So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

David Darling’s birthday is March 4th, and he would be 85 yrs old. We shared a Pisces birth sign, and I came to understand it for me as knowing what the world could be like while often feeling like a fish out of water in the world as it is. Our creative work together was trying to bridge that disparity.
 
I met David in 1978 when I was 26 years old. I had been working as a crisis counselor and in that role found inspiration in the writings of Gregory Bateson and the altered states work of Milton Erickson. Humor was a relief valve of sorts from the intensity, and in trying to make a radio comedy about dolphins, I started to understand that they were way more coherent than we as humans were. The music director at the radio station gave me a copy of the album Common Ground, and I set up an interview with Paul Winter when the Consort was in Boulder to support the album. During our interview, Paul invited me to the concert later that night. His sound engineer, Les Kahn, introduced me to David, and after the show, we returned to the radio station for some live improvisation.  Paul and the Consort members – David, Nancy Rumbel, Susan Osborn and Les Kahn – were to become some of my dearest friends.  
 
My wife Judy and I travelled to Baja, Mexico in January of 1979 with Paul and a group for music making in the presence of the grey whales. From what I had been doing and the future I had imagined, it was an other-worldly experience that left me completely undone.  

I quit my job, stopped seeing clients, and with Judy, Peggy Post, and Andrea Schulmann Cope, formed the company that was to become the record label Wind Over The Earth. Our first release was the album River Notes with Barry Lopez and David Darling, which is currently available as a free download on our website.

We began the recording for 8 String Religion in June of 1982. In listening to the sounds of rivers, we truly thought we could discover a way to speak river, to be the voice of a river, of all rivers, not as music but as rivers themselves. We had such a mutual sensitivity to and for water in all its forms.

Books such as Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts and Chungliang Al Huang and Sensitive Chaos by Theodor Schwenk were always with us in the studio.

I never learned to predict just when and how David might drop into the piece we were working on, but I learned to recognize when it was happening. Sometimes it was as if almost mythically he would “pull the sword from the stone” and bring forth such potency that I was honored just to be bearing witness. 
 
Which brings me to the "so long" part of this note. I last worked creatively with David about 10 years ago, and this newsletter, for me, has been a way to remember, honor, and share his gifts.
 
There is another version now wanting to grow. It would be David-related, just not as David-centric, and perhaps on the Substack platform, still free and allowing me to share some music-only files.
 
I will let you know, and of course you will have the option to unsubscribe at any time.
 
With an ongoing Gratitude for your participation in this Journey,

Mickey