. The most beautiful mythologies of the whole globe were planted here in this people. Because they learned from the land. It is still here.

I think one of the things we have got by being in contact with the modern elements of life – we have got a sense of unity with all human beings. Of the great tribe of the planet. Of that potential. We have got that.

I know that the impact of my life has been fairly limited, because of the way it has been cast. But I know also that I have made contact with some really important things. So I am glad for that effort, because I want future artists to be influenced by this. I believe so much in the art, and the work of the art as a sacred art, and in way I could be a stimulus to a future artist in some way, in this shed or other sheds in the country.

When I go out and sing, I am in a new cog. I feel different. Sometimes, when I am here too long – three or four days – I go into a kind of a coma. I never felt that when I was young.