Read the story behind "Aragon's Nite: A Song of the Earth Mother"
Kayenta...
The word is Navajo, meaning 'water-bearing rock'. It contains something life-sustaining to us humans....water.
Kayenta is not the name I go by. My name is Scott Francis. I provide nothing that life-sustaining. But Kayenta...Kayenta refers to the music. It is the music that comes forth out of me...and it seems to want to be music that is water for the soul. Pure and refreshing to the spirit. If it affects you that way, then I have done my job well. I stood out the way enough for the Spirit to play through me to offer you some of that water to enjoy...
The pictures you
see here are from my performance at Trolley Square in Salt Lake City, Utah
on Thursday, June 24, 1999. It was my second public performance.
I have always been a person that worked in the background. I never would have imagined myself going out in front of people to perform, much less perform musically, as I picked up the Native American flute having very little musical ability.
But after learning how to get sound out of my first flute, what followed truly amazed me, as well as many of my friends who heard me play. I had only been playing one and half years when I decided to take a giant step forward in my flute playing. I made just a fifteen minute demo tape and submitted it to a couple places around town here. To my surprise, I was booked at a couple local bookstores.
I was beginning a whole new stage of my life with performing publicly. There was a paradox to it, though. Physically, it does put me in the foreground of things, but the real work is done in the background, and that of standing aside to let the Spirit play through me.
Even with the web page, while I am the one working physically at the computer, I feel it is Spirit that is really putting it all together. How these pages display are not planned out ahead of time, really. It just flows together very naturally, and Spirit seems to tell me when things are as how He wants them.
But there was something else, as well. That something else was the start of EarthSong, the Native American Flute Circle of Utah.
EarthSong sprang into existence out of a realization of how little influence of the Native American flute there is in Utah, and my own need to associate with others who play or make Native American flutes. I came across three others that were very significant to the start of this flute circle: Doug Wilson, Barbara Burgett, and Nino Reyos. It was because of my quick association with them that EarthSong came into being when it did, and it's existence coincided with my beginning to perform publicly. It preceded it only by a couple of weeks, in fact.
What is most interesting
is that when I first came upon the Native American flute, it was in answer
to my own personal needs. But in no time at all, almost, I found myself
sharing this wonderful new gift with others, first sharing it, then increasing
more, wanting to, to where there became almost a need to have to.
I felt I was being given a mission, of sorts, to share this with others, and it became very important to me. I was a very private individual until the flute came along. It opened me up as a person, and it began change my focus off myself to the needs of other people.
At this point in my life, I feel the Native American flute needs to be heard. Its sound can have a profound, calming affect on people. My feeling is that if my playing touches anyone at all, even if I never realize it, it is worth it. Who knows, it may cause one person to turn a different way in their life, and prevent them maybe hurting or killing someone. I like to think that maybe it could prevent something like the Columbine High tragedy in Littleton, Colorado.
I don't believe the Native American flute is the answer to everything. What I believe is that we are affected by hundreds, if not thousands of different influences upon us everyday, and that it is the sum total of those different influences that makes us do the things we do and react the way we react. The Native American flute is a good thing. Its influence can only be a small part of a large, complex equation that defines us. To keep tragedies like Columbine from happening, we need more positive influences in our equations. I see the Native American flute as only one. We need many more positive influences in the world.
One way to get more of them is by the ripple affect. The more people that hear the Native American flute, and are affected by it's soothing sounds, the more they may go on to do something positive to someone else, and it could go on and on.
This is why I play the Native American flute, and why I started EarthSong...
--Wm. Scott Francis
Founder EarthSong Native American Flute Circle of Utah
