The Spoken Sound: Recent Episodes
Marcelo Sosa
A navigation of uncertain times through story, poetry, music and conversation; thoughts out-loud, creative expressions of the every day and all-at-once.
Election is the order and obsession of the days to come. An election of consequence like no other we have known. And yet it pales in the light of a greater consequence looming on the near horizon, begging a forthright conversation—ahora mismo, now—con la Madre Planetaria…La ubicua Pachamama. Home.
A reckoning is upon us. The human presence is being called to task. The planet is demanding that our species begin to tell a different story, to work for the practice of a better real—a telling of change in the human narrative, back to a truer state of human nature characterized by love, wonderment, solidarity, cooperation, humility…
None of this is new. Nothing that I say herein is anything a million others have not said, and said again and again and again and again, and continue to say and to exemplify in their lives in ways and at depths I cannot begin to measure up to. But I say it, as best I can with the intention of learning to begin to live up to the courage of my convictions—and to contribute to the writing of that better human story.
An Independence Day kind of podcast, in the spirit of the current spirit of shedding light on painful truths too long relegated to the shadows pitched by the walls and guns and egos, and the sickness of the Settler Class across the human spectrum.
A short chapter late in a writing in the works, Wake Up…And Go to Sleep. From the tiny story of three siblings dismantling their father’s “mancave”, to their mother’s odyssey into Alzheimer’s, to the bigger story of colonial “conquest” and the human footprint on this earth, to the current rising of a collective human voice saying STOP! CHANGE! LOVE! REMEMBER! RE-IMAGINE!—a general story of the struggle to change the course of a runaway train: diffuse the violence of the single-minded mind,for the restoration of the human-kinded kind…
"Mama used to say that music was the essence of the human soul, and the only true religion. Not just the music that comes out of saxophones and trumpets and vocal chords, but MUSIC—the rhythm of being, of knowing and not knowing, of trying and growing and sharing. The rhythm, she would say, of MIND and SPIRIT."
Chapter 7 from "The Last Sandoval", a novel I'm peddling to agents, about a shell-shocked twenty-year old LatinX writing in a diary from a shack in a State sanctioned shantytown in a near-distant future (2077) where she has lost her beloved mother, as well as her aunt, uncle and maternal grandparents to the consequences of a too “slow-to-come-to-Jesus” socially unconscious, climate-blind industrial plutocracy... Writing her way to a sense of hope and love and bone-deep feeling where they had each been frozen senseless by the times.
Five poems: loss, discovery, reality, interruption and the yearning for a second sight. This is life affected by the peopled spectrum. This is love and loss, trust and security. This is history and context, the layered sheets of balance and placement, of living systems adapting and evolving, engaging and negotiating, and finally asking: "What...do we do...about ourselves?"
Thinking about love, and the opposite of social distance: social cohesion. Thinking about kindness, compassion and connectedness. How do we speak and reach for each other in the tumult of disorientation? How do we muster the courage to step outside ourselves and find our common ground when the bottom has dropped from under us?
…an excerpt from Wake Up and Go to Sleep, a memoir in progress.
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Mentioned here: Dr. Dale E. Bredesen's book, “The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program To Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline".
Find at:
https://www.boulderbookstore.net/book/9780735216204
https://bookshop.org/books/the-end-of-alzheimer-s-the-first-program-to-prevent-and-reverse-cognitive-decline/9780735216204
https://www.powells.com/book/-9780735216204
And a website for Dr. Bredesen and his treatment program for cognitive decline:
https://www.apollohealthco.com
A little Earth Day offering squeezed between episodes 3 and 4. Wandering back to the theme I'd begun in episode 1, for the youth among us: Chapter Two of this (notebook? letter? message?) in the works, for whatever it might be worth..."The Climate of Our Changing...Grace".
A story today from a childhood memory of falling down, and being lifted in the presence of a loving smile. Four years old, scissors in hand, cowboy boots slipping on the top stair to the basement... The pain mi madre must have felt on seeing me at the end my fall; the guilt, the fear, the helplessness...each her own to bear behind the smile that always brought me home.
And a poem to marvel at the sheer simplicity and eternal depth of this thing that we call love.
For those who sing in any choir—especially the kind that would try to muffle this tune or otherwise drown it out—may this somehow strive to be a song of solidarity, or at least a call to re-investigate the basics… Nothing new here; just the tolling of an old familiar human signal.
Episode #1 of the Spoken Sound. Bear with me on this. It may seem a little long, but these words are for the youth among us, crying for colonial humanity to hit the breaks on its runaway train of progress. From a place of middle-age, it's a pause, of sorts, to look and listen and let you know that you are heard, in ways you may not even know. This includes an excerpt from a book (booklet? Notebook? Photo essay?) in progress, and a poem for the young and hopeful: los transformadores--the transformers--of our world.
Hola Mundo. Hello world. My name is Marcelo Sosa. Meet the Spoken Sound, a podcast idea-the-making where the object is to bring some written word and spoken voice together to leap off the page into the sound dimension. As I say in here, it's not a concrete undertaking. It's poetry, story, music, conversation; thoughts out loud, creative expressions of the every day and the all-at-once... It's a line tossed out into the foggy sea in crazy times, banking on a landfall.