Life is tough and it can leave you broke 
so hold on to your roots like the Mighty Oak

The Mighty Oak

Make Art [Improvised Lyrics]

On this edition of "In the Garden", Andre Viette talks about Daylilies.
In the Garden airs live, Saturday mornings between 8 and 11 a.m. eastern. Call 540-433-9782 with your gardening questions.
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In The Garden - Daylilies Part 1 - 7/1/23

You can buy cheap tools to use in the garden, or you can buy quality tools that will last a lifetime.  Andre Viette gives you his recommendations for garden tools that you might be handing down to the next generation of gardeners.  Listen live to In the Garden and call with your questions, Saturday mornings between 8-11 a.m. eastern time. Call 540-433-9782.


In the Garden-Gardening Tools_11/2/24_Hr.3

The roots of an oak are three times as deep as the tree is tall. An oak needs depth to steady its growth, it needs to know the ground from which it grows intimately. It's a metaphor, borderline cliché, for the self. We need to know where we come from, but the archive of the self, and the collective self, digs deep into the unseen. I like to think the oak's roots are three times as deep, because all things ineffable come in threes. The tree that stands on the brow of the hill just below my house is, most likely, more than three hundred years old and is tall and gnarled with some parts struggling for life. I can only see the rough edges of these roots that are three hundred years deep as they rise and crawl from the ground. Every spring is tentative, watching for leaves to return. I've been in this house for thirteen years, which is only a blink in the lifespan of the oak, but it's all the adult growth of its offspring, whose roots are gently taking down the boundary wall at the bottom of the garden. Those roots are more seen than either I or the young oak would like.

Oak trees are sites of life and death, their lifespans stretch beyond our own, they are seemingly eternal, but gesture gracefully toward death, our own, the tree's, and the multiple non-human lives that co-exist and have co-existed with it. The oak tree is a sacrament and, as I gaze up into its branches on Christmas eve, I think about Augustine's 'visible signs of invisible grace.'

This is my second silent prayer offering. My silence is the prayer and the sounds that occur in the same temporality as that prayer are an improvised liturgy. In the tradition of John Cage's love of silence, and the intent of his famous 4'33, the silence is different every time; a non-talking improvisation of sound. Here we have 4 minutes and 33 seconds, with a 5 second introit. 

'The sound experience I prefer to all others is the experience of silence, and the silence almost everywhere in the world is traffic, if you listen to Beethoven or Mozart you see that they’re always the same, if you listen to traffic you see that it’s always different.' - John Cage

4'33 Under the Oak on Christmas Eve, 2024

Do You Remember?

Epic rap beat featuring YuGiOh, Byron Messia and Amen breaks. Yo.

Half-Measure Shearer

a flock of birds circles a 300 year old oak tree as the sun is setting





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tree of life at dusk

My songs are my babies. When I am writing a song it is like I am pregnant. Until somebody hears it, the song isn’t born. I want my songs to grow up to do good things in the world.

New Orleans is a landscape where past, present, and future are intertwined and occurring simultaneously. These soundscapes are at the crossroads of magical praxis and acoustic ecology; an archive of nonlinear entanglements.

'The sound experience I prefer to all others is the experience of silence, and the silence almost everywhere in the world is traffic, if you listen to Beethoven or Mozart you see that they’re always the same, if you listen to traffic you see that it's always different.' - John Cage

New tracks tagged #Oak Tree