the company of peonies

I suppose I just live in my own world, a world where my nose is buried in flowers. I step out now and again and am chased back inside by limitations and pessimism. Damn - it's hard to not get infected by that version of reality. Trying to keep my dreams close and my vision of life in the forefront of my mind today.

It's somehow a nicer morning than it was yesterday, even though the sky is gray again. There is a understated sparkle on the water. I felt at conflict with everything yesterday and didn't make time to go outside. Won't make that mistake again today. This is my version of reality, right here.

I don't know what success is but I meet lots of people who are concerned with that and in their company I feel great doubt. I find that I fall into my own trap - I keep trying to inject some of my own energy and positivism into people who seem to need it. Unconsciously. I open up my reality and try to invite them in. It almost never works and I should learn that it's not helpful. Rather, they do the same thing - try to bring me into their reality - and I end up feeling lessened and weak. Then again, if I keep my thoughts to myself and try not to interfere with their energy, I still get pulled down. Something I have to keep working on.

It is too painful to lose my optimism - my faith. Let's just call it faith. I don't ask to stop feeling vulnerability and pain and doubt. Can you be called a living creature without those things? But I'm not prepared to face them without faith again. Don't know how I'd survive that. I hope that one day I will have the courage to open myself up more, and be less afraid of doubt. For now, maybe it's okay to be guarded and to insulate myself whenever I can from the sort of nose-diving energies that are swirling around out there. I don't like to think that I am living in a fantasy world where everything is possible and good, so long as I don't ask anyone else's opinion. No, I don't want that. I think the answer has something to do with compassion; I'll keep thinking about it.
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at long last

I just finished Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing." So grateful to have done so on a beautiful and warm day. There is no cheer in that book. None at all. It's a book that sort of scrapes all the marrow out of the bones of life and feeds it to a dying man. Or something like that. Almost all bleakness and despair, one tragedy after another. I wanted to lift Billy out of that world and give him a chance to find some peace, maybe even happiness. Aaagh! It is so troubling to peak into the monotony of suffering that can plague a life. It frightens me, here in this rosy slice of paradise. None of it makes any sense. Why is one person born to pain and poverty while another is born to pleasure and abundance? We are teeming with Spring. There are blossoms everywhere. I just cannot ever appreciate it enough.

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the hovercraft

The first truly warm day of the year; I'm feeling the way I only feel when I've had a day outside in the sun. I've just noticed a doe outside, staring at me with craned neck and cocked head. As if she overheard me thinking. I feel good.

Had a show last night. Played a set of solo material, and then a set with my trio. There were five extremely good musicians in the audience, plus two friends from my distant past, and perhaps 15 or more people I didn't know who weren't there to hear my music. The talkers out-weighed the non-talkers so the solo set was a challenge. It was good practice to have to dig down and find a place of focus and calm to play from, in the midst of all that noise and distraction. It is no easy thing. I couldn't hear my keyboard properly so it was hard to regulate my dynamics and it was dark so it was hard to read my music. (This was material I haven't been playing - older tunes revisited and new tunes - so I needed my charts.) I am so keenly aware now of what a hindrance it is to be sight-reading in performance. I'm determined to get this swath of music memorized quickly so I can eliminate that handicap altogether. I think I played fairly well, but I was very aware of the lack of polish - the kind of polish that only comes with memorizing and completely internalizing the music, playing it hundreds of times until it becomes not so much a piece to play as a state to exist in and communicate from.

The trio set, on the other hand, was a fucking thrill. We blasted through the loud-talkers, blasted them to kingdom-come. I love love LOVE my band. Going from solo to trio is like going from a dinghy to a hovercraft. Especially when your bass player and drummer are the creme de la creme of experimental avante-garde and genre-slaying, face-blasting, mathy-rhythmic, beautiful-yet-disturbing Art Rock. (I just made that up because there are no real terms for what they do. It's just how I'd really like my music to be described.) Playing with them gives me an incredible sense of confidence, substance, significance and... well, power. They fill out the context of my music and give it a magnitude of colour and depth that I can't even believe.

There's no room for slacking off in a trio - each point of the triangle as important as the others. Our live set is really starting to settle; achieving the details and technicalities is much less of a conscious effort. This means we're listening more and interacting more, paying attention to the whole sound and not to the individual elements. Such an amazing feeling, one I'll never get tired of and will never stop looking for. I swear it's one of the most intense varieties of human connection - an absolute phenomenon of synergy and unstoppable momentum. Hoooo-ah, I love it!

It was great to have those musicians in the audience. I take their feedback very seriously, and it makes me so happy that musicians I revere are responding so well to my music. It's exciting and encouraging. I've realized that I don't care very much about the opinion of the general public. I still don't know how accessible my music is, but that's becoming less and less relevant. I would be so honoured to be a Musician's musician. Even more honoured if non-musicians could love my music too. But I don't want that to influence my work too much. [A topic for another day: Who is Your Audience and How Much Does it Matter?]

I'm so looking forward to this tour in May. It's going to turn this triangle into a circle, I think. And in the meantime, I'm going to be practicing my ass off... Hoooo-ah!

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fernified

I knew what I needed today: a hike. I needed to get deep into some woods and cleanse my mind. So I went up a mountain with this beautiful she-wolf/dog:

She has become my new best dog-pal. Until I have a settled life (a few years or decades down the road), I have to just be a friend and not an owner of a dog. That's fine with me.

It was not a radiantly gorgeous day, but it was a very fine day for a hike, yes indeed. It's been a long time since I walked my bones up a mountain, so it was a slog, but OH did it feel good. Purifying!

Hallelujah, glory be, for dogs and Spring and hikes and snow patches beneath mossy rocks, and barnacled bark breathing out sweet pristine air into my hungry lungs.


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resting

I feel scrambled like 3 eggs. Like a bowl of soppy eggs.
A lot of activity during the days, a lot of activity in my mind.
Really happy about playing new material with my band. Full of ambition to get more music finished so I can start planning the next album. Tomorrow is a day at home, then Thursday I work and have a gig, then Friday through Monday is free time. Free. All for me. I can hardly believe it! I need to spend some time neutralizing my brain. I know I say this about every 3 days. Each time I say it like something dramatic has happened. It's always the same old story, and every time I feel just as scrambled-eggy.
A friend teased me about my metaphor use once and I see that he had good reason to. I love metaphors, but they probably don't love me because I flog them so. I am tempted to continue my egg metaphor now and say that the problem with being whipped into a souffle is that sometimes you just suddenly deflate.
There, I said it. ha ha!
(I don't actually know if souffles can deflate. I imagine that they must.)
I just plow through my time in the city, burn up tons of social energy. And then I come home and ploooooffff, all the air goes out of me. I've probably talked more in the last 3 days than John Wayne characters do in an entire lifetime. I don't know if this is possible, but I have a stomach ache from talking too much.
Ugh.

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...

admitting little things

I had a show this evening. I made 18 dollars. It was a good night. I made up an awards-acceptance speech (I'm just going to admit that I do this) on the way home, a speech in which I made people stand up and beat their chests and weep on each other in fits of passion. It was a speech about the Art that lies behind everything we hold dear in this world. It was a speech that shamed the government for the Musician's eighteen dollar paycheque and free glass of beer. I don't remember the speech now, but it was memorable to all who heard it.

Anyhow, I was going to say that the gig was actually quite fun. (I don't care about the money - 18 dollars is just a good joke. Why bother? It's like getting a tax refund from the government for 18 cents.) There were half a dozen people listening very attentively, and a few times during my set, I realized that the whole room was quiet. That's a special feeling when you're in a room full of strangers who are audience members by accident. After the show, 4 people told me, with sincerity, that they really liked the music. I gave them free CDs and we became friends. That's what it's all about. Some people might think it's stupid to give music away for free. But those kids weren't about to buy those CDs from me, and if I let them go home empty-handed, they'd probably forget all about my music. This way, they might tell a friend about me. 10 or 12 bucks for a CD - it's just as inconsequential as the 18 bucks for the gig, in a way. I'm not interested in selling my music like that. Yeesh. It feels so tawdry.
Tawdry!
This is probably not a wise entrepreneurial philosophy. I guess I just hate to bring money into the picture at all unless it's really worth it. Like if someone said, "I want to help finance your next album - here's 5 grand." I'd accept that, graciously.
Anyhow - I took away some good lessons from my gig this evening. Task: I need to somehow simulate the common performance scenario of not being able to hear my voice, and practice with that handicap. Sometimes there are no monitors, or the crowd is too loud, etc, and you hear your voice bouncing back at you from the speakers in the corner of the room - a split second too late to adjust the pitch. This is really tough. Especially when you're a born and raised unplugged singer. You rely so much on the sound your voice makes before it's even left your mouth - hearing the pitch in your head, and using all those tiny mysterious sensors in the brain and in the body to place the tone. You forget that you might walk up to the microphone and suddenly become vocally blind. It's a bit like touching your face after you've had freezing at the dentist - your fingers can feel your skin but your skin can't feel your fingers. In a loud room with loud speakers, you can't hear your voice coming out of your head unless you shout. Instead, you hear it at a distance, just a ghoulish echo of your musical intention.
How to practice like this? Maybe I just have to blast some other music in my room while I'm playing, anything to drown myself out. Fill my ears with cotton? Put my monitors in the other room and shut the door? I'm going to admit something else about myself, and that's my frequent Holodeck fantasies. I don't qualify as a Trekkie, but I challenge you or anyone to come up with a more brilliant concept than the Holodeck. I would walk in there, and say, 'Computer - gimme a room full of belligerent drunks, gimme the worst sound system invented by man, gimme a blown-out monitor, and gimme a stage set back 50 feet from the speakers.' And there I would practice. I would rotate through scenarios of course, because there are other challenges that must be faced. Pity that the only way to practice dealing with these horrors is by throwing yourself into the great unknown of real live performance, over and over again.
Well, not a pity really. Ha. It's what I'm here for.

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veils

Today I woke up to what looked in every way like Spring. April 14th - my Mother's birthday.

How appropriate, I thought. How very nice that Spring is going to pay a visit in honour of this good woman.
Well, it must have had another birthday to rush off to, because it left abruptly, allowing Winter to get its foot in the door again. Tarnation!


It should not be difficult to make time for a blog. But it is. I have way too much to say and a constant feeling of needing to be doing something else right now. Practicing, that is. It feels like such a luxury to sit down and muse slowly and at length about this and that. I'd like to muse about the book I'm reading and the shotgun to the heart it dealt me this afternoon, and about some poetry and some music, and about the tangles and tears in my mind (tears as in ripped, not as in wept) and about people close and far. Aargh. I'll let myself do this on Saturday, I think.


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brief hermitage

It's kind of a dull day outside, and so I feel a bit dull myself. I'm not really low, but low enough to catch myself wishing I was someplace else. It's easy to slip into that, but I don't want to. I want to stay with this raw dullness and try to see it for what it is.
One thing I see right away - not a revelatory insight, but a childish urge. I want to jump on a big trampoline. I want a large gulp of fun. Too bad I don't have a trampoline. I also would really like to swim today. I am so relaxed and full of well-being when I'm in the water. I wonder if it's the ol' back-in-the-womb feeling. Or if it is just a relief to be rid of gravity for a while. Or if it's because I get to feel non-human and animal/fish-like. Away from human dilemmas.

I also see that there is a soft layer of sadness over my heart. Sleepiness. Nothing dramatic, just a quiet hum like a misting rain. The sadness is connected to the dullness; my insides are disappointed by the world looking dull. How absurd. But it is the feeling one gets when a lover becomes distant and closed. It's the feeling of something being withdrawn. This thought occurred to me the other day when I was on my way to work on a brilliant and dazzling morning, passing by views of the ocean and mountains that squeezed all of the longing out of my heart. And I just felt as though someone I achingly loved and missed had come back to me.

But oh, what a fair-weather friend I am to nature. I know it, I know it. These are just the puerile remarks of my puerile spirit, wanting pleasure first.

I'm looking at the books of poetry on my shelf. Each of those books is a man's life. Part of a man's life at least. "The Complete Works of..." Yes, I think that's a man's life. I flip through them, scanning for something to hold today. Imagine being immortalized in a book, and poured over by people looking to you for wisdom or solace, or just something. Imagine.

I tried Byron and Blake, but I settle on Ryokan. So much more acceptance there of life.
Here are two that resonate me with right now:

Standing alone beneath a solitary pine;
Quickly the time passes.
Overhead the endless sky --
Who can I call to join me on this path?

..

Intermittent rain -- in my hermitage
A solitary light flickers as dreams return.
Outside, the sound of falling raindrops.
My black, gnarled staff leans against the wall.
The fireplace is cold, no charcoal awaits my
imagined visitors.
I reach for a volume of poems.
Tonight, in solitude, deep emotion.
How can I explain it the following day?

..

I think I will go back to my music now. No pressure to write anything or make anything perfect. Here's one more from Ryokan, making me smile:

Thirsty, I've filled myself with sake;
lying beneath the cherry blossoms --
Splendid dreams


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action

For some reason, I'm still thinking about the locker-room scenario, wondering why it stuck with me.

Firstly, I think it's just the energy that was radiating from these women. (Speaking of radiation.) If I hadn't been such a detached observer in the situation, I would've been infected by their energy. I'm not one for Aura-talk. I just know that people exude energy that can influence and affect me hugely, both for better and worse. These ladies were walking, talking toxic waste plants. Nobody is going to react to that kind of proselytizing except with compounded negativity.

Secondly, both these women seemed to be speaking from a place of outrage over wrong-doing. Which must have roots in goodness and a love of life and this world. Their rant seemed an aberration of the underlying care/concern that triggered the outrage. 'How good impulses turn into bad actions.' Such a disconnect there.

Thirdly, I think it's essentially disgusting to complain about the state of our society when we live here, in peace, health, safety, stability and beauty. There are troubled happenings everywhere, and while I agree it's important to be aware of them, I think it's even more important to be grateful for our living conditions, such as they are. When I think of the people of Japan and Libya, I am ashamed to catch myself in any stance of complaint.

Finally, I would like to find a way to be more of an activist. It requires a balance between an awareness of injustice and a grounding in gratitude. The desire to improve a situation of wrong-doing has to come from a place of compassion and not hate. Mostly, there has to be actual action. Bitching and ranting may be verbs, but they're not real actions. I need to think about this.

For now, I can commit to small but daily actions: appreciate and not abuse the luxuries of food, water, electricity, technology, and abundance; value, love and care for the earth by connecting to it at every opportunity; work hard at my work so that I can meaningfully contribute to the world; help others whenever and wherever I can; remember the fleetingness of all things, be careful of grasping, and recognize the difference between wants and needs; always be aware of the impact I have on everything around me; practice non-violence, forgiveness and loving kindness; take stock each day of my right actions vs not-right actions; practice, really practice humility; take responsibility for my energy and mood and how it affects others; ask the Universe for help with everything, because my own thoughts are too narrow to guide me wisely.

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swim meet

I've been swimming at the pool these last few weeks; trying to get into a morning routine with my sister. We're both loving it.
Today, I was alone in the change room for a while with two older ladies. They seemed acquainted, but maybe not close friends. They were bitching about this, that and everything else. Here are a couple of memorable quotes:
"I'm so sick of these bloody ignorant people who think that everything is just la-dee-da."
"I'm like, 'Beam me up already' - I want outta here. I can't take it anymore - just beam me up."
At some point, they became aware of my presence, or maybe they could tell I was eavesdropping, and they started to speak in low voices.
I still overheard something about the 'radiation we have to deal with because of Japan'. And plenty of other doom and gloom.

Well, I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the wonders of the Industrial/Electronic age. And I'm not going to scoff at speculations on topics I don't truly understand. Perhaps we are all being slowly poisoned by radiation, perhaps we are about to be devastated by earthquakes of our own, and perhaps 2012 really is going to be the end of the world as we know it. These things are beyond my powers of prediction - completely outside my control. They're also too frightening to contemplate. But... is it really so foolish and irresponsible to live in optimism?

I am a positivist. A realistic positivist. I've learned from my own experience that good things do not come from bemoaning the lack of good things, that bad situations do not disappear when you try to hate them away, and that it's always dangerous to label anything 'good' or 'bad' in the first place. That last item was and is the hardest to learn, and I still grapple a lot with it. 'Nothing is good and nothing is bad - everything just is, exactly and perfectly as it should be.' Well, like hell it is, the mind says. A tsunami is bad. Injury, death, poverty, pain, torture, crime. All bad. (Pleasure, joy, relief, etc = good.) And once I start down this rabbit hole, I get bedeviled quickly.

eg.) OK - so let's entertain the idea that nothing can be inherently bad or good, because every event influences some other event which influences another event ad infinitum, and therefore cannot be isolated and evaluated. Fine. But if there is no good and no bad, then what can I call that which triggers pleasure, joy, relief, etc.? What can I call the energy that I am drawn to; what is it that I focus my energy on trying to attract? Should I be wary of and neutral towards 'blessings' and 'gifts'? Is it foolish to revel in success since every external event has an unknown future manifestation that might betray me?

But - nobody can deny the powerful dichotomy of dark vs light in this world. I have to assume that the Dharma (or any philosophy) is meant to be taken with a grain of salt. The salt of Common Sense! There is the good that is the positive and the light, and is maybe the inherent quality of/in life. And then there is the 'good' that is just a label and brings with it hopeful expectation. There's certainly no question in my mind about what true 'goodness' is and what it feels like. I really do believe that it is possible, and more helpful than foolish, to extract the good from bad situations. I believe that faith in goodness begets goodness, and that adherence to negativity brings nothing but more of the bad. And I guess I'm writing all of this as some kind of self-affirming reassurance that even if I am a 'bloody ignorant person who thinks that everything is just la-dee-da', that I still might just be better off.

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a living roof

I'm thinking about horses again, after watching a Western last night. It made me think of the horses on Kauai. These pictures now look to me like stills from a movie I've always wanted to star in. I've forgotten what it's like to be drenched in sunlight and almost-impossibly-festive colour.

Today's unconscious mental-loop from Tintern Abbey:

That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
have followed; For such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense.

I promise soon to get onto another poem. Even though I think I could probably make do with this one for the rest of time. It seems to have something in it for every thought, feeling and situation in my life. Wordsworth, you wonderful crazy devil.

There's a bird singing away outside, singing an ecstatic and half-drunken waltz. I don't know what its name is, but it has always been my favourite evening singer. It has a huge range and its call is rhythmic and joyful - somehow reminds me of the sound of a burbling creek. Looking out the window at the grey skies and low mists, it sounds out of place. But when I open the window, there's that smell of spring... undeniable. So glad to be home, to have a day and a half of being on the land.

Being on the land - that's what I long for. The feeling that I can open the door, put my feet on soil - pull up the turf and bury myself in rich damp earth if I want to. When I'm in the city I actually feel that I could be on a space station. Nothing but concrete and metal underfoot. It's hard to believe that where there are gardens planted, you could tunnel down into real dirt. But that's a rant I've ranted too many times to need to re-rant any further at the moment.

Ooh- a fragment of a dream from last night just came back to me. A gorgeous scene. I was in Hawaii, in a new home. The walls were solid rows of living trees, and there was no roof - just the starry sky above. It felt wonderfully safe and magical, but I wondered whether animals might jump on us while we were sleeping. The solution was simple - at the touch of a button, the canopy shifted and spread until the thick branches formed a roof for the house.

I've just spent a half hour trying to write about a revelation I had the other day. In the end, I've erased it. For some reason, I can't put it into words properly right here and now. Perhaps it's just not a revelation I need to share. Or maybe the idea hasn't formed completely enough in my mind yet to bring outside of myself. So, I think I'll just let 'er go.

Time to go practice anyways.

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