I sat down with the piano. When I write a song, it is a beautiful and sometimes painful experience. Usually I’ll sit at my piano, play a chord, and then it gets going. I love to watch it happen. I am a vessel. I am not sure who flows the music through this vessel, whether it is God or my unconscious, or whether these things are anything other than life talking.

As a vessel, I am not absent from the process. I am there. I am the vessel. I have the responsibility to decide what is cool. I design the shape and the sound. I focus on what it is that I am trying to communicate and then the flow begins and I document it. I get excited when the lines are clever or well rhymed but I don’t feel like I deserve the credit for it. It feels more like good luck when things work out nicely. The lyrics don’t always make sense to me when I write them. Like when you wake from a dream and you know that the images are messages, but you can’t figure out what the message is. Sometimes it takes time for the story to become clear.

The same with lyrics. Since my songs are not like anyone else’s, I struggle with myself about whether I have gone too far with this line or that statement. My singing style is not as melodic as some folks would like. Fortunately my voice sounds nice. My weird lyrics can sometimes just slip by on the spoon full of honey.

But as I sat to capture the essence of my education and then infuse it into a few simple songs, I didn't expect it to be so time-consuming and heart-wrenching. The more time I spent at the piano, the less complicated the songs became. And the more simple the songs got, the less I trusted their value. Like, forty pages might be more valuable than forty measures.

In the end, I wrote three songs.

Synthesis: Application, The Table, Paradoxes