bn_songbook | Entries tagged with element

Several goddesses have seen me through my struggle with bipolar disorder and the integration of my bipolar aspects — first of all Persephone, with Her own seasonal cycle of ups and downs; but equally Brigid, Irish goddess of hearth and forge, fire and water, poetry and healing. As the goddess of the hearth, She teaches me to manage the fire in my head, building it up to cook or heat or light the home, banking it to rest.

As goddess of the forge, however, She had something else to teach me, more difficult and more dangerous: to make it stronger, a smith passes a workpiece repeatedly through the heat of fire and the cold of water. My passage through the Year of Madness — and much hard and deliberate work, both practical and spiritual, both during and after — has made me stronger, indeed made me whole in a way that I wasn't before.

It's not for anyone to lay the story of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" on someone else without their consent. This is me claiming it, freely (although She also had some say in the matter), for myself.

lyrics and music by Benjamin Newman

listen to this song

( Read more... )

bnewman

This song is a parody of, and my response to, "Chickasaw Mountain", Leslie Fish's tribute to Phil Ochs. Phil was a brilliant singer/songwriter who lived and died with bipolar disorder, and Leslie's song imagines the madness that drove his meteoric rise and meteoric fall as the fruit of a terrible magical bargain. It's a powerful and evocative song, but I doubt it's the story Phil himself would have told. As a singer/songwriter who also lives with bipolar disorder and survived, it falls to me to tell my own story my own way.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman
ttto: "Chickasaw Mountain" by Leslie Fish

listen to this song

( Read more... )