Keep The Path Clear

A friend teases me: “Hey Paul, how many folk singers does it take to change a light bulb?”

“I don’t know, how many?”

“Five: one to change the bulb and four to sing about how the old one was better.”

Point taken. We should be wary of believing the old days were better. I’m from New York — they weren’t. I don’t miss urine-soaked subway cars, blackouts, or getting mugged on street corners in broad daylight.

But one reason I’m drawn to folk music is that it preserves the forms of wisdom and power always at risk of being lost to so-called “modern” trends.

In his book, Invisible Republic, Greil Marcus described folk music as a “community of ghosts”: not relics to worship, but voices still speaking beneath the noise of the present.

As we face the onslaught of AI, it’s important to understand that what’s arriving is not just new possibility, but also the erasure of history, wisdom, dialect, humor, grief, and faith. AI can summarize, imitate, and recombine culture at astonishing speed, but speed is not the same thing as remembrance.

Whether you call yourself a folk singer or not, it’s important to practice some form of memory-resistance. Record your elders before their stories vanish. Learn what stood in your neighborhood ten or a hundred years ago. Hold space for your own grief and the grief of others without resorting to phrases like, “Well, everything changes.” Yes, everything changes, but what we fail to mourn returns to haunt us.

The Buddha said he did not so much discover the dharma as clear an overgrown path hidden for eons. That path runs through our bodies. One act of memory-resistance, therefore, is staying present in the body, for it is there that we encounter patterns of history and sources of power already forgotten by the digital world.

Keep the path clear. It’s not about clinging to the past, but preserving what the present threatens to destroy.