The most momentous event occurring in these days when I’m getting this blog underway is the death of my good friend jb (Jim Baird, 6/22/1951 – 9/14/2015). But I didn’t want to post anything specifically about that event, because, for one thing, I’m still grieving and reflecting on jb’s life and, for another, death is currently on the offensive in the circles in which I run (and have run). The less preoccupation with the end of life, the better. For now, at least.

So, enough thinking along that line.

One of the most interesting things I’ve ever done—and I’ve done it now three times in the last year or so—is sensory deprivation floating at Float Nashville. My most recent float was on Saturday, 26 September, less than two weeks after jb’s death, when I was in Nashville hanging out with Mark Chesshir, longtime friend and musical collaborator to whom jb introduced me back in the mid 1980s. (Mark and business partner Amy Grimes own and operate Float Nashville.)

In addition to friends like Mark and T. Michael Scalf, Nashville, to me, still is home to the memories and experiences related to my living there and working as a songwriter. So as I packed for check-out last Saturday before my float, my mind wandering randomly through the rooms of memory, experience, feeling, creativity and so on, three things—songwriting, floating, jb’s death—came together.

I was thinking about floating in two ways. First, I tried to grasp the experience for myself—what it’s like to float. I can think about this only after the fact. While many floaters seem to experience important breakthroughs in creativity or thought while in the tank, I find myself unable to think of anything as I float. My mind is blank. Even when I try to force myself to contemplate something, I can’t hold it for more than a few seconds before it fades to black. Not that this is a bad thing (I hope). I just won’t be able to add any tank achievements to the Float Nashville scrapbook.

Anyway, I was thinking about floating, about drifting out into some open space and encountering a presence there, a surprising presence and yet a comforting one. A few words came to mind, and, as such words have done for as long as I can remember, they began forming themselves into a lyric:

I am floating
Somewhere out at sea
Somewhere in the dark
On the warm skin
Of a water world
Under falling stars

I am floating
Floating in the blue
Of a cloudless sky
Above the earth
Warm and unafraid
Breathing in the light

And then there was that presence I mentioned:

But I am not alone out here
You are here with me
Somehow you are here with me

As these lines shaped themselves in my mind, I noticed that somewhere underneath them or on the other side of them was a second way I was thinking about floating. On the previous Thursday evening, when Mark and I were eating really good burgers at The Pharmacy, he was telling me his observations about jb’s last days, when he was in bed and largely unresponsive to the room and the people around him. And I began to wonder if that was, for him, somehow like floating in the sensory deprivation tank.

The lines above took on a relevance that seemed related not only to my tank experience but also to what I imagined jb might have experienced at some level in those last days among us. He was somewhere out at sea; he was floating in the blue. I hope he was warm and unafraid. I hope he found somebody there with him.

jb died just on the verge of autumn, my favorite time of year. But these words came more connected to my imagining of his experience of spiritual floating than to my remembering—or anticipating—my physical experience in the water and salt.

I am floating
On the balmy chill
Of an autumn breeze
Friendly faces
Speaking gentle words
In the autumn leaves

No, I am not alone out here
You are here with me
Somehow you are here with me

The lyric comes phrased in sets of three lines—a first line with four syllables, a second and third each with five. I have some simple music to go with this simple lyric structure. The song is not yet finished, but I hope it will be soon. I have a few other lines, pieces of ideas that will probably work, but for now I’ll let it all continue . . . floating.