No Man’s Folk

(roots music that Roots itself in dreaming)

No Man’s Folk is sobriety-based music for recovering peoples in recovering  communities. It unites original music with what we call ‘traditional’ folk music and Traditional, in the sense of Indigenous, folk music.

Generally, the population of the United States lives within 3 world views. They are the primal kinship/quantum world view, the modern world view, and the late-modern world view. Each world view has its ideas regarding death. They can be expressed by the images below:

The Magnification song and clip below are an update of Dylan’s The Times Are A Changin’. The times have changed since they changed last. The Magnification is an example that merges original, traditional and Traditional.

No Man’s Folk is mostly singing together, though original songs, poems, stories, are always welcome, so long as they are for the good of all.

All persons who come with good intentions, even enemies, are invited into a welcoming circle, a No Man’s Land, of shared songs for gratitude, love, peace, clearmindedness and human flourishing. Sing for the happiness of all beings of Earth in a participatory, ensouled cosmos. No Man’s Folk is music that is medicine for our times.

Here is a next good step for Recovery, as understood in the Recovery Movement. In its deepest sense, Recovery is a Remembrance that we are sacred beings alive, creating and dreaming of a sacred Earth at the harmony point of our solar system. No Man’s Folk carries forward into lifetimes the no man’s land of peace that came forth during the 1914 Christmas Truce because of music. Thou Art That and its loving companions, They Art That, We Art That, are now found the world over. Start, sustain and inspire a Renaissance.

To enter into a No Man’s Folk circle, you will be invited to feel gratitude and share it for the good of all. Next, you are invited to put down your grief as a gift for the good of all. This is done as a water or a fire ceremony.

A typical “set list” is:

Soul welcoming song

Orphan Soul (Reynolds original)

1031

Is It Time (Reynolds original)

Ojibway First Song

There’s No Place Like Home

Dagara Fire Song

Shenandoah

Hadacol Boogie

Dagara Earth Song

Ojibway Wolf Song

The Magnification

Contact: Christopher Reynolds

spiriman@aim DOT com

The American solar eclipse of April 8, 2024 invited us out of the Age of the Fish and into the Aquarian Age. We are invited to become galactically minded and rooted in the natural peace and balance of Earth. When the Age changes, so does the experience of looking at the stars. During the Piscean Age, the tropics have been the Tropic of Sagittarius and the Tropic of Gemini. We have been slowly shifting to the Tropic of Taurus and the Tropic of Scorpio.

The tropics of when we are alive give us collective encouragement to live into the full meaning of the signs found at the tropics.

Steven Forrest describes the goal of Taurus as: What does the fertile Earth teach? Timelessness. Serenity. Peace. How to be infinitely complex and yet still simple. How to be unfathomably deep and yet feel no need to talk about it…To find that serenity and keep it: that is the Bull’s task. (p. 43, in, Inner Sky)

The goal of Scorpio: To burn away all pretense. To let nothing be hidden behind walls of fear. To make the unconscious conscious. The aim of the Scorpion, in a word, is to live every minute as if it were the last. (p. 72, in, Inner Sky)

Labyrinth Walk For Peace:

The appearance of outdoor labyrinths around the globe in Western nations from the 1990’s onward, the burning of Notre Dame de Paris in 2019, the spring of the year that put “19” of Covid-19, (one million now dead in America alone from the virus), the global racial, gender, strife, the wildfires and rising sea-levels, the war in Ukraine, and now the James Webb Space Telescope images, can be considered as threshold events that offer us a chance to walk together to a more balanced and peaceful future.

The labyrinths and sacred circles are inviting us in and forward.

Outdoor labyrinths can be gathering places for walks for peace so long as there is a union of Indigenous and Western wisdom - a hybrid wisdom - that acknowledges that profound peace that surpasses understanding is the natural state of our planet with its moon in our solar system orbiting the galactic center.

Labyrinth Wheel events are Inspired by the 1914 Christmas Truce, by the Truce that belongs to the Anishinabe, First Song, the Truce that belongs to gathering with former enemies to heal as you find in Warriors Journey Home, the Truce that occurred at Stones River, Tennessee, near Murfreesboro, the night of December 31, 1862, in the song, There’s No Place Like Home. These are moments on the planet when individuals who were once trying to kill each other pause to recognize each others’ humanity. It is possible to put aside our weapons in what amounts to a circular firing squad, and help each other return to remembrance of who we are, of the value of life, of our hope for the future.

If you are interested, email me and we can get started:

spiriman AT aim.com

This peace-making ritual is meant for multiplying and sharing with anyone on Earth who wants to use it for the good of all. Find ye an outdoor labyrinth. Here's draft template you can use and or modify according to your needs:

Order of going:

1. Arriving and welcoming

2 Soul welcoming song where we sing each other home.

3 Becoming mindful, feeling, releasing as a gift for the good of all, even our enemies of grief, fear, rage, anger, depression, confusion, illness, despair, all emotional baggage using a newspaper, place those newspapers together a the fire dish.

4. Receiving a gift of Cedar and Lavender, an honoring of your reason for being born and a new way to imagine how an outdoor labyrinth intends to bring the best of Indigenous Wisdom (Cedar) to the best of Western Wisdom (Lavender).

5. Gathering around the fire dish full of the pain we have all released and in silence, allowing it to be a fire of warmth, love, surprise and humor as a gift to past, present, future.

6. Sharing stories of suffering toxic ideas/climate and how you were able to find better ways to live that nourish life. Offer a water libation with each story.

7. Speakers in various languages of the planet speaking from their hearts so we can hear what other languages sound like even as the same heart is shared. (5-min or less, please!)

8. Processing to the labyrinth. Silently offer your own medicine that has come from your life, those ideas you found to be toxic and the healing information you now live and share. Offer a water libation as your gift to the past, present and future.

9. Walking the labyrinth, in loving kindness for the good of all, any feelings that arise, offer them as gifts to the Earth. Stay in your lane, notice everything.

10. When you exit, receiving a drink of spring water, imagining/remembering this water as First Medicine, as the Indigenous still do, as was done using the ancient water from the well underneath Notre Dame de Chartres - the only location in that part of the world where the water was considered sacred and in no need of any blessing from any priest or priestess.

11. After your water, creating a small work of art out of the nature nearby, two blades of grass, are enough. Offering it as a gift of Beauty to allow all you feel to go forth for the good of all.

12. Returning to where the fire dish is and de-briefing if you would like.

13. Remembering how after a ritual like this, for the next 4 days, your dreams will answer back and give you and all of us help. The hope is that you would take up this form of spiritual team-effort in your own family or with your own friends.

Solar Apex Gatherings:

Songs of home as a hearth of spiritual healing and soul recovery

Solar Apex Gatherings offer a way to join together and bring support for our years of mental, emotional, embodied, spiritual global climate change within the cosmos revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope. It is possible within a shared music to transform how we imagine our homes. We can move out from the concept of comfy bunkers of our addictive culture. We move together into living homes that are like breathing beings with beating hearts within which we flourish within a living thriving planet. At the start of my ECOX talk, I give the starting point for Solar Apex Gatherings:

Thank you for the courage of your birth. Thank you for being born into the places you were born into. I can name a particular kind of spiritual poverty that our culture suffers that takes the name of “addiction,” addiction meaning, “surrendering your voice.” In the indigenous world and in our own tradition of Hermeticism, we choose to come into this world. We are part of the choosing of this life. How we got here is that we volunteered for the mission. Western culture creates addiction by imposing onto the children’s minds that their birth was an accident, somebody else did it to them, or a blend of both…I call this, “a cinder block to the head.”

I encourage you to listen to the full presentation below:

A Solar Apex Gathering is an event that moves us forward into remembering what we once knew culturally, one step back and two steps forward together. In a sun and culture that affirms our choice to live, we can merge more joyfully with those life giving cultures, communities, nations who share the same kind of warmth, light, music, dreaming, courage for the future. Though we labor through seemingly unforgiveable circumstances, our “yes” to live the adventure of this life is of a greater heart. Our sun reminds us each day of this fact.

Come generously with your “voice” of choice, whether your singing, or of an instrument, or a drum, any voice that you can offer to join in and share.

Current Solar Apex Songlist:

The Magnification

Marilyn of the Whirlwind

Belikane

Creation

Of Your Lover’s Hopes

Highway Home

Ignatia’s Angel

Alive and Well

Remember Us

Rejoindre Aux Etoiles

Literally, a Solar Apex Gathering is house concert that begins an hour before sunrise. You bring a snack to share and a $10 love offering. Between us, we sing a series of songs and the closing song is my chant, “Rejoindre Aux Etoiles” - To reconnect to the stars again. We use the house as a heartbeat drum and sing into a life carried by The Heart of the Heavens. We meet our new sunrise not only of our yellow dwarf star born sideways, but also of love in the here and now, in our regions, in our homes, in our relationships and within ourselves. The whole event takes 2hrs.

Here is how Joseph Campbell described the rite of passage of our times:

The mystical theme of the Space Age is this: the world as we know it is coming to an end. The world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and complacency are coming to an end. Our divided, schizophrenic world view, with no mythology adequate to coordinate our conscious and unconscious — that is what is coming to an end. The exclusiveness of there being only one way in which to be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in the sole possession of the truth — that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the Kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.

The journey to this new life — and it is a journey we must all make — cannot be made unless we let go of the past. The reality of living in space means that we are born anew, not born again into an old-time religion, but to a new order of things. There are no horizons — that is the meaning of the Space Age. We are in a free fall into a future that is mysterious. It is very fluid and this is disconcerting to many people. [p. 107, Thou Art That, by Joseph Campbell]

With all the arguments, pro and con, for going to the moon, no one suggested that we should do it to look at Earth. But that may, in fact, have been the most important reason of all.

- Joseph P. Allen, former astronaut

to recover the earlier challenges of art, to break through the walls of the culture to eternity. Thus, the only true service of a proper artist today will have to be to individuals; reattuning them to the forgotten archetypes which have been lost to view…

— The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell

Field Notes:

I’m now 60 years old. Most of my life has been spent in Ohio and around the Great Lakes. Three of my years were in France and Europe. I’ve lived and seen enough to know that our culture is violent towards much that is sacred. In the USA, the ‘normal’ is a chronic shredding to pieces of sacred experiences - day and night with no let-up. In her 1984 book, On Life After Death, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, after sharing the most important sacred experience of her life writes of the level of violence we accept as normal:

The experience has touched and changed my life in ways that are very difficult to put into words. But I think it was because of this experience that I understand that if I ever shared my understanding of life after death, I would literally have to go through a thousand deaths. The society in which I live would try to shred me to pieces…(p. 71)

I, too, experience this violence and see how it harms the most vulnerable, the most valuable in our families, cities, counties, states, nations, and how it harms the planet. The name I call our chronic cultural illness, disaster. When the word first appeared in Italian, it implied bad, or ill-fated stars. When you lean more towards the Latin of the prefix, dis, you get the meaning, apart from, split from the stars. Our cultural illness is that we are split from the stars. This is a metaphor for how it feels to live in a universe in which we feel like strangers.

In the opening quote from Inner Reaches of Outer Space, the metaphor for split from the stars is rendered as being imprisoned within walls/ideas of the culture that block eternity and that deaden our ability to tune our lives to the forgotten archetypes which have been lost to view. Forgotten archetypes which have been lost to view, when rendered into psychological language means that our culture is split from its own unconscious, collective unconscious, the dreaming of Earth - dis-aster = split from the luminosities of unconscious.

Solar Apex Gatherings offer a way to join together and bring shelter from the storm within a shared music to help us to feel our galactic home with the sun and Earth within. Much of the violence I have seen in my life has been due to religious literalism as regards monotheistic notions of the New Heaven and New Earth. Teachings based on scientific materialism in which the metaphoric/mythic language of our souls is shred to pieces by literalism have not improved on the monotheistic models.

As our star carries us along towards the solar apex, new earth and whole moon are descriptions of present-day human experience. As you can see in the charts above and below, the phases of the Earth and moon complement each other.

(The gibbous Earth that appeared in the famous Earthrise photo was taken when the moon was in its crescent phase.)

At that moment when we see a full moon, we could stand on the sun-lit side of that full moon and look back at ourselves to the planet. If that were possible, we would see before us the darkness of the new Earth. New Earth and Full Moon offer a way to invite people to a new ground where literal and metaphor, left-brain and right-brain, yin and yang, science and myth merge as one experience of human wholeness - species wholeness. For when the moon is full anywhere upon the Earth, the Earth is new — everywhere you stand. No culture owns the three days of new Earth and Full Moon. We have been gifted a time and space to gather for the good of the future.

The apex of the sun’s way or solar apex was first established by Herschel in 1783. It is the direction our sun is moving through the galaxy in its orbit. The solar apex is always moving before us, so it’s not a fixed point, but one that moves ahead of us as we move, always going before us.

To transform our culture into a more peaceful world, we can do more together than Joseph Campbell challenged Western artists to do, more than recover the earlier challenges of art, to break through the walls of the culture to eternity to reattune humanity to the forgotten archetypes which have been lost to view. We can create re-enlivened homes, neighborhoods, vehicles, clothing, music, institutions, relationships, dances, games, rituals, all elements of culture that merge with eternity and reattune humanity to the living community of the planet. Such a culture joins with the rest of humanity, ever-reminded of the native sacredness of being due to direct experience of eternity merged in time - Deep Experience of Being Alive.

The Space Age is central to all of this…we had the great symbol of change that has taken place. Men stood on the moon and looked back and by television we were able to look back with them to see earthrise. This is the symbol that enabled us to feel the truth of the discovery that Copernicus made more than four centuries ago. Until then, we may have agreed theoretically with Copernicus but his map of the universe was not available to us, except to mathematicians and astronomers. It was an invisible idea and we could go on thinking, as we did, about a religious idea in which everything was divided along the same lines as the heavens and earth were divided.

This divided model allowed us to think that there was a spiritual order, separate or divided from our experiences…With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained this notion could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. There is no division and all the theological notions based on the distinction between the heavens and the earth collapse with this realization. There is a unity in the universe and a unity in our own experience. We can no longer look for a spiritual order outside our experience…it signifies the return of Mother Earth to the heavens. [p. 105, in Thou Art That, J. Campbell]

To grow a vocabulary of “words of spiritual healing and soul recovery,” requires a circle of persons who gather for that purpose. In the work of decolonizing education by Marie Battiste, this kind of space is called, ethical space. For her, ethical space is one where Indigenous and Western wisdom can meet and learn together from each other. Solar Apex Gatherings, then, are a form of ethical space.

A second notion comes from Wade Davis’ notion of the ethnosphere. He defines it as:

…plants and animals, ancient skills and visionary wisdom…a vast knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination, an oral and written language composed of the memories of countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen, midwives, poets, and saints — in short, the artistic, intellectual and spiritual expression of the full complexity and diversity of the human experience…the diversity of the human experience as expressed by culture.

The goal of Solar Apex Gatherings, then is to learn from within ethical spaces to wisely and honorably interact with the now planetary ethnosphere of the global human species.

One of the better books of our culture that I offer as the bridge text into ethical space and into the ethnosphere is Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’, On Life After Death. On the other side of the bridge are the teachings of the Medicine Wheel and the structure of a sweat lodge.

In On Life After Death, Dr. Kubler-Ross writes in ways that mirror Indigenous elders. She writes of the wholeness of being human using the term, quadrants. This is the same teaching found wherever you find a Medicine Wheel:

I truly believe that every human being consists of a physical, an emotional, an intellectual, and a spiritual quadrant. If we can learn to externalize our unnatural emotions, our hate, our anguish, our unresolved grief, our oceans of unshed tears, then we can get back, get tuned in to what we were meant to be: a human being consisting of four quadrants, all of which work together in total harmony and wholeness. (p.64)

This language is the same language that describes the reasons a person does a sweat lodge. What she calls quadrants, in the Indigenous world is often called, Directions: North is the intellectual quadrant, East is the emotional quadrant, South is the physical quadrant, and West is the spiritual/intuitive quadrant.

The ground of a lodge, its four layers describe qualities of sacred relationships that are normal to human beings. The entire construction is meant to remind us of the unconditional love that is always within, around, in motion wherever we are.

She is an ancestor for Western cultural wisdom going forward whose stories open doors that open to understanding the original instructions of Creator that you will find wherever you find human beings flourishing for thousands of years. As audacious as her experiences may at first seem, she is describing whole human beings over the millennia. It’s our Western culture that has forgotten and that is in the process of remembering.

Email me (spiriman at aim.com) and invite me to work with you to co-create a gathering that intends to ease the shredding to pieces of the sacred that is now global - with music. It’s possible to sing songs of the apex of the sun’s way, for the good of all beings.

The courage and generosity are worth it, Kubler-Ross’s rest of the story in, On Life After Death:

…I understand that if I ever shared my understanding of life after death, I would literally have to go through a thousand deaths. The society in which I live would try to shred me to pieces, but the experience and the knowledge, the joy, the love, and the sensation of what followed the agony, the rewards would always be far greater than the pain.

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Empty Chair & No Man’s Folk: Two Approaches To Folk Music

Empty Chair and No Man’s Folk are sobriety-based music for awakening peoples in awakening  places. It unites original music with what we call ‘traditional’ folk music and Traditional, in the sense of Indigenous, folk music. This is a music of temperance where even enemies are invited into a welcoming chair or a No Man’s Land of shared songs for peace, clearmindedness and human flourishing. Empty Chair and No Man’s Folk sing for the happiness of all beings of Earth in a participatory, ensouled cosmos. Empty Chair and No Man’s Folk are medicine for our times.

— F. Christopher Reynolds

EMPTY CHAIR

Empty Chair is a conversation done with two musicians using songs as a language. It is based on my chapter 19 in the SUNY publication, Holistic Learning and Spirituality in Education: Breaking New Ground. Chapter 19, A Gathering of Orphans: Struggling for Liberation and Awakening Within the Goal, and the lyrics of my song, Orphan Soul, form the conceptual framework for Empty Chair. Before the gathering, share songs with each other. Listen to each other first using my method called Feeding Back. Receive the other’s song and feel it all, let it move you. Then, respond with sharing what it reminds you of, what occurs to you including images in your mind’s eye, and physical sensations, smells, tastes, other sounds you hear with it, respond to the art with art, and/or allow yourself to be stilled and offer your speechless silence. In this way, share songs and create your set list together. The music can be done as individuals, with entire bands, or with music videos/performances, if so desired. The heart of the music is its originality creation, sharing, receiving, responding back - Empty Chair is a Tao of music where each takes a turn as yin and then yang.

NO MAN’S FOLK

Music and sacred stories are strengtheners. No Man’s Folk offers a formula that you can do yourself with your own loved ones in your own homes, in social distancing locations where it is safe, indoors and outside.

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE AND WHAT DO WE DO?

No Man’s Folk is done wherever people come together for a better future. It can happen with a group of 2-6. There can certainly be more, depending on mask-wearing and social distancing concerns. The persons who come are encouraged most to come because they love music and love to sing.

At the center of the space is a drum (the one in this photo is a teaching drum) or harmonium or a guitar or an accordion or the pipes — any instrument shared will do. There are 4 chairs around the center with other instruments here and there. The way No Man’s Folk looks is a gathering of persons, a central instrument, four chairs and other instruments here and there.

Everyone sits around the musical center. Begin with gratitude and a short ritual where you invite all present to feel and let go of grief, fear, desire, anger, pain, insanity, despair, restlessness, shame, guilt, suicidal tendencies. Sing through the pain together. Let the songs be originals in both traditional folk styles as well as Indigenous styles. Let the songs be Indigenous and traditional. Create a rhythm between the leaders in the center and the gathering. Sing 4 songs and then invite 2-4 songs/prayers/stories from those gathered.

No Man’s music, therefore, invites a new understanding of folk music that opens room for the ongoing original folk music — the songs and traditions of Indigenous resistance the world over that for 500 years now have endured and sustained culture and soul.

It calls for a de-colonized method of song-writing. Re-indigenized song-writing is an inherently sacred activity linked to revelatory experiences in dreaming, ritual, creativity in relationship with a sacred Earth, Ancestors. It is care for the soul of a people and the life-giving relationship with all ecosystems.

The No Man’s Folk name came through a series of discussions I had with Cleveland singer-songwriter, Charlie Mosbrook, and by association, through Folknet. I am grateful for his help and the support over the years from Folknet. I wish to acknowledge them.

No Man’s Folk is based on the story of the 1914 Christmas Truce and my 2014 pilgrimage to bring forward its gifts.

Remembrance of the 1914 Christmas Truce: It’s Our Turn Now

This is an account of a pilgrimage in remembrance of the 1914 Christmas Truce. In World War I, enemy forces left the safety of the trenches to the song "Silent Night" in their own language. Soldiers; sons, husbands, fathers wanted the peace beyond understanding. You are invited to follow the author's pilgrimage to renew how we imagine the meaning of Christmas. Noel "New Sun" in Gaelic, has always been the unexpected birth of New Life in a most degraded, forgotten, even despised place. In our traditional telling, the savior was born into a forsaken shelter surrounded by animals. In the early 20th century, that unexpected location was No Man’s Land -- the devastated landscape between the enemy trenches. This book is a recollection of the past in order to bring forth a more peaceful future.

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