2004

Greetings Friends,

As I'm sure you noticed, I did not post any news during 2004. Many people wrote to me asking if this meant that something BIG was about to be revealed. Like maybe I was secretly working feverishly on a new CD for 4AD or Metropolis Records!

Unfortunately, this is only my fantasy.

In truth, 2004 was one of the most difficult and, apparently, important years of my life. It was a year of extraordinary transformation and, dare I say, death. Although I have absolutely no desire to burden anyone with the vast emotional content of my experience, I realize that you might appreciate a few objective details.

First, although I was intuitively compelled to move to Seattle, Washington (USA) and leave my beautiful home in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, I was ultimately obligated to sell it at an enormous financial loss. In the end, I was left with just enough money to cover my debts. Of course, being debt free is something that I do appreciate! But my appreciation doesn't stop there. I also found myself fortunate enough to have plenty of musical equipment to sell while I waited for my house to sell. This kept my bills paid!

As some of you may know, I originally imagined that I was moving to Seattle in order to more actively nurture my musical career. However, I soon began to feel that universal (and/or inner?) support for that was waning; so, I decided to harmonize with that cycle by allowing my philosophical philanthropic interests to wax a bit. To that end, I decided to apply for entry into The University of Washington, with the intention of majoring in philosophy and minoring in psychology and physics. Amazingly, I was accepted!

But even more amazing, is the fact that even after several months of very intense and very laborious life-altering preparation, I decided to drop out of school on the very first day! I wanted SO BAD for it to feel right; but, instead, it felt SO WRONG.

Naturally, I honored my intuition and immediately thanked the God of Spiritual Atheism for giving me an opportunity to realize that, that which I thought would nurture my philosophical philanthropic interests would, in fact, most likely destroy them!

At this point I still owned an acoustic guitar (and four track) and could feel its seductive pull on my soul; so I decided to give my musical voice one last chance to sing out and be heard before consciously repressing it. To this end, I rented a small studio and began working. After one day I knew the truth, but it took several days to accept it.

Finally, I moved out of the studio and sold the rest of my instruments and other musical equipment. Again, I thanked the God of Spiritual Atheism; but this time for giving me an opportunity to realize that, although I deeply enjoy creating music and hope to one day have an opportunity to create more of it, there is presently an even deeper desire (the desire to help create a better world) that is driving my existence.

Of course, there is always more to the story; but this is a pretty accurate and optimistic overview of 2004.

I don't even dare speculate about what 2005 will be like! :-)

Love and Dreams..

-Soren.