A nice article, if you are a cat person, by John Gray in the New Statesman. "One of the most attractive features of cats is that contentment is their default state. Unlike human beings – particularly of the modern variety – they do not spend their days in laborious pursuit of a fantasy of happiness. They are comfortable with themselves and their lives, and remain in that condition for as long as they are not threatened. When they are not eating or sleeping, they pass the time exploring and playing, never asking for reasons to live. Life itself is enough for them."
Today marks one year since I first encountered Harmogu, so it deserves commemoration. Somehow through a lucky accident, YouTube recommended the video below to me, which caught my attention. The image - black and white, downcast eyes, intensity, a bookshelf - promised a special experience. And it was. I clicked, and it was the start of something that changed my life.
To this day, I wonder what prior combination of searches and activities caused this video to bubble up into YouTube's suggestions, but I have no clue.
It is a matter of public record what happened next, since my comments are all there to show my reaction, played out over the next couple of months.
One might call it a mid-life crisis, but a subconscious wildfire was ignited. My friend says that Harmogu activated my "Inner Mongolian", and I agree. There was plenty of smoldering peat that had been laid down 15 years earlier when I had my last serious Mongolian plans, so all I had to do was return to my shelf of Mongolian books (and memories) to reactivate what turned out to be a launch sequence.
So there is that. There are also several other layers to this onion. One is that Harmogu's music has a very direct effect on me, somehow being at my precise personal resonant frequency. [This is why the Secret Mongols of History are related to Ellison's lower frequencies in the earlier blog post.] I can't claim any objectivity in that, but, having analyzed it endlessly, I know that it is a real effect. I will save the "oohing and aahing" for my playlists and YouTube comments, and for a longer future post that could do justice to the full effect that these songs have on me.
Another layer is that the whole combined persona of Harmogu as a musician, writer, and photographer extraordinaire was very inspiring to me, and led me to realize that I was going to have to let some of my content loose on the (unsuspecting) public if I was going to be prepared for the eventual next step. So this blog and my other outlets have emerged from that.
I would not really have imagined a year ago the long and involved sequence of events that led to the very intense process of "Mongolizing" [as it is called around here] that occurred, but then again, my life is jam-packed with previously unimaginable events that I am now forced to write down as fiction if they are to be believed at all. New friends, new life, and new energy have fissioned off from the chain reaction.
This blog only attempts to capture a few of the reflections on the surface of some deep waters that I am diving into. I see something beautiful down there, and eventually I hope to describe it properly. Some of that will be hard, and some of it I am not sure if I am prepared for. But it was Harmogu that catalyzed the final stages of this reaction, for which I am so grateful.
