
星降る夜に (On a starry night)
[Instrumental Intro: Bright and dreamy, soft piano, gentle guitar strums, twinkling synths, light orchestral swell leading into the verse] [Speaker 1] (0:01 - 5:07) Somebody told us that we had to have a discussion of seemingly useless things. The purpose for the discussion was to investigate the significance of subconscious thought. For example, the sound of a large truck passing by makes it difficult for me to speak into the microphone and be heard. The transcription won't come out clearly, so I have to wait for the truck to go by. So that gives me a moment to listen to the sound of the truck and the way it changes the atmosphere and creates a presence of power and a strong white noise, which to me must sound similar to what being in the inside of a sun must be like. And that gives me a moment to relax and reflect on what I'm going to say next. So rather than just rushing in, I wait for the truck to go by, and I make the truck a piece of my story. And I look across the way, and I think, as I see the cleaning ladies busy at work, sweeping, sweeping. I'm reminded of Calamity Jane, sweeping, sweeping, and how happy she was to learn that even she could be important by doing just a few simple things. And by simple, I mean simple. Simply turning the water on once in a while, for example, can be an art form. And little do you know, most of the time, but it's there all of the time. A woman turns on the water, causes me to take a pause and reflect on the sound and the purpose of her action and the presence that she adds to my experience. And the sound of the water becomes a piece of my story and gives me time to reflect on what that sound does for me on a personal level. And it shows me that I can see a sense of calm in a person that I don't normally see, or haven't seen since I've been in this place. Most of the time, everybody's in kind of a hurry to move on. But now I'm sensing a sense of relaxation and at ease, an almost familial familiarity. I see the white butterfly, but this one was a zebra. That was a trick. And it looks suspiciously like a dragonfly. I hear the number eight spoken in another language. And it sounds just like the word for duck. Duck means that I should get down out of the way. Something might be coming like a zebra, dragonfly, butterfly. You never know if those things can sting or not. I heard a story once about a butterfly named Blurry. She was a black butterfly. Everybody said she was a moth, but I didn't believe them. I always knew she was a butterfly, but it was hard to see her because she was always in the dark. You know how it is. Blurry kind of was hard to pin down because she was always busy. It was hard to get close to her sometimes. But then other times it seemed like it was impossible to get rid of her. And I'll tell you one thing about Blurry. Whenever she was around, we got busy. How did we get busy? Everybody. But it wasn't because they were afraid of her inspections. It was because we love her.

