Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Bruce Cockburn, Grizzled Groundling




 Water under, sky above

Creation as metaphor for love
Shed resistance like a worn out glove
Gonna hold you up and love you
Gonna hold you up and love you
Waterwalker

 Next week we'll be attending the Bruce Cockburn concert here in Belleville and I'm slightly rattled by the fact that he will turn 77 next month. We've been fans for the better part of 50 years and in our late teens/early twenties we were well aware that he had become a Christian. He continued to include spiritual themes in his music even when he moved away from the evangelical community of those days. In recent years he began attending a small congregation in San Francisco with his wife, on her prompting, and younger daughter. He enjoys the social justice commitment of the eclectic congregation and the preacher. Now he is a part of the worship team with musicians who'd never heard of him. 

Last week Bruce was interviewed by TVOntario's The Agenda and he has a white beard, not unlike that of a certain blogger. He was refreshingly open about his Christian faith and I commend the interviewer, Nam Kiwanuka, for asking about it in a respectful and genuinely curious way. They also talked about his life-long commitment to environmental causes which led to his receiving Earth Day Canada's Outstanding Commitment to the Environment Award in 2010. 

Here are links to the song Waterwalker which Cockburn wrote nearly 40 years ago from Bill Mason's classic film of the same name, and for If A Tree Falls. He is a grizzled Groundling, connected to Creation. 




Rain forest
Mist and mystery
Teeming green
Green brain facing labotomy
Climate control centre for the world
Ancient cord of coexistence
Hacked by parasitic greedhead scam
From Sarawak to Amazonas
Costa Rica to mangy B.C. hills
Cortege rhythm of falling timber
What kind of currency grows in these new deserts
These brand new flood plains?
If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?
If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?
Anybody hear the forest fall?
Cut and move on
Cut and move on
Take out trees
Take out wildlife at a rate of species every single day
Take out people who've lived with this for 100, 000 years
Inject a billion burgers worth of beef
Grain eaters methane dispensers
Through thinning o-zone
Waves fall on wrinkled earth
Gravity, light, ancient refuse of stars
Speak of a drowning
But this, this is something other
Busy monster eats dark holes in the spirit world
Where wild things have to go
To disappear
Forever
If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?
If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?
Anybody hear the forest fall?

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