Lifted Up

“Lifted Up”
from the album “Clothe Yourself in Righteousness”
by Jon Watts

Download this song

And for a moment there
I was ground down
I had my chin on my chest,
infested surround sound.

But I took a breath.
I took a moment.
No,
the rest of this poem’s
dedicated to our closeness.

The remainder of my fame
is aimed at saving all the
hopeless.
I’m committed to this human face and
focused.

So now I’m lifted up
and now I’m lifting others with me.
When my silence is serenity’s
a sign I’m living simply
and I’m simply living
in this complex world that we’ve been given.

And I salute the Amish
and all the other life affirming products
of considering our tolerance for process.
It’s like a long conversation
in which everyone’s involved,
like a deep breath
before you make that phone call.
It’s like a solemn, sullen song
that’s been written and exists
solely so some lungs can laugh,
only after, in sadness, they’ve
sung along.

So let’s make a contract now:
a contractual agreement
that we’ll only be what we really are.
And if you’re scarred, then
let me see your scars.
If you’re lonely
I get lonely too
and I’m here to rest with you.
Or to wrestle you.
If you need a vessel for the truth,
I’ll be a son of a bitch
or the father of our youth
but I’d rather just rest
Let’s get arrested.
Only time can test
all this time that we’ve invested.

If our settlement gets better
in these seven solemn days
I’ll be a weatherman
predicting all this rain on faith
that intuition is correct
or I’m supposed to be wrong
like
writing a song
when the notes
have a will of their own
or herding cats into a barn
when they haven’t heard
reports that there’s a storm on.

And now I’m lifted up
and now I’m lifting others with me.
When my silence is serenity’s
a sign I’m living simply
and I’m simply living
in this complex world that we’ve been given.

And I salute the Amish
and all the other life affirming products
of considering our tolerance for process.
It’s like a long conversation
in which everyone’s involved,
like a deep breath
before you make that phone call.
It’s like a solemn, sullen song
that’s been written and exists
solely so some lungs can laugh,
only after, in sadness, they’ve
sung along.

I’m saying
maybe our sadness
is a natural reaction
to the sad state of living
that’s been so in fashion.
This is babylon
and this is heaven on Earth
and since the day of my birth
every breath has been work
and it’s worth it.
A solemn, sullen song is just the surface.
It’s a tool to be used
for a purpose.

Celebrating life,
celebrating yearning,
celebrating sadness
and our infinite capacity for learning
how to be sad and joyful in the midst of all this mess…
learning how to love life in our faithlessness.

Learning how to love,
especially ourselves.
Forgiveness is a practice that’s essential to my health
forgiveness is the difference between heaven and hell
that’s not some afterlife shit, I’m talking now.

Sometimes I distance myself
because we’re not living deeply
but there’s nothing more shallow than alone.

And that’s the burden of vision
it’s this gift I’ve been given
and it can help or it can hurt the world I know.

And now this pit that I’ve lived in
self-indulgent and rigid
looked a whole lot different from below.

And now my life on the surface
is authentic, it’s purpose
is to be who I’m here to be
and grow.

So now I’m lifted up
and now I’m lifting others with me.
When my silence is serenity’s
a sign I’m living simply
and I’m simply living
in this complex world that we’ve been given.

And I salute the Amish
and all the other life affirming products
of considering our tolerance for process.
It’s like a long conversation
in which everyone’s involved,
like a deep breath
before you make that phone call.
It’s like a solemn, sullen song
that’s been written and exists
solely so some lungs can laugh,
only after, in sadness, they’ve
sung along.

from Clothe Yourself in Righteousness, released September 23, 2011
Written by Jon Watts
Violin by Marina Vishnyakova
Cello, Mixing and Mastering by Jake Thro

all rights reserved

Video Songs: An Emerging Genre of Internet Art

Rather than passively sitting back and being entertained, we now interact with whatever we are watching… we share it on facebook, we comment on it, and we even make response videos. It is definitely a new world of media, sharing and entertainment.

The Changing Face of Art

Listen! Can you hear it?

That’s the sound of people all over the world uploading videos to Youtube. 48 hours of footage every minute.

While that number represents an unwatchable (and perhaps unfathomable!) amount of video, what it says to me is that we are interacting online in a new way. Video has become a standard and casual medium.

Involving Ourselves in the Conversation

Rather than passively sitting back and being entertained, we now interact with whatever we are watching… we share it on facebook, we comment on it, and we even make response videos. It is definitely a new world of media, sharing and entertainment.
Continue reading “Video Songs: An Emerging Genre of Internet Art”

Quakerism 101 with Max Carter

When we were filming the scene in the hut for the music video, Tom Clement and I had some down time with Max Carter and, having asked him to prepare a brief lecture on the history of Quakerism for the video, decided to let him run once through the whole thing.

What’s amazing about what follows is that Max did this without flinching, as Tom and I were moving around the room trying to get everything ready for filming the music video.

As I looked back over the footage, I realized that there is simply no online resource as concise and comprehensive as the (less than) five minute talk Max had just given. I went to work with the visuals, and would say, humbly, that the result is as good as the music video (some might say better!)

The Story of James Naylor, The Most Controversial Quaker

During the time of George Fox, Quaker — and the Valiant Sixty — James Nayler (or Naylor) was a powerful and respected Quaker preacher, who, at the beginning of the formation of the Religious Society of Friends, traveled extensively preaching the Quaker message and writing prolifically.

During the time of George Fox, Quaker — and the Valiant Sixty — James Nayler (or Naylor) was a powerful and respected Quaker preacher, who, at the beginning of the formation of the Religious Society of Friends, traveled extensively preaching the Quaker message and writing prolifically.

After being in prison in Exeter, Nayler and a group of followers traveled North, embodying “signs” in each town they came across, eventually getting arrested in Bristol. Nayler was tried in front of Parliament and convicted of high blashphemy, whipped through the streets of London, branded with a ‘B’ and had a hole bored through his tongue with a hot iron.

I first discovered Nayler while working on my Senior project for the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program (QLSP) at Guilford College. The project (and this song especially) convinced me of Quakerism.

Tom Fox Music Video

Friends,

As the tenth anniversary to 9/11 came and went, I found myself reflecting on the past ten years… especially our reaction to being attacked and the results of that reaction.

I found myself reflecting on my elder, Tom Fox, who joined the Christian Peacemaker teams to try to heal some of the damage we were doing in Iraq. And I found myself mulling over the song that I wrote about Tom’s subsequent abduction and death.

What resulted was very unexpected. I am working full tilt on a new album (due for release in 2 weeks… yikes!) and certainly did not have the spare time. But of course I had to listen, and be faithful to the call. Take a look:

Read more…

How to Heal from 9/11

“What’s important is not your emotional reaction to something, but how you hold and interact with that emotion”

It will continue to become clear that 9/11 was a turning point for our country. Not because we were attacked. Because of the way we responded to being attacked, which was far more damaging (to us) than the attacks themselves.
Continue reading “How to Heal from 9/11”

Announcing: “Clothe Yourself in Righteousness”

Announcing the release date for Clothe Yourself in Righteousness, a multimedia project about Quakers and nakedness.

The time has arrived!

After months and months of praying, not knowing, wrestling, the moment has arrived. If you’re the type to pray, great… all of us involved with the project would be very appreciative.

Also, tour dates:

  • 9/23 – Richmond, VA – 4500 Kensington Avenue – 7 PM
  • 9/24 – Philadelphia, PA – Time and place TBA
  • 10/1 – Greensboro, NC – Guilford College – Time and place TBA
  • other times and locations TBA

…And I’m spent. If you love to read, you’re out of luck. 🙂 I just spent my last waking clarity on that video. Hit play. Just sayin’.

How My Ministry Ministers to Me (Or… How I’ve Been Called Into Nakedness)

Sometimes Friends approach me after performances, on the internet, after a Meeting for Worship, and praise me, noting how deeply my ministry affects them.

With all due respect (and thank you, truly), we might be going about this thing all wrong.

Invited Into Fully Being

When I take on a new project, I find that it is more often because there is something about the subject matter that I don’t know than because I do. That is to say – I receive a leading to go where I am blind, not where I am familiar.

When I lived at Pendle Hill in 2006-07 I named my project The Art of Fully Being. I saw that our shame and fear of judgment causes us to live limited lives in which we allow ourselves to experience openly only a narrow scope.

Rather than feeling that “I have figured out the way to live fully and now it is time to tell everyone else”, I felt that I was being invited into knowing that my own shame and fear of judgment limits my ability to love myself, to allow myself to be (which undoubtedly affects my ability to love others and allow them to be!).

To be specific, I tend to panic when emotions arise in me that I am not proud of or comfortable with: anger, jealousy, doubt, shame. My panic exacerbates the emotion that I am trying to avoid. What if, instead of hating and fearing these emotions, I allow them to rise in me and examine them lovingly…?

“Why don’t you try it and see what happens?”
-The leading to make The Art of Fully Being

What a gift is art. And what a challenge.

Invited to Clothe Myself in Righteousness

My current project is about nakedness. On a similar vein to TAoFB, I have found that our shame and fear of judgment hinders our authenticity in the world. We care deeply about being loved and being accepted, and we often will go to great lengths to prove our worthiness and hide aspects of ourselves that we perceive to make us unworthy.

I see that I wrap my perceived value up into my identity. My ability to be a clear and loving presence is hindered by my anxiety about how others perceive me and what I see as my value level in the social hierarchy. I have found myself clothing myself in my value as a musician or as a well known Friend. In this project I have been invited to dig past those layers, and it has caused a great deal of soul searching.

…and the project is not done. I am still in the final stages of recording (just posted this update on the CYiR website) and surely will continue to be ministered to by the project (often it is in the presentation and reaction to the project that I am the most stretched, as you might remember from my last music video).

But I can already point to major shifts in the way that I approach art. Instead of comfortably nestling my voice into layers and layers of instruments, production, and backup vocals, I have felt called to “strip it down”, lift my voice out and place it, bare, out in the front of the mix. The guitar work, similarly, is bare, with few layers and other instruments to distract.

I am videotaping each part of each recording session and will post videos online. This is taking something that once was a very private, solitary process for me and exposing it.

I am putting the project (my baby!) into the hands of others for the mixing and mastering.

Each of these things is dramatically new and different, and oh, how naked I feel! I am certain that the songs will speak to people, but while I am glad that others can benefit as witnesses of my projects, I wonder if passive observation is an easy way out.

We are all able to listen to the ways in which we are called into radical experiments in being. It is fine to appreciate “my” ministry, but I would like to encourage us to see others’ ministries as a beginning, or as the inspiration to follow the leadings that would minister to us.

Where My Great Passion Meets the World’s Great Need, Or, How Music Became My Ministry

I couldn’t see devoting myself to an extremely risky line of work for the sake of nothing but my faith in my own talent. My studies at Guilford pinballed my professional future between subjects in which I have a peripheral interest: psychology, sociology, restorative justice, philosophy. Then I discovered Quakerism. I should say, I re-discovered Quakerism.

The Beginnings of My Vocational Discernment

During my senior year at Guilford (‘05-’06), there was an active discussion about vocation. “Where my great passion meets the world’s great need” was the phrase bouncing around in my head and the community’s collective consciousness.

I had been writing and recording songs as a hobby since my senior year of high school. By 2006 I had even released a few CDs and played some shows. Music was, without a doubt, my great passion. But there were several major barriers between me and committing to my journey as a musician: (1) It is incredibly unlikely that one will succeed in this line of work; (2) Success often comes at the abandonment of the passion or love that brought one to explore music in the first place; (3) The majority of successful musicians are doing no great service to anything but their own egos.

I couldn’t see devoting myself to an extremely risky line of work for the sake of nothing but my faith in my own talent. My studies at Guilford pinballed my professional future between subjects in which I have a peripheral interest: psychology, sociology, restorative justice, philosophy.

Then I discovered Quakerism.

I should say, I re-discovered Quakerism. Or: I was convinced (as Quakers like to say).

Examining My Roots – A Deeper Commitment

I grew up Quaker. I was well versed in the modern Quaker jargon, the institutional acronyms, the banter of Young Friends, the songs of the camping programs and the schedules and rhythms of the FGC Gatherings. I thought I was as Quaker as they come.

The Early Friends said that baptism comes inwardly and powerfully when we make ourselves open to the spirit of Christ. My senior project for the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program was such an opportunity. Tired of music being an isolated thread in my life, I was inspired to write and record a CD of songs about the Early Friends and the beginnings of the Quaker movement.

The experience was incredible, not just for the personal and moving stories that I uncovered about the Early Quakers, but for the way that the world seemed to rise up around me to supply the resources needed to make the project powerful, alive. In sharing that life with my immediate community of Guilford and the wider community of Quakerism, I‘ve seen its impact be deep, meaningful, transformational. I had found where my great passion meets the world’s great need.

Settling into Action

Today, four years later, I spend my time traveling among Friends, exploring art and ministry and our collective history. I see this as being sacred, and very important, work and I am well supported in doing it.

Certainly I would not have discovered such a perfect, unconventional way to use my specific set of gifts had I not been given the opportunity to explore vocation in the safe container of Guilford College. I think of it as threading a needle (or threading several at once), which takes a lot of trial and error, thought and space. It is invaluable that undergraduates be given the space and guidance to do this explorative work, and I am always glad to know that Guilford and QLSP are still out there, helping to shape our soon-to-be ministers, musicians and leaders.

-Jon Watts QLSP ‘06

Reposted from the Friends Center Fall 2010 Newsletter

A Visit to Shiloh Quaker Camp

Shiloh Quaker Camp is a Summer Camp in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. It is a part of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM) Camping Program, along with Catoctin, Opequon and Teen Adventure (TA).

Shiloh Quaker Camp is a Summer Camp in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. It is a part of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM) Camping Program, along with Catoctin, Opequon and Teen Adventure (TA).

http://www.bymcamps.org

Bicycling into New York City part II: Biking into Manhattan on the George Washington Bridge

This is the second in a 3 part series on biking into Manhattan.
read Part One

Richmond to Boston on a bicycle

Me with all my gear loaded on my Xtracycle.
Me with all my gear loaded on my Xtracycle.

I recently completed a 1,000 mile bike tour in which I lugged all of my musical equipment from Richmond to Boston and then on to Buffalo.

Continue reading “Bicycling into New York City part II: Biking into Manhattan on the George Washington Bridge”

Xtracycle Radish Tour Vlog

For the past three months I have been touring on an Xtracycle Radish. Every week for ten weeks, I recorded and uploaded a vlog. Now, for the first time, each of those vlogs is combined into one window. You can watch all the way through or find the most interesting episodes, all from here!

Xtracycle Radish Tour

For the past three months I have been touring on an Xtracycle Radish. From Richmond to Boston and then on to Buffalo, NY, I ended up riding about 1,000 miles with all of my gear, which turned out to be about 120 Lbs. (!)

Click here to find out how I fit all of

that equipment onto my bike.


Two Wheel Tour Vlog

For ten weeks, I recorded and uploaded a vlog every week, which included footage from my performances and from the ride… and revealed some of the secrets of how I made my trip happen!

Now, for the first time, all of that footage is combined into one window. You can watch all the way through or find the most interesting episodes, all from this page!

Letters of Support and Recommendation

Promise Partner, Olney Friends School

Promise Partner, of Olney Friends School
“One student commented, ‘I hadn’t written that way before. It opened me up, made it easier to write, and I produced things I love.’ Another student, who was already a writer, said that her poetry has changed because of Jon’s workshops: ‘Now I can get out of my head and let the spirit in.’

Read the rest of Promise’s letter…


John W. Baird, Head of School, Westtown School

john-baird-westtown-head-school“Friend Jon connected well with students from both Quaker and other backgrounds. His vibrant spoken word messages touched on themes of environmental stewardship, peace, equality, justice and other quaker testimonies with an authenticity and immediacy that expanded the vocabulary of worship for all of us.”

Read the rest of John’s letter…


Tom Hoopes, Religious Studies Teacher at George School

“Jon Watts brings people together across boundaries of age, theology and musical taste. After Jon’s recent performance at George School, I heard a wide range of affirmative responses from various people. A spiritually-seeking teacher in his late twenties remarked, “Wow. Jon Watts is the real deal. He’s got it.” A very savvy girl of 18 said, “He is SO hot! I have all of his CDs.” A colleague in her 50’s noted, “I love his stuff. And my kids and their friends all have his music on their iPods.”

Read the rest of Tom’s letter…


Walter Hjelt-Sullivan, Academic Dean of Pendle Hill

walter-hjelt-sullivan-pendle-hill“Jon Watts is a skillful and perceptive performer. His performances take on the flavor of a Meeting for Worship. It is clear to me that Jon both prepares the play list to create that atmosphere and listens carefully to follow the leadings of the Spirit in the moment. What I appreciate most about Jon and his ministry is the honesty, sincerity, and transparency of his journey. He continuously seeks to be faithful – to find the true message that has been given to him.”

Read the rest of Walter’s letter…


Max Carter, Director of Friends Center at Guilford College

Max Carter“After witnessing the profoundly positive impact Jon’s work has had on the Quaker community at Guilford, I have felt moved to share the fruits of his labor with the wider Quaker world. I hope that Jon’s music will inspire others to dig deep into the experience of early Friends and discover, as Jon did, deep resources for our lives today.”

Read the rest of Max’s letter…


Bicycling into New York City Part I: How (not) to Bike into Manhattan

This is the first in a 3 part series on biking into Manhattan.
read Part Two

Richmond to Boston on a Bike

Me with all my gear loaded on my Xtracycle.
Me with all my gear loaded on my Xtracycle.

When I first announced that I was going to ride my bike from Richmond to Boston, one of the first questions that most people asked was: “How are you going to get into Manhattan?”
Continue reading “Bicycling into New York City Part I: How (not) to Bike into Manhattan”

How to Carry a Guitar on a Bike

Trailer vs. Cargo Bike

When I first had the idea of doing my East Coast tour on bicycle, I looked into bike trailers. I couldn’t imagine any way to fit my guitar and amplifier onto the back of a bike without towing something behind. (not to mention my box of CDs, t-shirts, posters, tent, food, clothing, sleeping bag, stove, etc!)

But towing a trailer would have felt bulky… two wheels of extra friction on the road? And where would I leave the trailer when I wanted to ride around without all of my stuff?
Continue reading “How to Carry a Guitar on a Bike”

Interview with Earlham School of Religion

Music and Ministry Among Friends: An Interview with Jon Watts

“One of my favorite Quakers Jim Corbett said ‘Verse can make false inspiration obvious, even when a line almost fits… a line that fails to fit is obvious to meta-conscious awareness, which recognizes contrived inspiration the same way it recognizes an idol. A line that fails to fit holds attention in the present, while the composer stops to listen for the line that has meta-conscious approval.’
Continue reading “Interview with Earlham School of Religion”

How to get through Quantico Military Base on Your Bike

This week I started out a bike trip from Richmond to Boston with my guitar and equipment all packed up. I had done minimal training so my first day was really slow going… I didn’t even make it to Fredericksburg. But my second day was much faster and I was hoping to make up for lost time – until I hit Quantico. It was a huge pain in the ass to get through, so I thought I’d pass the knowledge on. If this helps you out, give a holler in the comments section!
Continue reading “How to get through Quantico Military Base on Your Bike”