Iv'e decided to take a big risk here, by telling my friends and fans the absolute truth. 

I've been fascinated by death since I was a kid. If one of my thrift-store Ken dolls got smashed while I played with it in a construction site, his face beyond recognition and a leg broken off, I would stage a mock burial for it, with a funeral and everything. Then I'd wonder about where we went after we died. I was, by my own admission, a somewhat morbid little kid. (In hindsight, I was very likely also morbidly depressed, but diagnosing that sort of thing in seven-year-olds was not a popular stance for medical professionals to take in 1970, and so I would go undiagnosed for decades. That, as they say, is life.)
Dead animals in the road horrified me for years. A dead squirrel flattened on the yellow stripe was immediate, real, bloody and bird-pecked. Disgusting.
But stories of dead people didn't freak me out that way. They made me wonder: where do we go when we die? What will we look and feel like? Is there a heaven? And is it up? Or somewhere, something else?

The ancient Greeks (or the Romans? I can't remember now) believed that when a person died, they'd go to the Great Wherever and find themselves inhabiting a heavenly version of themselves aged thirty, no matter what their age at death. Learning this at age ten, I wasn't sure I wanted to skip the experiences of the twenty years in between if I died then and there. It seemed like being cheated somehow.

Judaism held out no additional help or comfort, not at first, and not for a long time.
When I was seven, my grandfather died. My grandmother followed a couple years after. I wasn't permitted to attend either of their funerals by my parents, because that was the prevailing wisdom of the time. So when my pet parakeet died around the same time as my grandfather, the best I could do was ask my father to help me conduct a burial service for Tweety in our backyard. Which he did with all the solemnity and love a father could muster for such an occasion. I took Tweety's death seriously, so my father did too.
It did nothing to answer my questions about what would happen to me, though.

Death is the thing you can't come back and tell the others about.

And so we make stuff up, in a feeble effort to wrap our limited brains around a concept of a No-thing that's possibly bigger than the Everything we experience as "life" here on earth.
But if No-thing isn't "nothing," if it is instead a thing that can't be explained by our limited/limiting language, then maybe it isn't so fearsome as all that.

I remember the first time I realized all the way down into my bones that I was mortal, and would die someday. I was in my early twenties. The realization rocked me in a way beyond words, and that knowledge has stayed with me ever since.

And so, when I began writing songs in my thirties, I knew back then that one day I'd have to write a song all about death, from the perspective of someone who was still living. Because, being depressed, I was -- and still am, periodically -- a somewhat morbid grownup. I didn't know how I'd write this song, or what I'd say. I trusted that at some point, my life would give me the raw material I needed, and I filed the notion away for future reference.

And then, two years ago, I began volunteering as a Shomer, one who guards the met, or dead body, during the time between preparation and burial, for our local Jewish burial society.
I was not prepared for what I experienced the first time I stepped up to take a turn sitting with the closed casket (Judaism forbids open casket funerals) for an hour and a half. It was beyond description, leaving me  humbled and oddly reassured. The man in the casket couldn't tell me where he was going, or if there was anything of him, his Self, left, or even what it was like to have died. But his presence inside the sealed casket gave me a quiet sense of calm I still can't explain. At some point, it will be my turn to be gently and lovingly laid somewhere, surrounded by caring people until it was time for my body to go where it's supposed to. (I'm purposefully vague about this last point because I'm exploring my options.)

In the end, Judaism gave me the reassurance I needed, and the raw material that informed this song.
Since I don't know if I will be able to raise the resources needed for a professional studio recording anytime soon -- money's tight all over in the New Economy -- I've decided to release a very rough, homemade version here. I am grateful to Portland's liberal Chevra Kadisha for allowing me to be of use and learn at the same time. If I can't give back, perhaps I can give something forward to someone down the road.

The Watchman’s Chair
V:
The room is still, so still that everything out there
Becomes nothing in here
Before me is a pine box, unpainted, unadorned
But for a little wooden star they glued on top

The star floats above the man inside the box
Sealed off from everything
Become nothing, lying oh so still
Too still for sleep
And for this hour I will keep caring watch
Over the body of the man who is no more

CH:
Starlight doesn’t shine in here
I sit beside the casket
And it’s strange to feel no fear
I know that it will be my turn one day
And though I’ll no longer know enough to care, I hope that someone else will take my place
And take their turn in the watchman’s chair

V:
Some may place a candle at their loved one’s head and feet
To light up the way to heaven
The custom here is different, we take turns taking care
Of our dearly beloved one

Each one of us is the candle
Lighting the heart-shaped hole poked in a world
That’s fast asleep
And for this hour I will keep caring watch
Over the body of the one who is no more

— CH --

V:
My days stretch out all blurry, behind me and before me
A million moments rush by in a whirl
When I guard this simple box I’m reminded once again
We’re each a tiny speck in the history of the world

A hundred years from now, who’ll know I was here?
Will it matter that I mattered once
To someone else who’s just as gone
Too still for sleep
And for this hour who will keep caring watch
Over the body of the one I was…

— CH --

Copyright 4-22-2019 Beth Hamon

Hours before our outta-town family arrive for Pesach, I am finishing up the last of the cleaning and compiling additions for our haggadah, the book that provides the order for our seder (which is redundant, since seder means "order.")

At the same time, friends and family are sharing their preparations for the holiday via social media. And as I view these, I cannot help but ponder our individual and collective choices in our observance of this -- and every -- Jewish holiday.

It has become impossible for me to walk into a store and see fresh produce without considering all the steps required to get that produce from the farm in California, or Mexico, or wherever, to my dinner table. I can't help but consider the energy, in human and environmental terms, required for me to wear clothes that fit well, to eat good food and to travel to the places I go for work and for play.

This recent post on social media stopped me cold.
Someone who traveled from one coast to the other on a sightseeing trip with their family, posting about how easy and cheap it is to obtain everything one needs for Passover in New York City. Of course, not everything in the photo was made in New York City, or even in the United States.
There are so many different choices reflected in this photo, so many cubic inches of particulate in the air, so many thousands of gallons of fossil fuels pumped out of the ground and converted into jet and auto fuel.

And for reasons I cannot begin to describe in detail, this disturbs me almost as much as the sight of veal disturbs my vegetarian friends. Because I cannot see this image without also thinking of all the resources used up to make it, and the travel and consumerism it reflects, so readily possible. 








I am still trying to figure out what to do with my discomfort.

I don't know if this is turning me into one of the most strident and boring people ever (like Thoreau, one of my childhood heroes), or if it's just another layer of personal awakening.
And I won't yet take a guess. Not here, not today.
Because I have cleaning and cooking to help with, and family to welcome with a warm embrace. And at least some kind of freedom to celebrate.

But as we celebrate our freedom story, I think we must also remember that the price we pay for that freedom takes many forms, including the potential for other kinds of enslavement. And I think that Pesach may be a perfect time to ponder the relationship between our various enslavements and freedoms, to sit with the tension found there, and to think about how and why we might want to reconfigure ourselves and our understandings. How we might want to reconfigure our lives, even a little, after we safely reach the other side of whatever chasm we're trying to cross.

Chag Pesach Sameach!
A zisn Pesach to all who celebrate.

Notre Dame cathedral in Paris burned today. The main spire fell in on itself, and there was a great deal of damage. A building that took 200 years to complete and which has stood since the 1100's, devastated in hours.
Two miles from my house live dozen of broken people, huddled under leaky tarps in the rain. They are broken because they cannot find living-wage work, medical help or affordable housing.
At our the southern border we share with Mexico, our President and his handlers are doing their damndest to turn away thousands of refugees pouring into the area every day. Whether its turning people back, arresting them at the border, separating parents from children, or threatening to turn the whole situation over to select US cities to deal with, it's all bad. People who are fleeing violence and potential murder in their homelands come here, ad are turned away by a president who says the USA is "full."
And our planet is warming so rapidly that species cannot be saved, and the ice caps are melting, and the oceans are rising.
It's all a huge mess.
It's all too much.
And I'm admitting right here and now that when it feels this way, making music and instruments and art feels, well, irrelevant. Pointless. Stupid.
I'm not looking for feedback here, or bucking up, or whatever. I'm okay.
But I am in a huge process of thinking about what I do, how I do it, and why.
And a lot of it is influenced by the state of the world today.
I am so deeply and profoundly affected by the state of the world, both globally and locally, that it is compelling me to question what I am doing in the world right now.
Because traveling as I do affects the world, every time I board an airplane or a bus.
Because while making things from repurposed stuff is cool, shipping it all over the palce is not sustainable, or a wise use of resources.
Because my music feels too nice, too gentle, for the times we live in. The times we live in feel more urgent, feel like they demand a more urgent response.
So I am thinking a lot while I'm home.

Pesach (Passover) begins Friday night.
For eight days we will consider the value -- and the cost -- of what we call freedom. For eight days I will consider how free I really am, and on whose backs my freedom rests.
I haven't written songs specifically for Pesach. None have come to me.
Lately I've thought a great deal about what it means to live in the world, on stolen land -- because unless we're Native Americans, we all live on stolen land in this country, and that weighs on me heavily.
Can I extend that to my still-forming understanding of the State of Israel?
I don't know enough yet to say.
But clearly it's land stolen from someone.
I suppose it depends on whom you ask as to which story you'll get.
The stories conflict, and in the end the outcomes depend on who holds the most power in the situation.
Just as it has here in America.
Which is why it is currently very hard for me to view Gaza any differently than the reservation in Browning, Montana, a place I've traveled through numerous times by train. Both are bleak and poor places, filled with desperate people who've been displaced from somewhere else they once called home.
Browning is what's left, Gaza is what's left, to the folks who lost the battle.
At least for now.
It could all change.
And it may change in our lifetime.
The ultimate victor may not be a race or a affinity group or a community of people, but the planet itself.
No way to know.
For now, I must wrestle with the meaning of what I'm doing, and ask myself some very hard questions about whether or not it genuinely matters, or if there's something more pressing I can and should do with my time and abilities that would make more of a difference. I don't know the answer to that yet.
But in the meantime, we can all do a lot better.
We can all remember what empathy felt like when more of us felt it in our bones.
We can remember what it felt like when we saw another human being suffer, and not turn away from them or from the feeling their pain evokes in us.
We can remember that they are us, and that when they hurt, we hurt too.
And we can all try to act from that place more often, to ease the pain and make things more fair and just.
Can we?