Jamey Wolff

Peace Pagoda Monk

There is a Buddhist temple called the Peace Pagoda in Leverett, Massachusetts a short drive from where i live. What i’ve found in the surprisingly heady world of Self healing, mindfulness, metaphysical spirituality, religion, & New Age woo is that certain concepts can be known backwards & forwards intellectually but don’t do much good just as information in the mind; & seemingly easy enough to understand methods of Being in living practice can be way more difficult to do than to comprehend.

i was at the Peace Pagoda by mySelf trying to do some walking meditation & rid the dark energy i could feel in my field & try to elevate my vibration. Or really i could say: i was taking a walk. My good friend from a different era Jeremy Ray told me about this term jouska, which is like an imaginary conversation you’re having, & i was holding multiple at the same time trying to shake off negative thoughts like a wet dog when i heard this steady drum coming from behind me. Every however many seconds was a rhythmic bang of a drum. The monks that live there circle the perimeter of the site & sanctify it with a ritualized walk where they hit the drum as they go around either in silence or with a mantra.

i remember feeling a sense of social dread & anxiety thinking that this holy man was going to see me & think something along the lines of: ‘Oh great; here’s another white guy lost in his woe, crowding our space here, jamming up my route with his pained gait & brooding face. Just my luck he’s here right on time to mess me up.’ But instead he just walked by & when i shot him my best forced-meek-contentment game face he looked at me with a warm, slight smile & kind eyes as he nodded & passed. i’ve heard the idea that we have an auric field of energy around us up to six feet & it effects how others feel around us & i completely felt that in this experience. i felt this monks said field of energy & physically felt a burdensome heaviness & weight leave me as he passed & tears of relief fell down my face; i full on cried.

i grew up around the Bible Belt (kind of, MaryLand) & there’s a brand of Christianity (corny Christianity i call it) that’s all about just neurotically trying to control what other people hold in their thinking mind, & judgement. Lots of judgement. There are ‘Christians’ that would say that monk, who’s devoted his life to peace & asceticism & selflessness & kindness & helping others, will be damned to hell… Not only is that obviously goofy but even if that was the case that God would be evil & undeserving of any devotion.

Esoteric Peace in Overlap

All three Abrahamic faiths have an esoteric path that say very similar things (Gnostic Christianity, Cabalistic Judaism, & Sufi Islam) & all three point to what is referred to as Maya in Buddhism & alluded to inherently by the nature of Krishna’s dialogue with Arjuna in Hinduism: that this realm is not the end all be all; that it’s an illusion, or ‘fallen’ & constructed with inherent flaws. Which at first can seem grim but all these tracts also point towards the ability to transcend this place. i’ve always thought it no mistake Christianity is pronounced with Krishna within it’s sound (& not to mention all the similarities of those two figures; there are many); & that Christ Consciousness & the Buddha-mind are one in the same.

i’m going to leave this off with my favorite Christian mystic who runs an orphanage charity in Africa for victimized children & has also mentioned these overlaps in his talks with a video speaking on the sacred secretion. His name is John St. Julien Baba Wanyama, not Jim Carrey… who may deserve a Substack deep dive of his own into whether he’s been killed & replaced with a clone because plastic surgery doesn’t change your eye color & he was pretty outspoken about a lot of things rare for a Hollywood star to be.) It gives new meaning to why Santa comes down the chimney to leave gifts before rising back up. & the symbolic nature of Christ dying at 33 (33 vertebrates in the spine) & my whole thing is religion has too long been used as more divide & conquer with anger & fear spreading, when what it all points to is peace & healing & compassion & a mystical transcending of the mundane world we’ve been forced to exist within

Be in this world, but not of it.

JW <333

i prided mySelf for the longest time on being offline more than the typical millennial archetype. But i finally caved a few months ago…

When i was (seemingly) hopelessly addicted to opiates, needle fixation, benzodiazepines, alcohol, prescription (& non) amphetamines, cutting/blood letting, orgasms, television, kleptomania, relations with & attention of women, dopamine in general, & whatever else to distract me from the Present Moment i couldn’t stand to be in, i told mySelf that what i was doing was diving out into the void & oblivion & sacrificing my mind & body to make some type of tortured-soul-art with my songs that would resonate deeply with people after i died from misadventure… Now that seems pretty corny & cliche & pathetic. i’d be heartbroken if the children i’m raising went down that painful & lonely-even-in-a-crowded-room road.

Change of Heart & Mind

When i first started journaling my intention was for it to be a death journal; a self indulgent suicide memoir. Luckily, i had a complete paradigm shift away from being a science-as-dogma material world rationalist, who used that outlook as an excuse for nihilism & hedonism (which is usually an extension of narcissism) but then had a change of perspective to a consciousness first (as opposed to matter first; as in the mind not being a result of the brain but vice versa, the brain just being a 3D transmitter & receiver) worldview where coincidences don’t exist & instead are synchronicities that are winks from the creator/Universe reminding us that everything is interrelated. & then that led to my time filling up with yoga, meditation, barefoot walks, fasting, reading again, swimming & cold water immersion, being selfless for the sake of others & trying to keep in check the self centered nature of the human condition, & then the journaling went from poor-me-pity-partying to dream journaling, intention setting, & gratitude lists.

So all that is to say my intentions behind making music & words then putting them ‘out’ has changed. Where as i used to find comfort in this idea that my work would surely find an audience after my death of despair, i now believe that the people that are meant to hear & read it will do so & if my role is of a small scale that’s okay. Nothing may resonate with people in a big way for me to see in my lifetime, but as an optimistic thought exercise, it may be granted audience by extra dimensional beings (whether angels or aliens, hopefully not demons), people in the future, or AI. - Even though my music & the whole Of Wolves & Whales Modus Operandi aims to affirm that humans create music AI never could because it can’t feel pain & transmute it, aka Spiritual Alchemy. -

RIP Rob Maher. & as always, Synchronicities

i recently performed a couple songs at the National Spiritualist Alliance’s Voices in the Village (thanks to the MVP performer of that night Matthew Thornton, also ‘Cello Monkey’ on Instagram, making room for me to park beforehand) & i stumbled over some words alluding to my past addiction issues before playing; & afterwards Matthew told me about this friend that he had collaborated with, Rob Maher. Rob left the physical plane on Halloween in a car crash & had his own similar mental health & substance abuse issues. His funeral will be held in July. Synchronicities (or meaningful coincidences) are a big part of my change in paradigm. i get them all the time & they remind me that this place is more alive & interconnected than we were taught. & i had just performed a song that starts out with the lyrics ‘You got clean on New Years Eve, But shot up on Halloween…’ & so (side-note neurosis) ever since KW & i got married at the Boston court house two summers ago i never like saying ‘my wife’ cause i feel like an old square, but then when i say ‘partner’ i feel like a cowboy, or a lawyer - & even though a cowboy-lawyer would be an interesting thing to be, i’m neither - but so when i showed Rob’s obituary to KW, when she walked by right when i was looking at it on my laptop, she pointed out that she & him have the same birthday. i had played a song of his (posted below. a jarringly incredible song that gets better each time you hear it) that Matthew accompanied on & had sent me online, on our way back from a camping trip & she had made notice of that voice he had.

My point in all this rambling is trying to figure out what the point of putting stuff out is. It can’t just be narcissism & ego validation. i wish for Rob what i used to wish for mySelf. That his songs would find a large audience post mortem & make worth of whatever suffering might’ve gone down & make easier his absence to the people that knew & loved him, that his songs are touching all these people’s lives… & maybe one day that’ll still happen; but until then his work will sit there without the external validation of thousands or millions of ‘views’ or ‘streams,’ waiting to be stumbled upon in the vast void of the internet. Making us, or at least me, wonder what we do this all for.

The old me would use the fact that Rob’s songs (songs with a hard earned stoic beauty to them, one you can hear has faced down the ugly) are collecting virtual dust - while videos of what can quite literally only be called & considered AI brain rot slop & commercially mass produced insidious drivel are amassing millions of hours of people’s attention - as license to unblock certain numbers from my phone, grab a hypodermic, spoon, cotton swab, water, & lighter, hit up an ATM, make a drive, grab a certain powder from a certain person, & go park my car in some ideally scenic but mandatorily secluded space & go join Rob in the Bardo… Check out of this demoralizing shit show for good with a dose my body doesn’t have a tolerance for anymore…

But that’s the old me. i have a baby girl now i can’t do that to. & i wouldn’t want to anyways; because what i see in her, & children in general, is this ingrained ability to shake off even the heaviest of drags & just general darkness & then see the beauty in this place & in humanity itself. i made a point to listen to Rob’s music as often as possible, at first out of a duty to do for him what i’d want done for me, but then because his mellifluous voice & subtle but fully sonorous melodies got me going back for the experience of actually just listening to the songs themselves. & i’m going to be as bold as to say i consider him a kindred spirit. i hear in his music, & the little else i’ve gathered, someone like me who refused the mundane tediousness of the material world. & what others, from the outside looking in, might see as self destruction might actually be trying to a hold a perspective of this human experience that’s, to modify the saying, through the eyes of babes. A refusal to coalesce to modernity’s matter of fact dullness. Trying to find something beautiful in the gaudy circus underneath the cacophony of vulgar exploitation; Trying to find something transcendental in the midst of the garish bedlam of the carnival’s ballyhoo.

Above is the album Speciecide by Rob & Matthew’s sonically surreal & velvety resonant project Fuzz Puddle that is worth multiple listen throughs, because more reveals itself each time. Rob has his own bandcamp page too where you’ll find everything he wrote in his bio to be a bit poignant from the vantage point of his recent leaving of the land of the living. &, on the living, that is of course who death is hardest for. i personally (again, in my humble opinion) think & know that Rob isn’t truly gone. His body may be, but the energetic force (& i’ll say soul) that sent out that coyly mellow voice of his, & that brought the pen to paper to pour out his lyrics was not just a body.

As i’ve heard the Susquehanna Sage Michael Wann (MikWan) point out: you can tell a lot about somebody by their relationship to animals, & animals relation to them. In Rob’s obituary his family mentions his connection to animals, to which i resonate with immensely; so, to end this possibly too heavy of a word salad with something light are some short video clips of a recent period where i kept having interesting experiences with birds. The first three videos are of a bird that was staring at me on a driveway & let me pet her then flew away to a nearby tree. The last one is a bird that flew in my open bedroom door when i was playing my guitar. Be easy on yourSelves Out There, ‘life is short’ became cliche’d because it’s true.

<333

— JW

Hi, How are you? Thanks for your time, i know there’s only so much of it in a day. Someone more important than mySelf, whose opinions you’re more likely to value, once said:

All of humanity is interconnected like the root networks of trees or mycelium; So when you take in an artists’ work or musicians’ songs you’re interacting with your own creations. And a deeper part of you knows & feels that. If it’s true that the difference between a schizophrenic & an artist is an audience, then by becoming that audience you are saving your own sanity & helping all humankind by shaking your own hand & closing the loop.

in media res

i’ve been making songs since early elementary school, but my first official release (with all the official UPC & ISRC & IPI #’s) only came out now & is called in media res; a play on the latin phrase for stories that start in the middle of things; but here medias is changed to media, signifying a culture completely oversaturated with media bombarding us from every angle. So please excuse the irony in saying: If you want to do your good deed for the day, so you can pass by a homeless/unhoused person & not feel bad if you don’t have any cash you can part with, you can instead help a recovering addict & new father, that not too long ago lived in section 8 housing & was on food stamps (& fresh out of Florida’s finest rehabs & Baltimore’s finest psych wards), by printing this picture out & putting it all over town:

or (because, just joking) you could just follow on one of these platforms if you have them because algorithms are the new self imposed gods of our times:

bandcamp

instagram

buy me a coffee

no one seems to use Apple Music, but…

Promises

1. i only put out sounds i’d want to hear & words i’d want to read

2. i think it’s grotesque & disgusting that the powers-that-be created AI that takes away so many people’s jobs without also taking away the necessity of making the money they made from those jobs; so absolutely no AI is used in my songs.

Note: We can go against being force fed by the plastic mainstream system of the beast by being intentional about what media/entertainment/art we take in (refusing to use the word ‘consume’ because despite being viewed as nothing more than ‘consumers’ by them i know that we are, way more)