Bliss Is Ordinary

An Introduction to Songcatching

March 19, 2022 Mythic Studios Season 1
Bliss Is Ordinary
An Introduction to Songcatching
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Yam launches the first episode of Bliss Is Ordinary and has a conversation with songcatcher Jessi Rado about her earliest memories of singing, the growing phenomenon of 'songcatching', and how singing together can benefit community health. Jessi teaches Yam a song about finding peace inside even when things aren't going well.

INSTAGRAM : @blissisordinary
PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/blissisordinary
CONTACT : blissisordinary@gmail.com

BIO TRANSCRIPT EPISODE 1:
An introduction to Songcatching

Release Date:
3/20/22

Production:
McClain Houston
John Iarussi
Alexandra Dragland Iarussi
Jessi Radovich
Traesti Luther
Brian O'Dwyer

Engineering:
Traesti Luther
Yam Sweets

Editing:
Yam Sweets

Original Music & Recordings Courtesy of:
Shamsi Bluesky Cummings
Yam Sweets
Jessi Radovich
Yin Dwyer
Earth Practice
Wild Choir
Freesound.org

Photo of Jessi Radovich Provided by:
Leo Moringstar

Special Thanks:
Griffin
The Mythic Studios Family
The Iarussi Family

Dawn Motherheart Yoga Sangha

Additional Support Provided by:
The Supreme Dharma

* * *

(0:01)

Support for this podcast is brought to you from within. Remember, you are supported from within, always 

(BIO Theme)

Yam: Greetings and salutations, people of earth. Greetings creatures and lifeforms and beings of all kinds. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the very first episode of Bliss Is Ordinary. I am your very delighted host, Yam Sweets AKA Yam Sweets: your usher at the door of the theater that is this show. I'm also an aspiring wizard, a devotee of the universe, and a servant of Love itself. I'm coming at you right now broadcasting from the so-called town of Bellingham, Washington as a settler on the ancestral lands of the Lummi people, the Nooksack people and other Coast Salish peoples. 

So you might want to know what is this show? You're tuning in. You might know me, you might not, but make no mistake: this is a show solely dedicated to celebrating the gift of song. It's a podcast about singing, but not only that, it's a podcast that sings. Yes. We're not just going to talk about singing. We are going to sing. 

I've been singing pretty regularly for the past four years. Every day, I’m pretty sure. And it's completely transformed my way of doing things. So much so that I now find myself hosting a show about it. My hope is that through this show, you may find yourself singing more. Simple as that. My hope is that through listening to this program and following along with us, you'll walk away with a deeper connection to your own voice. And if you're with me during this show, and you're a listener of this show, you'll be singing with me, hopefully. We will be teaching an original song at the end of this episode, so stay tuned for that, or just go right to the end right now and you can just learn a song if you'd like. But I do think we've got some really relevant things to talk about today. Okay, without much more preamble, let's do this. 

(Music)

(03:07)

Yam: Dear listeners, we have a very special guest in the studio today. She's my band mate for life, my roommate for a long time, I hope…She's a counselor and an integrative artist. She really helped me unblock my own voice, and to this day helps me sing my song. Put your hands together and welcome to the stage, Jesse Radovich.

Jessi: Hi. 

Yam: Hi Jesse. It's so nice to have you here. I was thinking we could start this interview off with a little bit of a check-in. Like a mind, body, heart check-in. Like, how are you doing in this moment? And you could say, ‘well, my body feels this, my mind feels this, and my heart feels this. You can be as lengthy or as brief as you'd like. 

J: I'm feeling great. My body feels good and healthy, which is nice because you and I are quarantined in the downstairs studio while our roommates are upstairs sick with COVID. 

Y: Yeah. Little known fact. I haven’t said this yet in the show, but we are in quarantine right now.

J: Deep quarantine. But feeling good. Feeling fortunate for that. And my mind is feeling really curious and open. And I like that state a lot. My heart feels calm. Yeah. And open to you. And to this time together. I'm looking right at you, Yam, in a little patch of sunlight in the studio with some great shadows from the trees outside. We've got some sun. Mmm. It's a good day. 

(Music)

 Y: Would you be able to describe to the listeners out there, some of the ways you spend your time? 

(04:37)

J: I am a counselor, a mental health counselor. I am an artist. There's a fair amount of my art that kind of focuses on healing and community healing and individual healing. I spend time during the growing season gardening and growing food and flowers, just rediscovering the earth after growing up in a place with a lot of concrete. I’m a musician. I really love music & singing with people casually and also practicing and performing my solo music. I also teach community rest classes that I've done for some years and just really enjoy making spaces for people to gather and dive inward together. A lot of my life is centered around helping people to heal and specifically to heal like in their minds and hearts. That's something I've been interested in since I was like a young kid. And I'd say I'm a human who’s learning and growing and highly experiential with life. Yes. Like I really metabolize a lot of my own experiences outward back into art and community offerings, and enjoy that process. Even though that's really vulnerable for me. 

Y: I wanna go back in time a little bit to when you were younger, like, what are your earliest memories of singing if you have any? 

J: Oh yeah. I would love to hear a lot of people answer this actually it's such a good question. Some of my earliest memories of singing, um, probably the earliest one I think I'm four years old and I'm sitting on the couch in my family house and I'm alone in the room. There's sun coming in through the window and there's those little, um, specks of dust. And I'm singing to myself, this church song. I grew up in a Christian Church. And so I'm singing this church song about, um, Jesus wanting me to be a sun beam, which is a pretty nice sentiment. So I'm singing that to myself, just in total delight of the moment, watching these sun beams. That's a pretty good picture of me though, I think, in my essence.

Y: Of all the songs I remember, cuz I also grew up in church, like in religious institutions, that’s a pretty, I, I never heard that song. Jesus wants me to be a sun beam.

J: Do you know it? 

Y: No. Most of mine are associated with like war and marching and stuff, but 

J: I mean, it's, it's still maybe a little pushy of a song, but it was like…so the song goes

Y: Yeah what do you got it? Our first song on the podcast. I didn’t expect it to be this one, but

 J: Let me find a good key for it. It goes: A sun beam, A sun beam, Jesus wants me for a sun beam. A sun beam, A sun beam, I’ll be a sun beam for him.

(Banter)

J: Yeah it gets a little pushy at the end. But, uh, other than that, you know, my biggest exposure to singing was through church. My parents were part of a small community based evangelical church and there was a lot of singing. I watched adults singing together in this really passionate way, like every week. So my, um, a lot of my earlier memories are kind of singing along or singing with these songs or just playing in and around this state of music that was really like embodied, and people meant it 

Y: That's really sweet. I mean, a lot of people's early memories of singing, if they did grow up in some kind of religious, uh, setting, it's, it's rare that it's such a pleasant memory. That's really kind of nice just to hear you remember singing, like groups of people singing and playing around them. 

J: Yeah. It's a really comforting memory for me to be a kid and be around adults, singing a lot and especially singing in a way that was really passionate. You know, I think when I would play alone at home, I would like mimic that, you know, I'd like put on shows, but I kind of like learned that, I mean, it was called worship in the church and that was certainly connected to, you know, the way that people were expressing their, their connection to, to the divine, to what's out there. I know that people’s connection to music is vast and different. Mine just happened to be in this unique way where people were singing together. Um, through church.

(Music)

J: When you're a kid, you have songs you learn in preschool, maybe in school. And then if you grew up in maybe a, a religion or like a culture that has some songs that people know you might have songs, but there's a big gap for a lot of people around what's available to sing. Like what do you sing? Like when what's available is mostly just what's exists on the radio and there's again, there's like incredible music out there. There's so much, there's so much rich music in the world to dive into, and also it can be sort of limited. 

Y: This feels like a great time to ask you, do you write songs? or I've heard it described as catching songs? Is there a difference between writing and catching? 

J: Lots of people would describe song catching in different ways. Just like if you ask people like what's dancing, people would say all kinds of different things about this shared experience. For me, song catching is like, I'm hearing, I can hear a song. I can hear something like a radio in the next room. So sometimes I can hear a couple of words and I can hear a melody for sure. Almost like garbled words. And just like, I can hear the sound of the words, like the consonants or something or the vows. And then I'll catch that, like whatever that line was and repeat it for a while. And in repeating it, I'll start to hear more and more of it, and it’s so different than writing. It's like not like, oh, what should the next part be? It's like a listening practice. And so many songs have come through this way. They seem to flow pretty freely. 

(Music)

J: I would describe songcatching as a practice of listening in to discover or catch a song that's that exists in the earth or like in the ether. My belief is that the whole world is made from song. There's a lot of creation stories that start with sound like that. The first thing that came through was a sound and then looking into various kinds of physics, you know, there's a lot of really interesting things about sound as a basis for, for the creative world. So to me, singing is it's like walking, breathing, you know, smiling, singing is something that humans do and, or at least can do. Maybe it's gotten forgotten in there…

Y: Say somebody's listening and they've never even considered singing. They like to hear it, maybe, they like music. What are the benefits of singing in everyday life? Like, why sing?

J: Singing does feel really good for me in my body. I feel my life feels more full when I'm singing often. I won't assume that that's true for everybody, but I will say that I, we, have sang with a lot of people and have watched people become transformed from singing. So just at a physical level, that much breathing and that much passing air and energy, like through your throat, from your diaphragm up and out feels really good. It's, you know, it's not uncommon for emotion to come up when you start singing, so things that feel backed up or stuck, get a little more space to move. It's also, it’s a creative act. So again, I'm an artist. So I can only speak really for myself, but my life is a more full, robust, alive place when I'm creative. I also love singing in a daily way as just a way to replace words. We've just grown into a culture where we put a lot of value on words. I'm not so sure that they're more valuable than other forms of communication. I like when singing replaces some of that

(Music)

J: I see singing as a natural capacity in human beings. And even if you don't have a voice, you can make a sound like a voice. You have a form of expression that is like a song. Songcatching was something that started to happen when I got to the Northwest. And then it felt like a natural phenomenon I was discovering. And then later learned it's something that people have a name for and are doing all over the place. So that's really cool. I love that, that organic discovery that turns out like, oh, this is a thing that happens for people. When I started listening in a little bit and it happened accidentally for me the first time I remember it happening, I was hiking a hill on the east side of the state. The rhythm of my footprints was, you know, probably just making like a really steady beat, almost like a drum beat. And I was walking and I, I started to get lost in the rhythm and inside of that rhythm, I started to hear just like a…(sound)…I just remember that was the first thing. And I just started repeating it. And the more that I listened in there were other parts. And then there was a song. That was a song. It was really simple.

(15:35) 

Y: In your experience, is there any particular conditions needed to, to effectively catch a song? 

J: I would say whatever allows one to listen. I, yeah, I would say whatever allows one to listen, and whether that's listening to the actual environment, you're in like a sound of water or 

Y: The sound of dishes being done… 

J: The sound of dishes being done, or whether it's listening into the moment in life that you're in, you know, you're like you're in a tough spot. Leaning into it with that kind of open listening curiosity, to me, that's the prerequisite for a song catching, is listening. 

Y: Is there any guidance or tips you'd give to someone listening who may be curious about trying to catch a song? Maybe they've never done that before. 

J: Yeah. I love this question because, uh, over time as we've met more people who hold songs, we've heard lots of people share their different tips or like their entry point. So what I like to tell people is go for a walk walk and just get your feet rhythmic. Like just let a rhythm start to come into your body and then listen for the first little note or word or hum that comes through and repeat it. Just let it repeat and loop for a while. For me, that's the beginning. It's also really good to know that we don't have to reach for these things. It's not like an agonizing labor. Although some songs are really intense and they come through like a birth, you know, I've had a few songs that came through that were like really coming through intense pain and they were hard to give birth to, but having it be a relaxed practice, like if nothing comes, nothing comes, you know.

Y: Do you remember the first time where you really got in touch with your own voice?

J: I started singing when I got to Bellingham with a pretty DIY group called wild choir. And the people that I was singing with were all really, we were all really collectively finding our voices in a lot of ways for the first time. Some people had more singing experience than others, but it was very, very vulnerable. So it was like a small container and it was vulnerable and it was an experiment.

Y: An experiment in what if you don't mind me asking? 

J: Well, there wasn't, we weren't following a format. I didn't even know what a song circle was coming from the east coast out on the west coast. I now know there's tons of song circles. I mean, there's song circles all over the place, all over the world. And I didn't know about them. So this idea of that people get to together, they get in a circle, they learn a song together and then they sing it all together wasn't something I really knew happened, but the, you know, the experiment of it was, yeah, there was no structure. There was no leader. We were bringing forward songs that were our own. So we weren't necessarily learning songs from other outside of the circle. So it was really vulnerable because people were sharing the truths that were feeling alive for them. You have to sing alone for a moment when you teach a song to a group of people and we didn't have any agenda about where it was going to go…

(18:49)

(Music)

 J: The first song I shared at wild choir was one sentence that we repeated over and over again, and didn't go anywhere else. That was a song. It was fine. 

 Y: Well, I'm tempted to ask what, what that sentence was. 

(Music)

J: It just repeats like that. It's really beautiful when lots of people start adding voices and harmonies. In that space, in Wild Choir, there were really like countless experiences of hearing my own voice for the first time and discovering what my actual voice sounded like to me, but more than what it sounded like was feeling where my true voice comes from in my body. I think that a lot of us learn to speak from a place in our body, maybe in our throat or chest, that's not sunken in and true. So I started to notice that I had trained myself to sing at this very surface place, like at the top of my throat and the top of my chest. And when I let myself experiment and explore and open a bit more, that there was like deeper tones that I enjoyed. Um, yeah. 

And I identify as a woman. And so even for the ways that women are not always encouraged to have deeper voices or to have that fullness, but really being able to feel where my voice felt pleasurable in my body, where it felt right. That same experience happened so many times in Wild Choir, too. To hear someone just break through, you know, they would like, they would break through whatever it was…the limitation that was there for them…and then it would just be like tears and this whole full body, like, yes, you know, this moment when maybe a person is anticipating being shamed or embarrassed and it's just met with relief and community celebration, like, yes, your voice! your voice, that's you! we know it!We recognize you! When I talk about singing, like that’s what I'm talking about. It's such freedom from the inside of the body, from the heart outward. And it's so recognizable. And when I hear someone singing from their heart, I can't fathom imagining that their voice doesn't sound good. 

Y: It's just so authentic to them. 

J: Yeah. Like that's what I mean by that paradigm shift of like, what do you mean good or bad voice? This is a human voice singing. It's a miracle 

(Music)

Y: In your own words, how does singing together benefit a community? 

J: What I've witnessed is that singing together is part of community. I like to say this during the pandemic, community is immunity. Community is part of human immunity, too. 

Y: I like that. I like that a lot 

J: Being together, even if we're not physically together in all the ways we would've been before singing to each other, singing together, passing songs, doing it n whatever way can, is, is remembering that we are interdependent, we could never be separated. It's not the nature of things. So in remembering that that's community, it's community immunity, we're keeping each other more healthy and well and robust. What I love about specifically the song within my community is because I sang regularly with a lot of the same people. There are friends. I have that, I know their songs. Like I know the way that they catch songs. I know the sound in their songs. I know the rhythms they tend to use. And it feels like knowing the shape of someone's body or like knowing someone's fingerprint or knowing the smell of someone, you know, this like indescribable imprint of a person is such a, it's so deep in my heart. Part of why I love that also is it's a way that we conjure each other when we're a part. And we've done that as community before, when someone's been going through a hard time and not able to join in, it's like just start singing one of their songs. And it's, it's like a transmission of love of support of connectedness. So singing is, to me, it's the fabric of the community I have now. I love that. I've never experienced that quite this way before 

 (Music)

(25:41)

J: I also think communities that can sing together are just it’s…it’s also fun. A community that can play together. Oh, that's fun. Oh my gosh. Like we, I mean, we haven't even talked about that. Like riffing, like free styling being spontaneous, like just making songs up on the spot, going wild. 

 Y: Yeah, songs that'll never be, um, remembered or caught for later. It's just like, they're happening in the moment. And it's just for us then, It’s just that one time. I live for that for that moment. 

J: Oh man. That playfulness play is something that happens generally when there’s safety. Human brains are like kind of wired that way. You know, if you're, if you're really unsafe, your brain's not gonna prioritize play. It's not the most important thing. When there's like increasing safety the capacity to play starts to really open. So communities that can play together and be playful together and learn and do that are, you know, it's possible that that's part of creating safety as community too. 

Y: A mutual friend of ours in Philadelphia once said singing is like a prayer amplified a hundred times. That's what I Remember. 

J: I love when she says that. Dawn MotherHeart, MotherHeart yoga in Philadelphia, just for reference, such an incredible teacher. 

Y: What does that bring up in you when you hear that. Is singing praying for you? 

J: Well, I think praying is a hard word. Not that it should be shy’d away from, but there's just a lot of associations people have with it. I am comfortable with the word because I sort of believe that we're whatever praying is, we're doing it all the time. Like we're repeating thoughts over and over again. So whether we're intending, whether we're saying prayers, we intend to be saying or not, we're reinforcing like similar thoughts and ideas over and over again. 

Y: That reminds me of something I've heard once around mantra. We're all practicing something, whether we're conscious of it or not. We're all running some program through our minds. Why not have a little bit of, uh, input? 

(27:39)

J: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And song singing is just, it gets things get stuck in your head that it's like, that can be terrible. And it also can be like the biggest advantage that singing has. It's like, it's catchy. It gets stuck. So you just start to repeat something that might actually be really helpful for you might contain a truth or a perspective shift or a reminder that is actually like lifesaving for you in a difficult time. I feel that way, not just with the songs that I've caught, but with songs that all, all of our friends have caught that we've learned from other people in other communities, some of those songs have pulled me through like really dicey times in life. 

Y: Maybe even a more helpful way to frame it is, it's like there are ear worms or there's things that get stuck. Like

J: Ugh. 

Y: You know, I have a seven and a half year old son and I'm teaching him all sorts of things about music. And there's one song he really likes right now. 

J: You gotta say what it 

Y: I, I don't know how copyright works in podcasts 

J: You can name, you could say the name of 

Y: The song, that song blue by that band, Eiffel 65

J: The Song blue. 

Y: Yeah. 
 
 J: Wait, the song blue by Eiffel 65

Y: The song blue by Eiffel 65. That's the definition of an earworm, 

(Music)

Y: Oh, that, that gets stuck. That can get stuck in your head. I feel like the songs that we're talking about, the songs tthat you catch it's, it's more like it takes root inside us. It doesn't just get stuck. It like plants itself and grows into something more.

J: In my counselor brain I'm often thinking about brain and neurochemistry and things like that. Anything that gets repeated becomes becomes like a shortcut inside of us. That's like our brains are made to be looking for, to conserve energy. So they, they build patterns based on repetition. So why not lay in there in this incredible way that music does in this place that is so embedded so much more deeply even than language, why not be repeating over and over again, the pathways you're hoping to encourage the root system? And the amazing thing about a song is you just can sing it over and over again. You can continue to repeat it. And all the work that's been done around music for people experiencing dementia and, um, Alzheimer's like how someone can be sort of like really, really far gone from their, a memory system and then music can suddenly, they're back. They're remembering. There's something there. So music just being so deep in us somewhere. So singing, you know, when, when the, the words you're singing or if it's wordless, like the sounds are feeling true and you, your heart is involved, you know, like you're letting, allowing yourself to be moved and feel, and then your body is making the sound or you're expressing in whatever way it is that you express how your voice shows up. That’s, if we can say magic, you know, like that's a certain kind of magic. I'm not sure what happens other than the vessel of our bodies and the congruence of my mind. And my heart are in alignment. They're in agreement with what my body is doing right now. That's a very, very powerful moment in a human. Again, there’s stories in lots of mythologies and even histories about sound bringing walls down and groups of, of people singing, like stopping really intense moments like in their tracks. So I would say that that statement to me feels really cosmically true in a way, 

(31:46)

Y: What makes a song medicinal? Like what makes it a medicine? I mean, medicine song feels like a packed phrase, you know, because I traditionally, I feel like I've heard that related mostly to indigenous cultures from this country and different tribal songs as medicine songs, but I've also heard reflected to me when I'm sharing these, these heart songs that it's medicine. Oh, that song was medicine for me. I needed that, that heart medicine. So I'm, I'm just curious in your own words, if like what, what makes a song medicine as opposed to Eiffel 65’s Blue, although that might be a medicine song for somebody


 J: For Waldo it’s definitely a medicine song. Really without telling anybody what their experience is or isn't because people experience medicine and all kinds of things. I've never tried to answer that question, but I, I would say that a medicine song is a song that deeply connects you to your own wholeness and, and the wholeness of all of life. So that also could be a song that connects you to the way things are. The reality of things. I would say a medicine song is free. Like it's not for sale. It's not produced it's in its raw form is a transmission from the heart to the heart. And it healed that heals being present, being present in our hearts together is a healing medicine. It's a balm.

(Music)

Y: And now the part of the show that I'm particularly excited about: music time. One of my deepest hope for this show is to try and include in every episode an original song that we can teach you, give you, and you can work with it on your own when we're not hanging out in podcast land. Why do I think that's important? Well, I mean, on a grand scale, my big vision would be that more people start singing that last of people sing more, that singing is normalized. And who knows? You might run into somebody somewhere at some point, and you both might know a song together. This is a new edge for me as a songcatcher to try and share it over the airwaves like this. But I really believe in trying. Um, so we're gonna give this on our first episode and see how this works. Jesse, do you have anything for us rattling around in that gorgeous heart of yours? 

(34:34)

J: I do have a song I'd like to share. 

Y: Yessss. 

J: When I share songs, I like to say let's keep it heirloom, which to me means, just keep the song close to its origin and, uh, share in a good way. So for me, that means when you share a song you've learned, try to share who it came from, name them also. You could share the bio region that the song came from. And even more specifically, if you know, the ancestral lands that the song came from. Lastly is just keep it, just be cool about it. Give credit when you know where a song came from, you know, don't record a song and then sell it or take part of it for yourself, just be, keep it a free gift. The songs are a free gift and they can circulate so freely when we honor them and, and where they came from.

 Y: Now I was to just laughing, but not at the part about it being free and being like, I think we should be cool and honor the songs. It's just, this thought crossed my, of any of these heart songs, you know, being somehow sold or, or being recorded by some famous recording artists. And then it ends up on the radio. You know, next up on the next up on the show we've got a heart song coming up, busting up the charts. 

J: I mean, I think it's happened a lot though, if we're being honest, like this underbelly of just how things get taken, you know, and even with medicine songs and especially, you know, I'm learning a lot right now about gift economy and just different ways of sharing abundance. And it's, so it's so foreign to most of us because of the systems that we grew up in, that there's enough when we share freely, you know, and as soon as we kind of siphon something off or silo it and put it in the realm of profit or try to make it work for us in a way it changes the nature of it in a sense. So there's an abundance of song. We can all sing freely, like the song that I'm about to share. You have permission it, you have permission to share it with your friends, with your kids to sing it alone. You can share it at a song circle…

Y: Your Grammy and pap pap?

(36:47)

J: You know, you can sing it, just keep it heirloom. Like, keep it free, keep it a free gift by keeping it connected to its lineage. Ultimately the songs come from the source of wherever song comes from, which to me is abundantly free. So I think if we keep those practices, it's not just doing things in a good way. It's just really beautiful. I love when I hear like who a song came through or where the lands that it originated from. That's the earth singing. 

Y: Would you care to unpack this track for us a little bit? The medicine of it maybe? How it came through…anything like that. 

J: It came through when I was in the shower about four years ago, and I remember at that time I was just wrestling with a lot. There was unrest in both my mind and my heart. In that way that catching a song is a deep listening practice, like I mentioned earlier, I was just, I must have just been listening a bit and these words and rhythm floated through. Would it be helpful for me to say the lyrics of the song? 

Y: Yes, I think so. 

J: It's just two lines. 

Peace in my heart, even when I don't know where to start. Peace in my mind, even when I'm not fine.

This song is about deep possibility. It's a song of possibility. What if peace isn't contingent on my mind having some certainty or a plan? And what if peace is not even contingent on things going well? Is there a deeper okayness, a deeper piece that can exist in all circumstances? So that was the question, the inquiry in my heart. And this is the response that came back. 

So let's learn this song together. We’ll do it echo style. So I'll sing the first line and then you yam and you dear listener at home, will sing it back. And that's how we'll learn the song. And then we'll sing it through altogether. Sound good? 

Y: That sounds good. 

J: So I'll sing a line and then you sing it back to me. 

(Song teaching)

Y: Well that's about all the time we have, um, for today's interview. Yeah. Just thank you so much for making the commute from our bedroom to our podcast studio and being a part of this, this nascent show 

J: I’m honored. 

Y: It’s really nice to have you as the first guest. Well, second guest, really…the very first special guest being you, the listener.

(42:13)

I’ve got just one more question for you: Bliss is ordinary…true or false?

J: Pass. Well, what I think you mean what that phrase means to me, Bliss is ordinary, is that everyday life has most of what we need. There’s there's no, um, there's no like heightened place to get to. There's no like that thing up there on that mountain peak out there that then suddenly, oh, this, this is BLISS, you know? Like I’m like completely blown out, overwhelmed by the magnitude of this. I really believe that the deeper happiness or peace is found in, in really sinking into ordinary moments. And if it's not accessible in the ordinary, then I'm not sure that I'm interested in it. Like if it's some exclusive thing that you have to be able to have access to through all these difficult channels - I do think it's a narrow pathway to coming into peace and and happiness because you, they will change you and you'll let go of a lot in order to like receive them - yeah if it's not available in the every day, then I'm not sure what that would be. 

Y: Unfortunately, that's the wrong answer. We were looking for something else. 

J: And this is where you push a button and I like, I go down through a trap door on the floor?

Y: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we did it. We all did it together. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for participating in whatever way you did. If you enjoyed listening to today's show and would like to continue enjoying our show, I now wholeheartedly invite you and your robot of preference to like, and subscribe and follow, et cetera, our show so that you can be included in listening to, and hopefully actively participating in future episodes of Bliss Is Ordinary. 

Until next time, keep singing. I'll do the same. 


OM MANE PADME HUM 108x
THANK GURU 108x
WORLD BE FREE
WORLD BE FUN
WORLD HEALING

An Introduction to Jessi Radovich <3
Jessi's Earliest Memories of Singing
Jessi Wants Me for a Sunbeam
A Radio In The Next Room...
Songcatching 101
A Way to Replace Words
Lost In The Rhythm
Prerequisite for Songcatching
Pro Tip
Enter Wild Choir
I Am The Light Hey Hey I Am
Break-Thru
Community Is Immunity
It's Where I Wanna Be
A Prayer Amplified 100x
Definition of An Earworm
What Makes a Song Medicinal?
Music Time!
Unpack This Track
Jessi Teaches Yam a Song
True or False?
Roll Credits