Friends,
I'm happy to report that time travel is possible, and I know because I’ve done it four times this month so far. Here’s proof:
🕰️ September 1 at 11:00AM. I’m in a one-room Methodist church in Granville, TN at a family reunion. At the top of the hour, a parishioner pulls a rope, and the steeple bell rings out in the sleepy lake town. A few rows over is my great aunt, born in 1930, one of my last living relatives of that generation. I was born in the 1980s, so that’s an extra half a century filling up that small room. We pull out the hymnals and flip the pages to “It is Well,” a hymn published in 1876. We start to sing, and as we all find our parts, we join over a century of other voices in harmony, all traveling through the present.
Then the pastor walks up to the pulpit and reads out loud from the gospel of Mark, backlit by stained glass with my family name written in the center. It’s a passage where Christ heals a deaf and mute man, and it’s one of the few times in the gospels that directly quotes the Aramaic, the actual language he spoke. The words travel two millennia, across desert and seas, through crumbling papyrus and illuminated manuscripts, and meander down the Cumberland River over the pulpit and into my ears: “Ephphata!” he says. “Be opened!”
🕰️ September 9 at 9:47PM. I’m in the nosebleeds at The Fitzgerald, a storied century-old theater in Saint Paul, to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. I’ve carried their folk music with me for decades, from Nashville to Los Angeles to Minneapolis. Their songs feel old, they reach through the past and into the future. Listening to them feels like a deep breath, as if each song lasts for hours and you don’t even notice. At the end of the night after many encores, they sing “I'll Fly Away,” that all-American hymn written in the depths of the Depression. It’s an anthem of freedom, a collective yearning for a better future: some bright morning, today’s pain will fall away. We’ll be free as birds glinting across a wide sky.
We start to sing with them, quiet at first. And by the last chorus over 1000 people fill the theater with their voices—I'll fly away, oh glory, I'll fly away—we stand to our feet as Rawlings brings us back into the chorus over and over: “One more time!”
🕰️ September 14 at 2:45PM. I’m at the top of a three story rotunda at the Minneapolis Institute of Art looking down at people crowding around a Tibetan Sand Mandala. Four Buddhist nuns start to chant sacred scriptures. I make my way down to the bottom to see it up close and see out of the corner of my eye a Tibetan grandmother with gnarled hands clasping prayer beads. She’s chanting along by heart. The nuns ring bells and cymbals as they chant, and the art and prayer and ritual reanimate centuries of tradition in the heart of the museum. I look on at the mandala’s landscape: four gates opening onto rings of bright neon greens and pinks and ancient symbols distilling Buddhist teaching, a map for the spiritual life.
It took days of patient work for the nuns to sift out this sand into shape, and after a week on display, they’ll dissemble it and pour it all out into the unceasing flow of the Mississippi River.
🕰️ September 14 at 8:50PM. Now I’m at the Walker Art Center with a new friend to see Moor Mother, a musician and poet-activist who effortlessly blends hip-hop and history into jazz improvisation. The songs aren’t presented as much as they emerge from the group—piano, bass, guitar, tap dance, percussion, saxophone, and invented instruments. As the song cycle progresses, the group finds groves in the music while the poet-activist speaks sharp truth into the microphone. Through chant-like rhythms, she names colonizing histories in Great Britain and the United States, levels prophetic critiques against wealth and oppression, and envisions an inevitable and just future. The band follows along, adding thunder to her voice.
And the song they use for their final improvisation? I kid you not: “I’ll Fly Away.” Instead of a straitlaced cover, the band expands the hymn into a twenty-minute sonic landscape, remixing the past and bringing ancestors into the room as the poet recites:
We have to build new bridges
new structures of creation
one bright morning
our ancestors make today
we make today
transmitting
testifying
rewiring
remapping
can you hear us calling out?
I love that: ”new structures of creation” that bridge past and future together. You can find those bridges anywhere—a church, a theater, a museum, wherever you’re reading this letter. Can you sense it? How time presses against the edges of our life? How the light shifts, right now, toward another bright morning?
Take care,
Michael
“I’ll Fly Away” is one of the most covered songs of all time, and here are some of my favorites of this all-American hymn—spanning folk, jazz, country, classical, and gospel music:
“Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou
A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
The school for poetic computation
Moor Mother on jazz as a “liberation technology”