Making connections

Following the by-ways of my mind

The dividend of my curiosity

I was listening to my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify, a generated playlist it thinks I might like given the other things I have played/saved/liked. It works well enough that I now have 17 hours of songs discovered simply through that process.

A song came up by a band called 1 Giant Leap, that started with someone speaking. It was clearly someone that had grown up in New Zealand (I’ve married into a Kiwi family, so I recognised the accent) and from what he was saying, I surmised that he was Pasifika or Maori. I found what he said pretty powerful:

I am the sum total of my ancestors
I carry their DNA
We are representatives of a long line of people
And we cart them around everywhere
This long line of people
That goes back to the beginning of time
And when we meet - they meet other lines of people
And we say: bring together the lines of me

I decided to try to find out who was talking. A small amount of Googling led me to find out that it was the voice of George Nuku, a Aotearoa (New Zealand) Maori contemporary artist.

I was then curious about him and how he came to be on the track, and came across an article in the New Zealand Herald about 1 Giant Leap and their Aotearoa connections. In that article, Jamie Catto of 1 Giant Leap (formerly of Faithless) talked about visiting a tattoo artist in his studio and hearing a musician called Whiri Mako Black, which he described as “like an anaesthetic. It was the most amazing experience”.

So I pulled her up on Spotify and came across the most gorgeous, evocative music I have heard in a long time. I haven’t listened to more than a couple of tracks, but I will be exploring her work more. So here is my curiosity’s offering to you: the music of Whiri Mako Black.

I think it hooked at my heart in quite the way it did, because it made me realise how much I miss living in Oceania and losing the direct connection to the incredible depth of history and experience connected with Indigenous cultures in that region. It reminds me how when I arrived back in Europe I missed the Acknowledgement of Country that we made at the start of each meeting - a moment of ritual, yes, but one if done right and with proper intent provides a moment of calm and connection.

I think of experiences like this morning’s as the dividend of my curiosity - exploring the nooks and crannies of my path through life. However much I can sometimes be frustrated by the distraction, I look at the many things that I have come across in this way, and am grateful that this is how I work.

I’d love to hear where your curiosity has taken you. Do you tend to go down the rabbit-hole like me? And if so, what are your strategies for avoiding getting completely side-tracked?

Extending my mind

I just finished reading “The Extended Mind” by Annie Murphy Paul. She pulls together studies from a range of disciplines that support the extended mind thesis. I found her argument pretty compelling, though if I am trying to be rigorous, some of the “evidence” was a little thin and clearly more work needs to be done. I especially liked her ideas around the power of working in groups - it’s something I have really noticed coming back into a more individualistic environment. Some of my efforts to work in a group way have left me feeling that people think I’m a bit weird. Not that it’ll stop me, of course!

Partly as a result of reading the book, I have started a daily journal. Just a quick thing, in Notion, where I put my intentions for the day to come, what happened the day before and what I am grateful for. The gratitude element is harder than it seems, at least not to say the same thing every day. But it all feels like a useful exercise. Let’s see how long it continues!

Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash