”We are living in a time where many people are asking themselves, what is truly important, both in my own life and in the life of the planet. Many of the rules and structures that shape our international community are outdated and harmful, and still many of us feel powerless to change them because we don´t have political or economic power.
I think the first step towards creating a better world is maybe to change the way we look at it. What if we see the planet as a living being, what if we see our own life as an animal, uncaged and curious. What if we stop listening to what everyone is telling us to do, and start listening to our own inner voice – maybe things are not as locked and closed as we fear. Maybe we can take back the magic of our own story, and live as free beings on a free planet. Maybe we can find ways to help each other, and invent a new system that secures everyone´s safety and freedom, including the animals and plants and the planet itself. Life is meant to be an adventure, not a measure of success or status. Make sure you´re living your own story, and creating the world you want to live in. And don´t let anything stop you.”
-The Musical Slave
MUSICIAN AND FILMMAKER
THE MUSICAL SLAVE
The story of the travelling street musician, the Musical Slave
Chapter 1 - Dr. Kosmos
Once upon a time, and long before there was in or out or up or down or time or sound, there was an old singer sitting all by himself in the dark. He called himself Dr. Kosmos and he owned nothing, except for his own beating heart. He´d lived many lives and done many things, but now he´d somehow ended up back at the start. But his heart was still filled with dreams and ideas about everything he wanted to do and hear and see and be and feel. And one day his heart started beating so fast that he couldn´t help himself, he had to write his dreams and ideas down. And as he was writing, his dreams turned into songs...
And when Dr. Kosmos finally started singing, the songs flew out into a thousand directions, and turned into the suns and moons and planets that we know from our very own dimension. And on one of these planets there started growing these enormous trees, and on these trees started growing all kinds of crazy fruits. And as you probably understand, these fruits were filled with a very special kind of juice.
Chapter 2 - The jungle
And in one of these forests there was born a girl who used to wander around and do whatever she felt like doing. And every time she got hungry, all she had to do was climb straight up into one of the trees, split open one of the fruits, and drink the juice from the inside of the earth.
And soon she felt her heart start to beat, and she got this urge to sing. And every time this girl sang, it didn’t take long before the other girls came and joined in, and soon they’d started the world’s very first band.
Chapter 3 - The stone age
But the girls were tired of the old forest where they’d been living all their lives, and they decided they wanted to go on tour. And as soon as they started travelling, their hearts started beating a little faster. It was like their hearts were giving them signals about where it was smart to go and who it was smart to talk to.
And it didn’t take long before the girls ran into another travelling band. So they lit up a huge fire and shared their fruits with each other.
And suddenly the girl noticed this boy who was playing the guitar and she felt her heart start to beat so hard that she forgot about everything else. And she knew the only thing that mattered was showing this boy who she really was. So she gathered her friends together and they sang this song for him.
Chapter 4 - The fruit cage
But the next morning, the boy was gone. His band had travelled on. But the girl knew that never again would she meet someone who could make her heart beat as fast as him – and she knew that one day they would meet again.
In the meantime, the girls decided to keep on travelling. And they were actually on their way to a festival up in the north when they suddenly found themselves in a very strange forest where, for some reason, all the trees looked exactly the same. After taking a closer look, the girls agreed that yeah, they were in fact fruit trees. But even though it was the end of the summer and they should have been filled with fruits, all the trees were completely empty…
And then, a little further on, in a clearing in the forest, the girls discovered this enormous cage, filled with fruit!
The girls tried to break into the cage, but then a man popped up from behind the fruit and asked: Yes, may I help you? Eh yeah, the girls said, we’d like to have our fruit back!! The man answered: Well, you can have as much fruit as you like, but… I’m afraid you’re gonna have to pay.
And from this day on the girls had to work like slaves for the man who’d built the fruit cage. And now they were picking fruits from morning to night.
And fair enough, at the end of the day they were given a few metal coins as a reward for their work. But there was a catch, because the girls had to give the metal coins straight back to the man who’d built the cage, in order to get out the fruit they needed to survive. And if anyone tried picking the fruit straight from the trees, well, they were put in a cage.
But one day, something strange happened. After the sun and moon had been shining on the cage for a few weeks, some of the fruits started to crack open. And out came this strange, rotting juice. And one day at work the girl thought she´d try some...
It didn’t take long before all the slaves wanted their share of the rotting fruit juice. And the cage owner was quick to see the potential, and right next to the world’s first fruit cage, he built the world’s very first bar.
And now every day after work, that’s where you’d find the girls and all the other slaves, in the bar drinking.
Chapter 5 - The Musical Slave
The years went by, and the girls got so used to working and drinking that soon they couldn’t imagine their lives without it. And they forgot what it felt like to be free, and wander around and pick the fruit straight from the trees. And anyway, it seemed that they could get everything they needed from one of the new cages that were being built all around them. And it wasn’t just the food that was being put into cages. Anything and everything was put in a separate cage with a price tag on – and now all the girls could think about was how to make enough money to buy all the things they wanted. But they wanted so many things, and there were so many different ways to make money that the girls got confused. And soon they split up, and ended up in different jobs and different schools, and they even stopped singing and making music together.
But at night, some of the slaves would break into the cages and clean them out. The way they saw it they never agreed to having the cages there in the first place. So now the cage owners had to find a way to keep everyone under control… and they built an even bigger cage, around all the other cages, and they called it the big Paper Cage. And they started writing down the names of all the slaves, and they gave a number to all the slaves, and they decided that all the slaves had to pay a share of the money they made back to the Paper Cage. And now the people running the Paper Cage had enough money to do anything they wanted.
But the problem was that the slaves had just as many dreams and ideas, but they were stuck in this loop, struggling to make enough money for house and food, and they never had enough time or money to do what they really wanted to do. And by now most of the slaves had forgotten about the fruit trees, they didn´t know who was picking the fruits, or where the fruits actually came from. It didn´t occur to them that the fruit trees had the power to give them their freedom back...
But one day one of the slaves decided she’d had enough. She decided that from this day on she wouldn’t go to work, and she wouldn’t go to any school, and she wouldn’t go to the welfare office either.
And instead she stood herself up in the street and started singing and telling this story.
And she called herself the Musical Slave – and she was the world’s first street musician.
to be continued...