The cause of all unhappiness, dissatisfaction or distress: the clash between life and our identification with our views on that life. Not only did we often think of life differently, but we also invested our soul and happiness in it. We quickly experience setbacks as personal attacks. Life becomes self-defense, seeing us as looking through a visor helmet.
That is why Liber does not consciously focus on transformation. The point of departure is not to learn to ‘inhabit’ another, new point of view or at home, but to learn to become present ‘without standpoint’ for precisely that longing for another, new, ‘home’.
Liber thus teaches you not to gain weight, but to travel. And this by means of a permanent inner dialectic: our empty relationship with point of view A yields a new point of view B, with which we then relate ’empty’ again, so that yet another point of view C can be born.
In doing so, every dogma becomes alien to us. Instead of a point of view, we become an answer to, life. Our new exclamation point: the comma.
In the most literal sense of the word, Liber is thus about learning to walk the path of progressive insight.
A song that delightfully expresses this ‘Praise of Locomotion’: Amarillo by Morning . In fact, soberly, without any drama, it sings about how obstacles on the road do not have to stand in the way. We hear the rhythm section run imperturbably, illustrating great leaps of violin and guitar ups and downs, and pregnant melodies sink in and dissolve as unexpected events that come and go.
Listen and hear: to keep moving, whatever happens, that is the art. Not: to be a single chord, but to dare to embody all verses of the song that lives inside you…
Amarillo by morning
Up from San Antone
Everything that I got
Is just what I’ve got on
When that sun is high in that Texas sky
I’ll be buckin’ at the county fair
Amarillo by morning
Amarillo, I’ll be there
They took my saddle in Houston
Broke my leg in Santa Fe
Lost my wife and a girlfriend
Somewhere along the way
But I’ll be lookin’ for 8 when they pull that gate
And I hope that judge ain’t blind
Amarillo by morning
Amarillos on my mind
Amarillo by morning
Up from San Antone
Everything that I got
Is just what I’ve got on
I ain’t got a dime,
But what I got is mine
I ain’t rich, but Lord, I’m free
Amarillo by morning
Amarillo’s where I’ll be
