Biophile Music

For most of his musical life Eric explored musical expression in a pretty predictable way, through typical folk and rock idioms with an occasional foray into more experimental territories. It wasn’t until his mid-life discovery of the grand cosmological perspectives offered through evolutionary spirituality and the writings of Thomas Berry in particular that his musical expression shifted dramatically into discovering the realms given vibrancy through Biophile music.

This direct relationship between spiritual awakening and musical evolution inspired the alignment with the concept of biophilia as coined by the famous Harvard biologist E.O.Wilson, for Eric’s love of life and deep affiliation with living systems get opportunity to gain form through the vehicle of Biophile music. Discovery of the evolutionary perspective (we are all made of stardust!) somehow gave Eric’s ego permission to let go and step back within his musical expression so that he directly experiences the flow of musical ideas as more of a witness than a direct participant. He has expressed on numerous occasions how honored it feels to be the midwife for such an animated celebration of life and consciousness.

Eric Geoffrey apparently opened the door to discovering the evolutionary perspective as living mythology and his affinity for biophilia when he started spending a lot of time in the tops of very tall trees. Odd as that sounds, he suspects that there is a deep genetic memory that gets stimulated by courting what one of the leading instructors in technical tree climbing calls entering into “treetime”. However it happened, a summer spent in the canopies of old growth forests peaked his interest in environmental education, and he can actually pinpoint the moment when perched at the top of an ancient oak he recalled an earth oriented book that had been sitting unread on his shelves for some 20 years. Turns out that the book was “The Dream of the Earth” by the seminal Thomas Berry, and in the process of reading the book Eric experienced what he terms a series of deep awakenings. “I have never before experienced such a complete alignment of everything that I have ever read, and thought of, and dreamed of; all of a sudden, everything within me had a vibrant context, and deep meaning, and things started to make sense in a way that they never had before, and I knew what I was supposed to be doing with my life.”

Drawing upon over two dozen years onstage in various performing capacities, it was a very natural progression to combine a wildly varied background into a symbiotic whole. Eric’s time as an aerial clown with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus (yes, you read that right), his involvement with numerous community theater projects, his youthful apprenticeship and subsequent bouts as a vaudevillian juggler, and his explorations as a musician with various groups in numerous adventuresome places over the years have all culminated in the unified singularity that is the sonic pageantry of Biophile Music. Throw in a little fire-breathing dragon taming in Colorado, a couple of contemplative winters off the grid in Alaska, and the attentive parenting of a truly magical water child and you have an evolutionary soul who was ripe to take on such a calling.