I feel that there are two worlds to journey within: the inner and the outer. And altho I wouldn't consider myself particularly well traveled in the outer world - I have been forced into depths of my inner world in ways I never expected.
In my life I have lived at various levels of madness. At times dark and debilitating, at other times grand and expansive. To speak in less poetic terms - I have a bipolar diagnosis which has acutely reared its ugly head many times throughout my life. Whether severe depression, or out of control mania I've been forced to grapple with the extreme and the unknown - often with my life on the line.
So when I speak of journeying, I refer to the nights I thought would never end and the days so expansive I felt as if I transcended time and the self. Both experiences plunged me deep into an intensity I often felt I could not bare. Feeling so emotionally charged the outside world would fade away. At these most extreme times, extended hospitalizations were necessary to keep me safe and treat the illness.
I identify as a survivor of an illness that all too often kills. The suicide rate for a bipolar individual is 25X that of the normal population. The extremes of the disease are often too much to bare. Yet interestingly there is a documented connection between creative ability and bipolar illness. Quite literally I owe much of my artistic prowess to what has so often come close to destroying me. This path of creation and destruction, of lived extremes, is what I think of as Journeying.
lyrics
1. Walking like Mahatma, I need to balance more…
2. Clocks melting like Salvadore….
3. I left, but I’m back for more….
4. ... Washed up right on the abandoned shore...
5. …A matador slash man of war…
6. With love and hate in my veins moving back n forth….
7. In the fog….. blinded by the high beams…
8. I haven’t felt this alive since I was 19…
9. And my heart is pumping - like a fight scene...
10. ..Feeling my own eyes gleam in bright green…
11. compassionate madness splashed on canvas,
12. Back when rap was only path in this savage,
13. garden of eden…. darkness in season…
14. Finding myself through (in) this art that I’m breathing….
15. Connecting to all the reason’s that I started MCing….
16. ... Mind and body aligned brain and heart in agreement…
1. use to pray for forgiveness…Now I pray for subsistence….
2. System collapse - test the shade of the litmus,
3. uh… It ain’t a problem cuz i take it the distance…
4. … Then I turn on back and slay every witness,
5. I learned how to live, but never learned how to thrive,
6. Chasing money but the journey is inside…..
7. The body is a vessel, I can feel that it’s alive…
8. the medium’s the message when I’m staring in ur eyes….
9. It’s the end of era, helping prepare the burial site of the pharoah,
10. Finally share a piece of my heart ,amongst my brethren in the coal mines,
11. Looking out we can barely see the coastline…
12. Walking on water waiting, lost in this contemplation,
13. Watching the crows flock, killing a common raven,
14. Preoccupation with this thinning population,
15. Plus the promise of loss with no consolation
credits
released November 27, 2022
Writer, Composer, Perfomer, Producer: William Rideout
Indigenous Vocals: Isaac Murdoch
