Dear Jacob,
I was introduced to your music a year ago, by someone I thought I would love. He was young and colorful and spontaneous, taken with movement and music and an inner spirituality, much in the same ways your art is. I tried to love him and ran into his past unaddressed pain and decided to stop, but I kept on loving your music. It was a bridge to him my own yet unrealized hopes and dreams, of oneness between humans on this plane of existence - conventionally packaged in a romantic relationship and yet available in so many other forms.
I attended your April concert in Philadelphia thinking I might be crossing that bridge, to meet a conventionally packaged person on the other end. What I found instead spanned the troubled waters of our times, brought forth our voices from the depths within, and united us as beings of the cosmos. Oneness through the audience choir - vibrational attunement, a whole greater than the sum of our parts. A spiritual experience heightened by the scarcity of unifying experiences in these polarizing times. I laughed, I cried, I was and still am - moved.
In the aftermath I read a lot about your story, your journey. I wanted to know how it came to be that someone could do what you did and continue to do. I was struck by the confluence of factors - the intergenerational talent, the nuturing home environment, the lack of achievement pressure, the intrinsic motivation/reward of creating, the technology-enabled sharing, the industry mentorship, the ongoing experimentation and collaboration, the fierce protection of one's artistic vision/impulses. It all adds up to you existing as you are, creating as one breathes, and moving people across the world into feeling the the truth of interconnectedness.
You are living what I believe - which is that when people are free to be exactly who they are and are supported into their highest potential, that we all stand to benefit. And yet, so few experience this, much less those confluence of factors. It took me years past 30 to nuture within myself the kind of home environment I never had, and freeing myself to be exactly who I am is an ongoing journey. Supporting myself into my highest potential is an neverending battle against selling my (non-creative) labor to the highest bidder. But it is still the vision I defend, and we'll see what factors might confluence for me yet.
In short - I am moved by you, I envy you, I may one day make a living as I am - but more importantly, everyone should be able to live their potential, and you have shown how and why that is. The world could use more Jacobs, weaving us together through the universality of music.
Happy Birthday,
Jo