Song 17 of 26 - Change and Renewal

The seventeenth of the 26 songs is called "Change and Renewal". Scroll down below the following videos for the lyrics and a brief discussion of how this song ties into the project. A blog post which lists all 26 songs, including 1 video for each song can be found by clicking here.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blVNWkbPlII

CHANGE AND RENEWAL
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Water of life, flow through me
Water of life, renew me
Water of life, surround me
Water of life, astound me


Every minute of every day
I keep changing, I keep changing
Nothing ever stays the same
All replacing, rearranging
Every cell that’s in me now
Was not the same when I was born
In an endless constant flow
Renewing when they’re old and worn

Every minute of every day
We are water, we are water
Swimming in an endless sea
Mothers, fathers, sons and daughters
Molecules of H-2-O
That move around and move between
In an endless constant flow
Connecting us in ways unseen

Change and renewal
Incarnations
Change and renewal
Inspiration


Every minute of every day
All around us, all around us
There’s a sea of new ideas
Waiting out there to astound us
Innovation coinciding
Simultaneous discovery
Flowing out there, waiting for us
Just as easy as can be

Change and renewal
Innovation
Change and renewal
Inspiration


Every minute of every day
Pay attention, pay attention
Open up to what’s around you
Endless paths to new invention
When you hit a roadblock
It’s as easy as can be
You can drink a glass of water
Find a new idea

Change and renewal
Imagination
Change and renewal
Inspiration
Change and renewal


Water of life, flow through me
Water of life, renew me
Water of life, inspire me
Water of life, rewire me
Water of life, surround me
Water of life, astound me

Quite frankly, the opening lines of this song started out as a reminder to myself. I have spent so much of my adult life dehydrated and sleep-deprived, a workaholic drinking too much coffee slaving through the night to meet the latest crazy deadline in my career as a composer and sound designer (and don't get me wrong, I love my work and that's why I have always been willing to stay up all night if that's what it took). Every time I manage to get additional water into my daily routine I feel better, my brain works better, I'm more creative. Old habits die hard though, and making sure I drink enough water just doesn't seem to come naturally to me, for whatever reason.

As I was working on my book, I was spending a lot of time visualizing the shapes and connected patterns that would be created by a branching set of parallel universes resulting from choice, chance and circumstance for our own universe, now and throughout all of its possible timelines. Here's one of the relevant sections:

Sounds also can trigger memory and even instinct. We have already mentioned the squealing sound of chalk on a chalkboard being commonly reviled. Could this because it resembles the cry of some prehistoric predator which our distant ancestors learned that they should retreat from as quickly as possible? Or, as another example, could the desire to urinate at the sound of running water be a racial memory that connects us to our ancestors who chose to urinate in a place where their urine would be carried away? That would mean the potential ancestors we could have had who constantly chose to urinate in their own standing drinking water supply died of disease, did not become our ancestors, and therefore we have no connection across time to them. As we discussed before, these ideas can also tie into the work of Richard Dawkins, who proposed a new way of looking at genes and how their “desire for continuance” connects them from the past to today in a “river out of Eden”.

Water is particularly interesting when considered as a medium across time, since we as human beings are mostly water. Do you recall imagining ourselves four-dimensionally, as a snakelike creature with the embryonic self at one end and the dead self at the other? Now imagine the water that we are mostly made up of in four-dimensional terms. Obviously, some of the water that is in us now is not the water that was in us a week ago, as there is a constant depletion and replenishment taking place (by the way, keep in mind that we’re not just talking about urination here: water leaves our bodies as vapour in our breath, as perspiration, as evaporation). Parts of the water that was in us today could have been in someone else last month, or up in the sky, or inside a plant, or in a reservoir, and so on. Imagining the interconnected fourth- and fifth-dimensional paths of water that flow in and out of each of us creates a gloriously interconnected web that surrounds the earth. What if it were really true that water molecules are able to respond to emotion and carry information? Here is an internet that our current world of technology can only dream of.

The same is true of all the molecules in our bodies. We are constantly going through a process of exchange and renewal, so that in the passing of ten years many of the molecules inside our body are not the same as the ones that were there previously. Imagine the fourth- and fifth-dimensional net connecting the carbon that was in your body ten years ago with where it is today. Imagine the connections across time and space back to the creation of that carbon in the dying of other stars billions of years ago, since that is where all carbon in our universe comes from originally. Once again, the image of a fantastically huge new web of connections is made, and those connections are invisible and unknown to us within our limited viewpoint travelling along our narrow fourth-dimensional line.

Here are some other blog entries that touch upon the ideas from this song:
Welcome the Fifth Dimension
Boredom and Consciousness Part Two
Death?
Gravity and Light
Music and the Dance of Creativity
The Universe as a Song

Next song: 18 of 26 - From the Corner of My Eye