This a prayer love song that I wrote to Beauty-Source last when I wanted to make love with the divine.  I picked up the guitar, sat on my bed, and played the first chord and the whole song flowed in that moment.

Holy One Holy All

I wrote this song after listening to the stars singing one predawn morning in Seatlle.  I had a friend who was struggling, and I heard the stars saying, "I see you."  We all have a beauty that we may not see as brightly as others see.  This songs is a reminder of that.

The Stars Have Something To Say

This is a collection of song I composed on the harp, the piano and the guitar.  Half are instrumental.  All of them were composed with love.  Most were composed as I was expanding from my inherited faith story of Christianity into a universal spirituality that no longer saw God as a separate and other entity, but as a part of myself.  I put this album together as I worked as a hospice counselor and wanted the dying to hear in tenderness from my heart, the invitation to step from one form of love into another, without judgment.

Night Watches

Sunrise & Butterflies

Angels At Sunrise

Angels at Sunrise

Come My Love, To Love

Love I Am Here

Forgiveness

This is an album of lullabies to soothe the soul.  I wrote these songs when I was a hospice counselor and Episcopal priest, wanting to provide the language of heaven without words, that said "Welcome."  Without judgment.  Without reservation.   Without condition.  I composed this music on the harp my oldest son built for me.

Sacred Harp for Living and Dying

New Every Morning

Gratitude

Lament For Beauty

This is an album of lullabies to soothe the soul.  The guitar and vocals are lullabies with words, the piano pieces are my piano quantumplations, and the harp is another contribution of creative beauty.

This a piece from my heart.  I sat at the keyboard one morning, and hit the record button, and I let me fingers make love to the keys and allowed life to make love to me.  And this recording.  A beautiful reciprocation.  Make the loveliness that flowed between us touch you.

Sacred Mother Dreaming

This is a piece I wrote while in Peru.  Pachakuti is a Qechua word that means the Great Turning.  Ayni is a word that means sacred reciprocity, a beautiful word for living in harmony and love.  May the melody and harmonies soothe your soul and remind you that your heart and life are longed for by this Sacred Earth, and you have a part to play in your choices to love.

Pachakuti

This poem has been stirring deeply in me for years.  It is a call and blessing for men to love men in every way, expanding what is holy and virtuous.  There is no shame here.  Following what the heart finds beautiful in our intimacy is our clarion call to support and extol the beauty that may just help save the earth.  This is a part of regenerative intimacy, blessing and reaching to express the gladness of life to be alive in us.  We can be glad to be alive.  

My piano piece, Sacred Mother Dreaming, caresses the words as they are shared.  May you find your heart encouraged to follow beauty in your intimacy.  If you are man who has desired to love men but have been caught in the repressive moral code dictated by religion, there is a new paradigm upon us.  I encourage you to trust and long for what your heart desires.  We will join and take down the religious patriarchy that is ready to fall.  Dream with me, precious brother, dream with me.

Dear Brother Dream With Me

This is the narration of my first Substack.com post.  You can subscribe to my writing at:  https://open.substack.com/pub/regenerativeintimacy/p/regenerative-intimacy-to-save-the?r=x07rn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

RISE post 1 narration 051823 - 5:22:23, 12.52 PM

This is a piece I improvised as a prayer of joy in my heart for how I am enjoying life just now.  When love dances in my life, it is a muse for me.  For poetry, for music, for prayer, for devotion.  I am flirting with a beautiful couple and there is an invitation to explore regenerative intimacy together, and I am gushing with joy at the thought.  Our conversations have been deeply intimate and sensual.  They have expressed a desire to engage my regenerative ideas when it comes to love especially the life that we can infuse each other with in sacred intention.  I smile at the thought, and joy blossoms where there used to be shame.  This song is a prayer of gratitude from my fingers that I expressed spontaneously today and hit "record", for the new invitations and expressions of life loving to be lived by those loving to live life.  The title of this piece reflects the pure and innocent joy of dreaming of waking in each others arms.

Threesome Awakening

I wrote this piece as I was thinking of having deepening intimacy with my friends and lovers without having sex with them, both guys and girls.  I wanted to hold them and feel them in the night, to hear their heartbeat, to smell their scent and hair and skin, feel their warmth.  

I believe there is so much intimacy in the world that we haven't even begun to plumb and the time is ripe to do so.  Intimacy does not all boil down to sex, as beautiful and nourishing as that sex can be.   We need tools to foster the other million ways to make love in this world that go beyond the genitals. 

So I developed a regenerative intimacy tool called the Wakeover, as I wrote this song, where people can have a safe and boundaried place to share intimacy without sex or sexual contact or purposeful arousal.   So instead of asking my friends to sleep with me, I say, "Would you like to have a Wakeover?  Where we do not have sex, but enjoy each other's nearness.  And then wake up into a new sunrise together?"

This has been a joy of my heart!  I enjoy both men and women in my intimate bedroom, and I also have many friends I don't want to have sex with, yet I do want tender intimacy with.  This tool, and song, have been beautiful elements of building that intimacy for me.  I offer it to you.

Would You Like To Wake Up With Me

A lullaby for the soul.  Reminding that we are not only lovable, we are Love itself.  And that as Simone Weil said, "We are made by love, for love, to become love."  I am grateful to my soul brother Ryan for bringing the story of this letter, to me.  None of the words in the song are really mine.  Oscar Maynard, Hafiz and Simone Weil.  Their words make the story.  My music makes it a lullaby.

Sweet Love

I sat down to the piano tonight to improvise a prayer through my fingers and felt my mother.  I longed for her, with deep gratitude.  So much has shifted since she died 2 years ago, for me.  And this week something has happened deeply in me.  And tonight, in Penig, Germany at the old country piano my friend, Andreas bought, for my arrival, I sat and improvised intuitively feeling my mother.  This piece has a sweetness repeated, with minor keys and dissonance, and major chords.  And different elements came in as I thought through some elements of sadness, loss, disappointment she felt, and her indomitable spirit.  And the pulse at the end is her ongoing pulse in me.

Beths' Song:  A Song for My Mother

Touching With Love What Was Once Touched With Fear

This is a piece of lubrication, of wooing.  For deepening intimacy.  Unafraid of emotions, though taking it slow.  Its a fragrance of grace as I quantumplated what my heart wanted to sing through my fingers, and the whole piece is a slow love-making to life. I see and approach the world through sacred sensual lenses and metaphor, and it moves me closer to making love with all of life more often as I do this.  And for this I am made.  I sing inside, back to the stars, for they have been singing to me in a way I can hear them in my bones these last 4 years, especially in the predawn darkness.  I believe in magic in the world, and frequency and resonance are a part of that.  When the vulnerable expression of a heart is coupled with intention, a sacred focus forms that can pierce, change, and alchemize things.  It can bless and ferment.  It can marinate a soul, and magnetize it.  I hope something beautiful happens for you as you listen to my quantum prayersong sung through fingers on keys, reminding this piano and me of one of our highest virtues.

Risk Letting Me Close

This piece is an improv of my finger's speaking the sign language of heaven as I listen to my heart, preparing for the birth of my manifesto.  What is deeply present is my heart's musings on the sacred masculine, and the natal star chart of my Mars in the sign of Cancer.  I am one who expresses my love an devotion through affectionate care, wrapped in the veil of seeing the world, indeed the universe, in sacred sensual metaphor.  

I am a nurturer in my masculinity.  My integrating feminine and masculine are forming a belonging and community inside of me that I never knew was possible.  I am enjoying their intimacy, owning my desires and asking for them, and offering my gifts to the world in courageous vulnerability.  I make unapologetic invitations to life, making love to the world in the way I show up with my opening heart in an innocence that is not silenced by my wounding.  My innocence welcomes and embraces all of me.

This piece is a creation of the minor and major frequencies, harmonics and resonance that has been drawing me, calling my names in the predawn morning before I make love with the dawn.

Mars In Cancer - Variations On A Theme

This is a tender lullaby for the soul, reminding us that beauty knows itself, and you are beautiful.  Its an invitation to risk believing this.  And a lovely thought of beauty holding us when we die.  I see Beauty as the primary thing in the universe.  And Light came to allow Beauty to see the object of its affection.  And I believe that Love is born at Beauty's witness and it's reverence.
 
I wrote this at Winter Solstice of 2023, as I was playing lullabies for a person I was providing care for, reminding them that beauty holds them now and always.

I also dedicate this song to Anneloes Smitsman and the Future Humans community their inspiration from our Solstice call together.

Beauty Knows Beauty

This is one of my most intimate pieces on guitar.  My passion is Regenerative Intimacy, where life loves to be lived by those loving to live life.  And for me, presence is foundational for our deepest connecting.  There are a million ways to make love in this world, and only a dozen of them involve the genitals.  The invitation in this song is my own soul's deepest lovemaking.  Breathing, gazing, adoring, reverencing beauty ... these are core to the intimacies that nourish the soul from within the body.

For me, virtuous lovemaking is about the intimacy that is beneath the skintimacy.  This is what I am after.  Once this deeper intimacy is caressed, it almost doesn't matter what happens next with skin.  The nourishment that happens here slows time, and pleasure tended, gifted and received from this place changes a life.  From this place desires can be alchemized into naked prayers from authentic hearts relishing in generativity, adoring pleasure into portals beyond space-time, and the nurture available here causes mere skintimacy to pale in comparison.

I recall attaining this with the first man I fell in love with in 2019.  He and I sat in my tent and shared stories night after night at an ecstatic dance camp, opening our hearts.  We knew sensual contact was consented and desired, yet we settled into a slow reveal and unfurling.  One night, as I opened my heart, I was sharing some difficult parts of my childhood story and I was crying deeply, laying on the floor.  He scooped up my head and put it in his lap.  I felt his generative heat and presence in such an intimate position.  And as I cried he bent his head and placed his mouth at the corner of one of my eyes and parted his lips and stayed there, drinking my tears.  It was the most intimate thing anyone had ever done to me in my life.  I felt so seen, so heard, so received and held.  It was more intimate than what he would do with my lingam in the coming days, as precious as that kind of intimacy is between sacred brothers.  

Because of this, to this day, I would rather know the nectar of someone's eyes and heart before knowing the nectar of their genitals.  For the lovemaking that ensued in the following days with this beautiful soul was built on an Eros far beyond skin.  Because he chose to come and sit with me in this way.

I have sung this piece so many times to just one person, or a small group in an intimate gathering.  I love the feel of doing so.

Come and Sit With Me

These songs are my newest release.  They are filled with hope and peace for a more beautiful world.

May Beauty Find You

What Was Said To The Rose (a Rumi poem trns. by Coleman Barks that I put to music)

This is my new song - a piano piece - Leonardo's Compersionate Tears. 
It's a piece that I composed on the piano while feeling the complexities and grief within polyamory, layers of emotions that I honor and that I do not want to trade. It is inspired by the concept of compersion.
It represents the archetypal Leonardo Da Vinci, and my wild dreaming of humanity's ascent beyond patriarchy and colonized religious morality that does not support anything other than monogamy.
The term "compersion" comes from within polyamory, and instead of feeling jealousy when a lover's needs are met by someone else, it suggests that one can feel joy that the person they love is having their needs met, even if it is not by them. Jealousy often stems from a worldview of scarcity, competition and separation - a worldview perpetuated by my western culture’s inheritance of colonized patriarchy, white superiority and unfettered capitalism.
The concept of compersion calls us to move from stories of separation, isolation and competition to stories of connection, collaboration and belonging. A beautiful way that might just change the world.
This piece is laced with waves of emotion for me, in the complexities of loving beyond what was accepted in the predominant moral structures of my culture and inherited religion. I am a co-creator and dreamer. I am an aesthangelist, one who extols beauty every chance I get. Compersion is one such gem of beauty I have discovered.
To me, compersion is a force that can help us live fully alive as our truest selves by supporting us to love what we love, and who we love, with all its complexity and challenge.  I honor monogamy but when it is presented as the only sanctioned, blessed form of intimate relationship, it can leave much to be desired, literally and figuratively. I speak from the experience of one who served as an Episcopal priest within a conservative moral framework for 20 years. I lament not having the option of compersionate polyamory for the many couples I counseled and married in that time. As I counsel and coach now, it is an option. I also encourage spreading seeds of grace within a relationship for the ending or transitioning of it, allowing for the possibility of deep gratitude and humility as the relationship may be less prone to be taken for granted and considered more precious if its ending is not shamed in shadow, but rather hallowed in honor and the relationship celebrated for its courage at the risks taken to pursue love.
Compersion provides a broadened framework from which to navigate and experience relationships compared to the predominant culture's morally restrictive and sexually repressed framework which has held sway for millennia. The morality of this culture was dictated by my former religion of conservative Christianity and did not allow for intimate love beyond their approved patriarchal, institutional, possessive, sexually repressed understanding - an understanding that they labeled a Sacrament. Now what I continue to discover is that there is a holiness in love beyond my former framework which I had only dreamed of before. It isn’t easy. It isn't a panacea. And it may not be for everyone. Yet it has a place at the table. And to me it is beautiful … and complex … and fraught with the need for grace, like most things that are truly beautiful. It is a color on our relational and moral palette that we have been robbed of for too long.
I am grateful for an opening heart that is allowing me a broader perspective from which to view one of the most precious things in the universe - Love. I am moved by the thought that if there is a God, this God must be polyamorous, desiring each of our best and fullest expression and unfurling, and not only our best, but all of creation as well. There is clarion call in the universe that echos the words of Shams of Tabriz, "It's a sacred universe. Live in it!"
This song is my first attempt to honor such a broadened complex and beautiful idea as compersion.

Leonardo's Compersionate Tears

This is a poem I wrote for falling in love with beautiful hearts in this life, and exploring the consent and beauty of the process.  I hope it stirs something deep in you, and touches your longing.

May I Fall In Love With You - A Poem

A poem dedicated to the friends in my life who have come in to my heart, and demonstrated such tender care that has left an imprint that is surely shaping me into my truer self each day.  I wrote this particular poem because of how my friend, Osha, showed up for me in Santa Fe.

It Isn't Every Day - an original poem.

This is a Hafiz poem that moves me.  I read it over the Johann Johannson piano and music track - Flight from the City.

Someone Who Can Kiss God - a Hafiz poem

This piece came to me in the summer of 2019, after a year of deep grief.  I love nature, and I realized I hadn't been out into it in almost a year.  I told my daughter that I felt like I had been exiled from beauty.  I then began reflecting on my love affair with nature and its beauty, all my life.  It represented a deep beauty to me, and I realized I was moved by beauty's presence, like a lover.  

Another friend posed the question, "what if Beauty is the primary thing in the universe?  Not light.  Not love.  But Beauty?"  I had never considered such a thing.  I acted as if was true, as it resonated with me deeply.  And that maybe Beauty was longing for me, and missing me, as much as I was missing it.  

Hafiz and Rumi poems came to mind and heart, too ... always their influence is in me.  This song has become my favorite that I have written on the guitar.  I hope it kisses your heart tenderly with its beauty.

Beauty Returns

I composed this piece after listening to the stars on several mornings, in my pre-dawn quiet time.  I so love preparing for the kiss of the day, knowing that darkness has left a gift, and light knows what it is bringing. And when it hits me and you, shadows and rainbows happen.  This song is an invitation, an invocation, for the Divine Mother and Divine Father to rise.  And for each of us, as incarnations and expressions of these, as divine Mothers and divine Fathers ourselves, to rise.  I was influenced by Octavia Butler's Earthseed books, the Parable of the Sower, and by adrienne marie brown, and her Emergent Strategy writing.  I hope this piece is magical for you.  It is for me, every time I play it.  I recorded this also, on the mountain, at Bryan's cabin in Oregon's wild region.

Stardust Falling

Welcome to my music.  Nothing is wasted when we contribute to beauty.  My music is a way I contribute to Beauty's creation and reverence. 

I am a poet, bard, composer, creative rebel, beauty maker, writer.  I am love itself breathing this breath, singing my songs, remembering my divine invitation to touch with love rather than fear.  I love the resonance and mystery of music.  Welcome to the portal of my divine connection as co-creator of beauty itself.

Derek Tendersong Washington

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks