A Million Shining Things

This is an old interview but I have always loved how Wanda put things together.

A Million Shining Things
 by Wanda Waterman St. Louis
 

Sam Baker is a Texan singer-songwriter whose first
 CD, Mercy, in 2004 brought him an ardent and
 extensive following in North America and Europe. Two
 decades ago Sam survived a bomb blast perpetrated by
 Peru's Shining Path rebels. For the Mindful Bard review
 of his latest CD, Pretty World, go here.
 

Train to Machu Picchu
 

It was 1986, and I was in Peru with some friends. We
 went to Lima and from there to Cuzco to catch the train
 to Machu Picchu. We were going there for the Inti
 Rami, which is a pretty big celebration there. The bomb
 was on our train car. Me and my friends who were
 there—they were foresters, living in Columbia—the
 bomb went off and killed them and the German family I
 was sitting with, a mother, a father, and a boy. It killed
 them in a particularly terrible fashion.
 

The exploding shrapnel cut the femoral artery in my leg
 and I should have bled out right then but for some
 reason didn’t. I stayed alive in spite of subdural
 bleeding, cranial bleeding, gangrene, and renal failure.
 When I was brought back to the States I started round
 after round of surgery.
 

I think that whole experience made my writing much
 more empathetic toward people. You see quite a bit after
 weeks when you can’t move, near death. It makes you
 reflective.
 

“Broken Fingers” was written partly in memory of the
 German boy who died in the explosion. His parents
 spoke only German but he knew Spanish and pretty
 good English, so we talked. The way my hand is now
 reminds me of that; the shrapnel blew off the top of my
 left hand. They didn’t operate on it at first because they
 didn’t think I’d survive, but eventually they did operate.
 I later had to learn to play the guitar left-handed. There
 were times when I got frustrated. And then I somehow
 connected that to the boy. Some things are just done,
 and death is one of them. Some things don’t heal, some
 things don’t change.
 

Conditions for Creativity
 

Things come to me and I’m not sure where they come
 from or how they get to me but once they’re here I
 generally have to deal with them. I work with what
 comes and I’m not sure what I do to make it happen.
 

I do listen to some music. I’m deaf on one side and don’
 t hear very well out of the other, and there’s a very loud
 ringing, so I’m not sure I get much out of music. I liked
 that whole thing Yo-Yo Ma did of Bach pieces. And
 then when I hear birds I don’t know that we are able to
 do anything much more beautiful than that.
 

I also read. Recently it’s been Thoreau, Conrad,
 Faulkner, Annie Dillard. I’ll probably go to the library
 this afternoon and see what I can find.
 

Lately my writing has been sporadic, but then I’ve got
 other projects that are taking a lot of my energy so I
 block out time to see what comes out. The thing is to
 find the balance: energy-time-time-energy-energy-time.
 There are a million shining things and you can’t do them
 all.
 

This is a good month to see how I feel about the world.
 I hate to say it’s “X” or this is my expectation, because
 then all of a sudden that’s what I have to get out of this
 block of time. It’s better to let time pass and let things
 come to me. It’s hard to know what to focus on, to
 push more energy into, so I’m seeing what sort of
 energy comes up about different things. It’s really more
 of a triage.
 

Doing nothing is good sometimes, too. I can look at the
 trees outside and see that something shining and
 beautiful is hanging from every branch.
 

On Religion: Red Hats, White Hats
 

You can suffer from belief in nothing. I think you can
 also suffer from belief in too much. We try to find
 differences in religions, as if that gives us some sort of
 edge, instead of looking for those great similarities. The
 great teachers are all saying, “Drop the ego; we’re all in
 this together.” The boat rises and falls. We all rise and
 fall as does the boat.
 

In Buddhism there’s a story about the coming apart of
 everything, when the self dissolves. That’s not actually
 that far from the Christian idea of dissolving into the
 love of God, when ego drops away and we become
 whatever that is. If Christians have a problem with
 Buddhism, their struggle is not with Buddhism, it’s with
 Christianity. I think Blake would say that it’s that clash,
 that cracking of our universe so the light peeps out, that
 comes to everybody regardless of their religion.
 

What I saw in that terrible thing in South America is that
 we’re all essentially connected. There’s an attitude that
 says, “I’ll wear this red hat or this white hat and
 because of that I have something that gives me access
 to a different spiritual realm.” I think our spiritual realms
 are right here with us all the time.
 

The God of Rosemary
 

What if everything is perfect right now? By perfect I
 mean whole and complete, all you need available to you
 at this very moment. It doesn’t mean you’re not
 responsible for making things better. We should all be
 more responsible and more compassionate, but what if
 it’s you in the face of God this second? You can then
 get outside of yourself and not say, “Oh, look at me,
 open the door,” or, “Look at me, do something.” This
 whole thing where you and I are separate and look at
 ourselves as if we were players on a football field—we
 can get past that.
 

God is in every face we meet, and not just in every
 face—in every plank of cedar that’s tacked onto the
 outside of our houses, in the rosemary that grows in the
 yard. The question then becomes: How can I learn not
 to turn away?
 

http://www.voicemagazine.org/articles/columndisplay.
 php?ART=5777
 

The Mindful Bard
 Sam Baker: A Million Shining Things
 Books, Music, and Film to Wake Up Your Muse and
 Help You Change the World
 Wanda Waterman St. Louis
 Volume 16 Issue 07 2008-02-15
 (Notes from a conversation with Wanda Waterman St.
 Louis on January 29, 2008.)