20 Days - Standing in Deep Water, a Compassion Tune-Up

Sometimes my blog post springs from a number of small ideas, comments and events converging. Today, I'm combining a song sent by a young friend, a chance glance at a review of a new movie about Woodstock, and a realization that we have become our own worst enemy, despite the ethos of our generation when we were young.

So have a listen to the lyrics to Deep Water (below the video), performed at Woodstock in 1999 by Jewel. If you're in my mindset right now — with the Copenhagen climate talks crumbling before they even start, with news that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are set to pay record bonuses of $29.7 billion this year, while several American states are facing bankruptcy — you'll appreciate the chorus.

Hey, Jewel even sounds a bit like Janis Joplin towards the end, to help us really "get back to the garden," which was supposed to be the message of Woodstock and that era. How did we allow ourselves to get so hoodwinked? So exploited? So numbed and dumbed? And which ones among us have been doing the hoodwinking, exploiting, and numbing and dumbing? Any chance it could stop now, since your kids are going to be as much at risk as everyone else's?

DEEP WATER  (approximate lyrics)

When you find yourself

Your hopes in the sky but your heart like grape gum on the ground

And you try to scrape yourself up

But you keep seeping out like cheap gin through a broken cup

And you try to find yourself

In the abstractions of religion and the cruelty of everyone else

And when you're standing in deep water

And you're bailing yourself out with a straw

When you're drowning in deep water

And you wake up making love to a wall

Well, it's these little times that help to remind

It's nothing without love

When you realize your only friend

has never been yourself or anyone who's cared in the end

That's when everything fades or falls away

Cause the chains which once held us are only the chains which we've made

Cause when you're standing in deep water

And you're bailing yourself out with a straw

When you're drowning in deep water

And you wake up making love to a wall

Well, it's these little times that help to remind

It's nothing without love

Love, love, it's nothing without love

It's nothing without love

We compromised our pride, sacrificed our health

We must demand more, not from each other, but more from ourselves

Cause when you're standing in deep water

And you're bailing yourself out with a straw

When you're drowning in deep water

And you wake up making love to a wall

Well, it's these little times that help to remind

It's nothing without love

Love, love, it's nothing without love

It's nothing without love