Later, rather than sooner, that is my hope anyway. But still, the fact remains indifferently true: there is not a single person on this planet who is not going to die; this while the majority lives on—wasting what time they have—secure in his or her immortality.

Of course, there is no need to turn morbid about it, or to dwell on it, but unless we are utterly convinced that this is all there is to it, and that all these pesky, unanswerable questions are just that, pesky and unanswerable; unless this is our take on things and we opt not to listen to our heart of hearts which still does ask questions; unless we really could not care less, we do not have all the time in the world.

Annie Dillard once offered this quote to budding (or not so budding) writers:

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.

That is, after all, the case.

What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon?

What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

We’re dealt a hand that includes eighty or so relatively productive years. Twenty (give or take) of these, at the front end of things, are usually spent doing nothing much but learning how to walk and read.

Another twenty or so of these are usually spent seeking and finding a better half to sprout some bairns with.

The next twenty are usually spent planning for retirement and then actually retiring—not unlike treading water.

The last twenty (less a week or two) are then spent in blissfully boring retirement where pains now begin to come and go (and sometimes don’t go) and then we find ourselves in a hospital bed surrounded by sad-looking family.

The last week or two (the ones deducted in the paragraph above) are then spent wondering why we’ve wasted eighty years ignoring those pesky, unanswerable questions, which—it suddenly occurs to you—may not be so unanswerable after all, if you had only asked them properly.

And then it’s too late.

Imagine this:

All Americans, every man, woman and child have left their self-destructive food habits behind and are now settled in on a mostly vegan regimen, much like the one outlined in, say, Fuhrman’s Eat to Live.

As a consequence, gone is obesity, gone is overweight, gone is the host of afflictions and illnesses attendant to those conditions, including digestive problems, skin problems, allergies, asthma, you name it; gone are all those disorders that a healthy body is quite capable of handling on its own, given the correct resource of nutritious food.

Imagine this, and imagine the colossal—and I used this word in its most impressive meaning—ramifications this would have on our economy. Imagine the effect this would have the following industries:

The $50-100 billion a year diet industry—no more, sad to see it go. The $800 billion a year meat industry—on the brink of extinction for lack of customers.

The $115 billion a year fast food industry—stranded and customer-less. Floundering, too, is the 6.7 Billion gallons a year beer industry.

The $4.5 billion a year skin-care industry is in despair over the naturally healthy skin that Americans insist on fostering. Oh, and the $20 billion a year candy industry, last seen packing things up and heading out of Dodge.

The $100 billion a year dairy industry—in serious trouble, to say the least.

The $40 billion a year non-alcoholic beverage—ditto.

The $200 billion a year auto industry, while not dead, is having a serious problem with healthier people insisting to walk or bicycle their way around.

And, oh, yes, the $2 trillion a year medical industry is on the rocks. People just aren’t getting sick enough—a travesty. Also in rough water is the $500 billion a year health insurance industry—another travesty.

Other industries are also in trouble, among them the fashion industry, people care less and less about how they look and more and more about how they feel. The entertainment industry is trying to solve the problem of how to keep these health nuts on the couch, or in the theaters, when they’d rather want to be out hiking, walking, rafting, sailing.

Oh, and advertising, pretty much belly up or at least drastically down-scaled. And feeling healthy, and moving about, people don’t seem to be as depressed these days, a terrible blow to the mental health industry.

The list does go on and on and toward the inevitable conclusion: a healthy America would kill the economy.

Therefore, I want it known that it is our patriotic duty, as Americans, to remain shackled to the low-nutrient/hi-calorie and fat glob that we are wallowing in right now.

To do, or even think, otherwise would, frankly, be un-American.

Eddi is of course Eddi Reader, in my view one of the nicest voices ever to grace the Earth.

I stumbled upon her by mistake, more or less. In a used record store in Pasadena, California. Some of you will know the place: Pooh-Bah’s, at its original location.

This odd looking candy-floss consuming girl on this odd looking CD sleeve: Candyfloss and Medicine, it said.

I’ll take it, I said.

And have I never regretted it. Cooler singers seldom arise.

Years later, it was through her that I then discovered 1 Giant Leap, who recorded her for both of their releases, “1 Giant Leap” and “What About Me?”

Sometimes listening to her I fall in love the same way I’d fall in love with Virginia Woolf when I read her sometimes, as with some ancient and wise one to turn to and curl up against for safety, for comfort, for understanding.

And in one of those curled up moments, I wrote this tribute to Eddi.

Ulf Wolf

PS. To view the video of this song, click the picture, or click here.

PPS. I have set up a YouTube channel for my song(poem)s named VargenUlf (it means “Ulf the Wolf” in Swedish), which you can find here.

Some time ago, I was looking for a name. I was looking high and low for what to call that inner stillness that on the surface seems so fragile and easily broken but in fact is the unbreakable core of our strength.

I was wondering what to call that thing that certainly doesn’t make a fuss about it, but just goes on shining underneath it all, inextinguishable—literally.

Finally the name just came to me: The Quiet Light of Strings. I believe I was playing the intro to this song at the time. Playing it and listening at depth for the name.

The Quiet Light of Strings. The music within the music, the light eternal.

Ulf Wolf

PS. To view the video of this song, click the picture, or click here.

PPS. I have set up a YouTube channel for my song(poem)s named VargenUlf (it means “Ulf the Wolf” in Swedish), which you can find here.

By the time Anna Akhmatova died in 1966 she was one of Russia’s most beloved poets.

Born in 1889 she took the brunt of the Communist revolution and all its insanities and without leaving, as did so many of her contemporaries.

When asked by her friends and colleagues to go with them to Paris (where the persecuted  Russian artist community had formed a new home-base) she refused, saying someone has to stay, endure, and bear witness to the atrocities of the day.

Several biographies suggest that the only reason she survived the Stalin purges was that Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, loved her poetry—or she would have been killed along with his other millions of victims.

Courage in the face of death. Few things move me more.

The name of my tribute to this amazing woman is “Akhmatova Beriosa.” Beriosa is the Russian word for Birch, one of my favorite trees, and a tree that as a species seems to have made Russian its unofficial home.

Beriosa is also one of the most beautiful words that I know.

Not that Anna Akhmatova was named Beriosa, that is my tribute to her, attaching the most beautiful word to the most amazing woman.

One legend has it that when Anna returned to St. Petersburg (Leningrad, then) from Vladivostok after the Second World War, she stopped off in Moscow, where she took in the ballet one night. Spotted, she was prevailed upon to, after the ballet performance, to take the stage and recite a few of her poems. She agreed to do that.

After this perhaps fifteen minute impromptu recital, the audience, to a man, rose, and gave her an equally long ovation. She was that loved.

When Joseph Stalin got wind of this, only question was: “Who organized the ovation?”

To have had the courage to stare down this regime, with nothing but poems as weapons, and to survive.

That was Akhmatova Beriosa.

This song is my tribute to her.

Ulf Wolf

PS. To view the video of this song, click the picture, or click here.

PPS. I have set up a YouTube channel for my song(poem)s named VargenUlf (it means “Ulf the Wolf” in Swedish), which you can find here.

This was the last song I wrote.

When I began writing “Words” I don’t know whether I knew that it would be my last song, but by the time I reached the end I did.

Words, when you stop to think about it, are amazing things. Language is an amazing thing. Too amazing, in my view, for an infant to learn just by being talked at for a few years by swiftly moving grown-ups.

In fact, I believe that as young children we’re simply being reminded. It is simply too fantastic that by hearing language for a while we absorb not only words and their meanings but the gender of things, the inflection of verbs, the cases of things, tenses of things, the whole universe called grammar.

In Swedish, for example, the definite article “the” is added to the noun as a suffix, either –en, or –et, depending on the “gender” of the noun. Now, there’s no rhyme or reason to which noun take –en and which noun takes –et, none. Still, hearing language for a while, the child just knows. And that’s Swedish. I’m not even going to touch German. Or Finnish.

Language has deeper roots somewhere within us than infantile memory, of that I am sure.

That said. “Words” struck as an apt way of telling who I am, what I do, and how I come to you. Not only that, it is also how I see and know.

My songs are my eyes, my ears, my heart. And when I stop singing, I know I am done here.

Ulf Wolf

PS. To view the video of this song, click the picture, or click here.

PPS. I have set up a YouTube channel for my song(poem)s named VargenUlf (it means “Ulf the Wolf” in Swedish), which you can find here.