Ray Levy Uyeda

Both liturgy and poems, the languages of God and poets, come from within our many skins yet live outside of us.

What if there were a universe inside each of us living things? What if we could recognize it? Mark Doty's poem is a road map to the infinite within us. 

Ada Limón's poem reminds us that after the shock of the winter season the earth's plants offer a "return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty."

The world and the us are joined, always, and without effort. To look closely at others is to watch ourselves closely, and what a gift it can be, offering our attention.

A person who listens to a recording of a specific moment thinks of the person holding the instrument and feels known in a way by a person from another place, in another time, who does not know them.

I'm moving away from my home of two years, and I'm held in memories of this space. I am fixated on Neil Young's 1972 song and the impossible task of searching, not for a place, but a person. Keep me searching.

"Transformer," the second solo album by the late Lou Reed, is 11 tracks of Reed's most popular music, an album produced by David Bowie, and known for the New York ballad, "Walk On The Wild Side." And where is the wild?

Nick Drake sings like a person who does not believe himself to ever have been received. Heard. His constant self-repeating is an act of the desperate and wanting.

Commentary: We're approaching climate tipping points. While we must turn the clock back on our own destruction, do we have the resolve? A poem from our past didn't think we could do what we needed to do.

Perspective: Affected by music, Janis almost seems possessed, by something other than herself. I have never been affected by anything that deeply. (How much do you allow yourself to be affected?) Most of the time I am hiding.

Perspective: Contributor Ray Levy Uyeda uses poetry to explore the love and ache in Joni Mitchell's 1972 album "For The Roses."

Perspective: We can listen to David Bowie's 1972 "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" as if it were released this year, as if its messages were precisely of this time, urgent and unrelenting.

"Take It Easy," remains one of the Eagles' most notable songs. Eagles drummer Don Henley once said it highlights Americans' "search of freedom, identity, fortune and this illusive thing we call 'home.' "

Al Green's 1972 album "Let's Stay Together" bisects the point between his own musical traditions, with albums released before 1973 reflecting a life ungrounded and quickly unraveling, and albums released after speaking toward God.

By the time "Young, Gifted, and Black" was released in 1972, Aretha Franklin had released 21 albums, including recordings of live concerts. Church and holy belief is everywhere in her voice.

John Prine's songs remind us that the problems of yesterday are present today, the political divisions of four or five decades ago mirror what we read on the news now. We are an amalgam of our pasts.