Today is the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring which means it's (time again) the annual celebration of death and rebirth for the dominant cult of the Western World. Happy Easter!

People like to conflate celebrations in this modern world, if not to intellectually distance themselves from uncomfortable ambiguities of spirit and mortality, than to signal they have some insight into the historical development of belief and have therefore developed immunity of some sort. It's certainly important to have a window outside your belief structure and, at the same time, it's intellectually lazy to claim a "this is that" of religious and social celebrations. Yes, there are similarities, both calenderically and otherwise, between Pagan festivals of the equinox, ancient fertility rites of sacrifice and Easter, but there are just as many, if not a lot more, differences.

But, what a time to contemplate rebirth, eh? As spring unfolds from its long winter posture it would seem that, more than any year previous, life has changed. Here we are in the year 2020, the year that will be remembered as the moment when the human organism realized - FINALLY - that it and its' planet and its' planet's other inhabitants are all only one being.

The 2020 Vision is understanding that the health of one, is the health of all.

This recognition of boundary as an illusory and outdated model brings with it a subtext worth noticing. If we are a singular organism where thermodynamics claims energy cannot be created or destroyed and, at the same time, we remain dependent on all of our divergent parts for survival, than the death of one part, with its undestroyed energy, has to be the rebirth of another. There's a fuzzy little paradox for you: death as survival.

One of the best albums of 2019, by my estimation, was Purple Mountains first, last and eponymously titled album. "Purple Mountains" was the last project of Silver Jews front man David Berman who killed himself not long after its' release and just weeks before he was set to tour his long anticipated return from self-imposed retirement.

The album is rough stuff. Songs about depression, loss and self-loathing made animate by Berman's genius knack for melody, hook and humor. It is a cognitively disinhabiting moment to find yourself head-bopping to a man's very personal confession that "All My Happiness is Gone". But it happens and it did. From letter to concept, "Purple Mountains" is the embodiment of Berman's uncanny gift for bone-splitting poignancy and coke-black humor.

But inside of this album, an album which a friend aptly grouped along with two other death records - David Bowie's "Black Star" and Leanord Cohen's "You Want It Darker" - is the key to the collection and the turn which elevates "Purple Mountains" from a morose infolding of one man's mind - however catchy - into the loving final salute of a fragile, funny and important voice in American art.

"Snow is Falling In Manhattan" is a lovely, lulling ode to memory and to a solitude that, when shared between two friends, becomes a refuge. Inside of this song, Berman offers an operational application of music as a means of flattening time, as a method for delivering the mind to the ever present now of memory.

"Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song's design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines"

We circle our wagon's around the sun literally every day. Each night is a death and every morning another rebirth informed, at least in part, by yesterday's night. You can hold onto life just about as well as you can stop our circles around the sun.

As things fall away, just let them go. It's literally all you can do. And, when you need to return momentarily to the refuge of a friend or family member now gone, put on some music, close your eyes and enjoy the sun light's power, your memory and a good, old-fashioned day dream.