I spent much of the last couple weeks relaxing and spending time with family and writing or reworking songs. There’s also been some preparation for the series of shows that I have coming up in January, and we have nearly a dozen shows already booked or in the works into 2012. Certainly, this is looking to be the year of the Matt PK Borghi – the singer/songwriter. Michael Teager and myself are also preparing to begin work on our first recorded Teag and PK outing.

There’s a lot planned and I’ll be talking about that here. I am looking to get 52 Songs going again here, more regularly. The holidays didn’t bear the fruit that I had hoped from a Christmas tune perspective, but I definitely wrote some just never set them to music.Teag and myself also have some other plans that if they come to fruition, I’ll write more about here… I’ve learned about doing too much talking about plans that aren’t yet happening, so that’s all I’ll say now.

Similarly, I lost the last few day’s posts and subsequent comments. I’ve put the posts back up, but the comments were lost, my apologies for the time you put into writing them. I’ve moved to daily back-ups now to alleviate that in the future. In any case, I won’t belabor the point.

Thank you for sticking with me.

Highlights:

• Saw an excellent Phish show that blew my mind and has inspired me for almost a full month now.
• Travelled a bit and learned that I love Buffalo, NY, particularly The Mansion on Delaware (Loved it!) and Babeville!
• Did a few excellent rounds of golf — maintaining my handicap
• Discovered Cleveland writer, John Hyduk, kind of midwestern Charles Bukowski… His piece here, Loading Dock Manifesto, really grabbed me, but can’t seem to find much else outside of a few articles…

As I write this it’s the eve of July 4th a time to contemplate the birth of our nation, The United States, and what it means to be an American. I’m more than a little concerned about the climate for public employees, education and unions here in our country, and more specifically my home, Michigan. I don’t know where things are going, but more and more I’m sure that our elected officials don’t have our best interests at heart and I wonder where our country can go as we lose our place as an economic super power where no matter how much we ran amok, we had the most guns and money, necessary for silencing dissent. I dunno… Time will tell…

You only have to look at what drives and what’s driven the Web to see that this is true. Whether it’s open source projects like Unix, Linux, Apache, or openness and sharing that occurs naturally on the Web, think Twitter, Facebook, or earlier BBS systems, or the approach of company’s like Google who’ve tried to harness these open source, sharing models. They’re successful, because, mostly, they work with the Tao rather than opposing it. Microsoft is a good example of an organization working counter to the Tao, specifically now, as they try to use dollars and energy to push their Bing search service to overcome the natural and organic (or Tao-centered) adoption of Google.

If you want to succeed, be concerned less about being a success, and more about how you can add value, centered in the Tao the rest will surely follow.

Note about Taoist references.

I’ve been a student of Taoism and Zen Buddhism for nearly 15 years. Early Zen was influenced greatly by Taoism, which preceded it, philosophically, in China, and so much of what’s been written in both schools of thought is complimentary. This isn’t always true, but frequent enough to mention. Taoism isn’t a religion as much as it’s a life philosophy. I’m wary of mixing anything that be construed as religious with my professional work, but I’ve been working on a translation of the Tao Te Ching, and I’ve come to see many examples of how working with or against the Tao can predetermine success or failure. In fact, patterns were so great that there was a point when it was hard to not correlate success and failure to how centered or uncentered in the Tao a given organization or service was. Anyway, there are sure to be more references to Taoism as I move through the translation and come to understand more of these small and ordinary mysteries…