On August 14th, Shawn Tompkins, well-known MMA trainer, passed away, very unexpectedly. I never had the opportunity to meet the man but I work with his mother-in-law and so found myself attending, sadly, his visitation and funeral.
Shawn was 37 when he passed and was discovered to have had an enlarged heart and blocked artery. As a trainer of high-level athletes, he was outwardly in excellent health himself and this made his passing that much more incomprehensible. He left behind his family, his wife Emilie, a stable of devoted fighters and uncountable friends.
I had never met Shawn and, prior to his death, knew him only through his burgeoning reputation as a trainer of top MMA fighters. MMA stands for mixed martial arts, a combination of different schools of physical combat--boxing, judo, kickboxing, tae kwon do, etc.---and Shawn was more than well-respected in his field. Until recently, this type of fighting was banned in Ontario and Shawn and Emilie had had to set up residence in the States, Las Vegas to be exact, in order for Shawn to be able to practice his craft. Recently, with the ban on MMA fighting in Ontario lifted, he was exactly where he wanted to be with his life when it all ended.
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| Shawn and Emilie |
At his evening visitation, my wife and I found ourselves standing in line for two hours. Earlier in the day, there were similar waits. This and everything we saw and heard while we were there was a testament to the love people had for this man and his family. As I watched the throng of people there to pay their respects that evening, it also was obvious that the vast majority of them were young and, to be honest, beautiful in their youth. Both men and women. This did not terribly surprise me, it occurred to me that Shawn's was quite likely the youngest and most vital person's funeral I'd ever attended and it only made sense that that his peers would be there in abundance. What I also noticed was the sense of camaraderie; the hugs, back-slapping, the tears. People who'd obviously not seen each other for long periods of time were re-united.
The young were there to pay their respects to one of their departed own. This, of course, should never have to happen, it belies the natural order of things. We don't want to be reminded of our own mortality at the best of times but death is the ultimate expectation. What affects us even more deeply though is the totally unexpected passing of the young, of unforeseen causes. It is impossible then to not look inwardly and possibly re-evaluate our own lives.
The funeral itself needed to be moved to a venue that would accommodate the huge number of people wanting to attend. Friends and family members took to the stage to offer remembrances and testimonials. It was impossible to not choke up, over and over. Pathos was mixed with humour. At the end of it all, there was a clear sense of who the man had been and how badly he will be missed.
Shawn Tompkins was not someone I had ever met. Nor have I ever been an MMA fan. As someone who follows sports generally, though, I was more than aware of and appreciated his accomplishments. What I discovered as I spent time watching and listening to those who did know and love him was his ability to encourage, motivate and inspire the people he touched. This was spoken of many times. It is agonizing to consider what might have been, particularly to those close to him. That is always the way when those who are seemingly in their prime pass away.
For me, at the end of it all, I found myself missing in some small way a man I'd never met.
I was driving along in my car the other day and all of the sudden realized I was bopping along to "Evacuate the Dance Floor" by Cascada. I was not totally embarrassed to realize this but new full well that I would be looked on with disdain by teenagers of all ages and, most particularly, mine, should they ever catch me.
I imagine that I would have been similarly disturbed had I caught either of my parents be-bopping away to the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. The bands of the sixties seemed so intrinsically your own, God forbid that your parents might trespass on such hallowed ground, besmirching it.
Having said that, I'm sure that every youthful generation believes its music is the only real and valid type of music and that their parents just don't get it and couldn't possibly ever understand its validity. I went through this as a kid with my parents and have been lucky enough to go through this with two different sets of kids of my own.
So, as I'm grooving to Cascada, it occurs to me that if you grew up in the sixties and experienced what seemed like such a monumental shift in musical tastes then it isn't likely that anything since is going to throw you for a loop. Another fascinating thing I've discovered is that the youth of today are also prone to appreciating the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin et al. Occasionally they even end up becoming more familiar with the music than you are. So, in a tit-for-tat kind of way I figure I'm allowed to know a little something about Lady Gaga, Cascada, Pit Bull et al.
Self-indulgent me, I now take the opportunity to describe my own personal musical journey.
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| Harry Belafonte |
As a very young boy, the music I first heard and became fond of was my parents'. Listening to Sing along with Mitch Miller every week introduced me to all the old classics (Beer Barrel Polka, Bicycle Built for Two, Surrey With the Fringe on Top, etc.) My parents had a couple of Harry Belafonte Live at Carnegie Hall albums and they were always being played. When my parents weren't playing them I was. His version of Danny Boy and La Bamba should not be missed. It seems very odd to say, but one of my biggest musical influences at the time was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. For whatever reason, my parents had one of their albums and I found myself enthralled by the power and majesty of the music. It got to the point where I would put the album on at bedtime and listen to it from the down the hall, lying in my bed, with a ruler as a baton, directing the music as it played. Nerdy, eh?
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Mormon Tabernacle Choir
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Soon after this period, I entered into a more mature form of adolescence and began an interest in contemporary music. One of my closest friends had a Simon and Garfunkel album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and soon I had my own copy. It had such a combination of lyric and melodic orchestration that I couldn't stop listening to it. More than this, though, it was mine, the first album that I owned.
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| Simon and Garfunkel |
Subsequent S&G albums ensued and the generation gap between my parents and I grew. It was nothing strained or tense but I clearly remember my Dad listening to El Condor Pasa and saying something to the effect that "That was kind of silly--who wouldn't rather be a hammer than a nail...?" Okay, I guess one of us didn't get it.
One evening I was sitting in the living room watching the Johnny Cash show. His guest that night was Joni Mitchell. I was only vaguely familiar with her. The song she played that night was For Free, a very haunting piece, to piano accompaniment. I immediately went out and bought Ladies of the Canyon, the album that song appeared in. I was then hooked on Joni Mitchell. She had all these songs that used love and loss as their themes and this resonated strongly with a lovelorn teenager. Her songs were also filled with beautiful poetry.
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| Joni Mitchell |
I have always been a sucker for beautiful poetry. So I became a fan of Leonard Cohen. I remember the first time I heard Suzanne on the radio. It was so unlike anything else I'd ever heard and even his voice struck a chord, unorthodox as it was. The poetry of the song challenged me and this was unlike most other singers. I was in high school at the time and we even studied this song (anything to get young high school kids studying poetry!) My parents were aghast at my love of Cohen. They thought he was simply the most depressing-sounding singer they'd ever heard and they were sure that I must be just as depressed if I found anything about his music attractive. I can almost see their point, now.
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| Leonard Cohen |
I think what I liked about the man and his music was that he was dealing with situations which were not well. As teenagers, we are all dealing with things that don't seem well or fixable. And here was this singer who I could identify with and, not only that, he seemed to acknowledge and deal with those things I was having a hard time with. Sometimes it was only by talking about it but that seemed enough. For me, anyway.
In 1970, a song called Lay Down (Candles in the Rain) began to appear on the radio. It was sung by a young lady named Melanie Safka and she was backed up on the song by a group called the Edwin Hawkins Singers, essentially a gospel group. It was a very powerful song and touched on her experience performing at Woodstock the previous year and looking out at the huge sea of faces, many of whom had lit candles. Listening to the song on the radio and hearing how the voices meshed, I could only picture some young southern black girl standing in front of this group of black gospel singers, belting it out. Imagine my surprise to find out she was a white girl from Queens, New York! Lay Down was one of her biggest hits, along with Brand New Key and a cover of Ruby Tuesday.
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| Melanie Safka |
I have discovered with many singers over the years, though, that sometimes their hits are not even close to being the best songs they did. This would be true of Melanie and you would be well-served to download samples of her other music. Some of my favourites are Momma Momma, Birthday of the Sun (not the live version), Leftover Wine and Bobo's Party.
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| Cat Stevens |
Soon I said hello to Cat Stevens, he of the incredible voice. Wild World was on the radio all the time and it, as well, resonated with a lovelorn teen. Once again, I found that many of my favourite songs of his were not the ones you heard most often on the radio. You could take a boo at such songs as 18th Avenue, Sad Lisa, Lady D'Arbanville, Into White, Longer Boats, and many more, actually. A drawback , however, was that my wannabe girlfriend at the time thought he was absolutely gorgeous and swooned around pictures of him constantly. Later in his career, he became a Muslim and took the name Yusuf Islam. Humourously, recently one of my young stepsons was watching a music video on You Tube of an older gentleman singing Father and Son. He remarked on how much this guy sounded like Cat Stevens. I took a quick look and said, "Uh, that is Cat Stevens". He said, "No, it says Yusuf Islam!" I then explained it to him.
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| Harry Chapin |
Harry Chapin showed up about then, with a song called Taxi. This was an epic storyteller's song, through and through, and very emblematic of how he wrote. My favourite of his is an even more epic song called Sniper. The subject material was a little dark (a man goes to the top of a university tower and starts shooting--based on the story of Charles Whitman in the sixties) but is a fairly involved psychological study of what motivates desperate people. Certainly, not all Harry's songs were dark. Please check out 30,000 Pounds of Bananas and Flowers are Red. They were also introspective songs such as Cat's in the Cradle, possibly his best-known song. Heartbreakingly, Harry passed away in a car crash at the height of his popularity, leaving behind legions of true believers.
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| Kate Bush |
I have to mention the theatrical, whimsical Kate Bush. I must have discovered her by accident as I don't remember ever hearing her on the radio or seeing her on television. Once again, a distinctive voice captures your attention. Many of the songs are thought-provoking and sensual. Some of my favourites are Cloudbusting (see the video with Donald Sutherland), The Man With the Child in His Eyes, Wow, The Sensual World and Wuthering Heights.
I could probably end my little journey here. But if I did who would I be omitting? Let's see....in no particular order there would be the Moody Blues, Bruce Cockburn, Doug McArthur, Peter, Paul and Mary, Gordon Lightfoot, Elton John, Tori Amos, Loreena McKennit, and Judy Collins, among others.
I'm sure I've neglected to mention many who were important to me and will likely slap myself later for not including them. I have, though, touched on the ones who shaped me the most and as much as music can.
Apparently the universe started as a result of an explosion of unfathomable proportions almost 14 billion years ago. This is what is commonly referred to as the big bang theory. I am quite prepared to believe this and am in no position to question it. Brilliant men using brilliant technology have come up with this and the theory is not as recent as you might think. Thus, I am prepared to believe it.
No mention is made of God in this theory, no thought toward whether He may, in fact, have lit the big bang fuse and then watched it sizzle on down to creation. This is also fine with me, as I suspect God had nothing to do with it. I also suspect that God is a man-made entity anyway. And did I mention that I was suspicious of the Bible.....?
So here's what I think. I think that there was such an explosion way back when, the earth was formed, it cooled down and life began. Mainly because it did and I don't ask questions. I imagine it began microbiologically and the next thing we knew we were running around on two feet, hitting each other with sticks.
Somewhere along the way, we began to want to make sense of everything. Then we began to notice that things happened in patterns, beginning with the sun and moon. Soon, seasons started happening. At this point, there was such a regularity to the patterns it must only have seemed that someone larger than us puny humans was in charge. At this point, God showed up. In many shapes and forms and all over the place. He was benevolent and caring at the same time he was the almighty punisher. He was even a she, if it worked. And because half the time we were scared shitless of the world around us, we were quite happy to have him in charge and watching out. We were so happy, in fact, that we began to worship him and all the other gods it made sense to worship. Life has gone on like this for millenia and still does. As is apparent, we continue to be strong in our beliefs, to the exclusion of other people's. We also seem prepared to kill, if we think that's what God wants us to do.
Now, just because there are patterns, I don't think this necessarily means there's a God. I think there are patterns because the earth spins and planets orbit and because it's all just circles of one kind or another we tend to end up at the same place, doing the same things. Thinking that someone must be in charge. And because occasionally the unexplainable miracle occurs, we think it must have been orchestrated somehow. Totally incredible coincidences somehow seem to be the work of God as well as major catastrophic disasters. If someone's in charge, the age-old question begs to be answered---why so much pain and suffering mixed with so much love and benevolence!?
It could all just be dumb luck.
In a nutshell, here is my own particular big bang theory. The universe began with a completely unimaginable burst of energy, an unimaginable length of time ago. The laws of physics declare that energy does not peter out, it simply changes form, one way or the other. I believe that this happened, the earth and universe was formed, and that it all came out of this initial burst of energy. I believe that all living things grew out of this energy and here we all are. Because it's all the same energy we started with, we are all inter-connected. We are one with the earth, as the expression goes, we are not just connected to other people, we are connected to plants, the air, the water, other animals and on and on.
Energy is an amazing thing. It is an amazing thing to harness and it is amazing when unleashed. It is sometimes controllable and, more often than not, outside our grasp. I don't believe we understand most of its capabilities. I believe if we understood it fully, our conception of God would become clearer and perhaps make more sense.
I went and visited a psychic once, for the first time. She, of course, spent some time tapping into my energy and, apparently, a little bit of the energy of the important people in my life. She talked to me about personal things she could have known nothing about. She also talked about the odd thing I have no idea about or simply haven't been able to understand yet. I am prepared to be as skeptical of stuff like this as the next person and believe it's quite possible to be tricked into giving people like psychics and mediums little bits of personal info that they then feed right back to you, as if they have divined it. But I didn't have a skeptical bone in my body after I left this woman and I truly believe that, through and innate gift and many years of practice, she had developed the ability to wade into the river of energy that surrounds us. And then tell us about it.
Did this experience have anything to do with God, or the gods? I don't believe so. I tend to believe more in the physics of it. I believe if it was something we could see and therefore believe in we would somehow then make it measurable and describable, with characteristics. For the moment, though, this is impossible and so some of us chalk up psychic experiences as hocus pocus.
Once again, I believe that there is this river of energy that surrounds us. Some of us are able to use it, some of us are unaware it exists. I believe it explains such things as ghosts, answered prayers and deja vu. As weird as it may sound, I also have a theory that there is a time-travelling element to it. Einstein himself believed that time travel was a viable theory (you need to Google einstein time travel as I don't have the time here for an explanation) that centered around the speed of light and its specifications. He developed this theory in the early 20th century and scientists now are able to verify much of it. Mechanically, we have no ability yet to utilize this theory due to the difficulty of moving things at the speed of light. In the river of energy, though, I don't believe we are hindered this way. That is possibly why there is that that unsettling experience called deja vu, wherein you find yourself experiencing something (sights, sounds, sensations) that you could not possibly have already experienced but somehow you know you have. It may be possible that some of your own energy has travelled ahead in time and that you are now remembering this! Most of us have no way of controlling or channeling this so it just pops up randomly and we call it deja vu.
What about reincarnation? Ghosts? Possibly just collections of energy left behind as people pass on. I tend to think of it as energy with a consciousness; Billy the Kid passes on (with assistance) and little bits of his conscious energy that get left behind mingle with a new life's energy and all of the sudden you end up with someone who believes they may have been Billy the Kid in a former life! A whole bundle of conscious energy gets left behind after another person passes and this becomes a ghost. This energy is strong enough that it makes its presence felt; the living see it, or hear it, perhaps just sense that it is near. There may be enough consciousness to this energy that it has a actual agenda. It may want revenge or simply to warn. Just theories, of course.
Did I mention that I don't trust the Bible? I did, didn't I. Well, I don't trust it because it was written by men. It is not the word of God although parts of may have been written by someone who thought he'd just seen or talked to God. I believe it was written for the most part by well-intentioned men who were trying desperately to discover the meaning of life and to make sense out of all the patterns they'd noticed. I believe it was written by men who desperately wanted someone to be in charge, other than themselves. I also believe that the writers of the Bible sometimes had their own political agendas.
Speaking of the Bible, and the river of energy, isn't it interesting that so many of the world's religions have their own great books that mirror many of the same things in the Bible? Out of that one great burst of energy that created the universe and from all the earth's distant corners this flow of energy has been tapped into by men desperate for direction and much of what they've come up with has sounded similar. And isn't it interesting that, in civilizations which have not been historically technically advanced, the connection to the earth and nature has been a large part of their religion--they did not place all their faith in a Deity but, instead, realized the connection between themselves and the energy surrounding them and made worship to this. And if there was some sort of Deity involved, it was simply the god that provided the earth and all its resources.
Unfortunately, I will not find out if any of my theories are true until I die. I occasionally find myself jealous of the dead, as they have been imparted with all the answers. I have many more theories on good and evil, heaven and hell (hell, by the way, is writing a really long blog entry!) and what you find there in the afterlife, but all that is maybe for another day. Several times I have gone back and reviewed what I've written in this entry and realize that it may be difficult to follow and that it may even sound like a mad man's ravings. All of this under the assumption that anyone is reading it and that could be a major assumption! Hopefully those who know me and have read any of this will not shy away the next time our paths cross. It was an interesting process to undertake and gave the opportunity to ramble on about something which does not often pop up in daily conversation.
Thank you for reading. As always, I have enjoyed the writing part!
