Practicing Surrender

Sometime we just have to let things be alright. Even if they're not. Even if they are. I've been trying to open up an allow things to be easy of late. It's amazing how hard this is for me. I'm always looking for the angle, for the other shoe. It's not that I don't trust everything will work out, but I have to consciously remind myself to let go of the notion that it must be hard.

I've been trying to apply this to my creative process. It means not forcing the issue, or going after the challenge. Rather, it means doing what's easy, and natural. It means going from little bliss to little bliss, and letting the rest take care of itself.

It's the equivalent of eating your favorite part of dinner first, and then not bothering at all with the thing on the plate that you don't like. And not feeling bad about it.

I can feel myself daily, almost hourly, being sucked into wondering what's wrong, or wondering if I'm doing everything I can. Then I check myself. I find the sweet spot, and turn off the debbie downer switch, and just let it be ok. Even if it isn't. Even if it is.

Side A Starts Now

Wow, so shamanism. I learned more about the patterns of my life in 30 minutes than I have in years of journaling. From what I understand, it takes a few weeks to integrate what I've been given. While I do that I'll probably stray off-line. See you on the flip side.

The Known and Unknown

Three things have been on my mind as of late: Irish Music, Shaman truths, and Day Jobs. In an effort to keep my life from becoming stagnant I have accepted a proposal to learn some Irish & Scottish ballads in the hopes that I will be that girl singing every so often with some excellent Irish bands in the area. We'll see. I've been swimming in Irish music for the past month, trying to identify what songs will work with my voice (and, geez, can I do that little trilly thing that all the singers do???). Stay tuned. If this works out, I've just embarked on something new.

Next, Shaman truths. As it turns out, my inner work has led me to all things energetic and spiritual. The futuristic notion of Quantum healing flits at the edges of my consciousness these days. And somehow they compliment so easily the ancient arts that work with spirit and soul. I am both attracted to and freaked out by the prospects of these two worlds, and how they might collide in my life and change my future. I have no idea what this means for who I could become....hopefully something more restorative than I can even possibly imagine. Why explore this? Because it keeps coming up, that's why. It comes out of nowhere and won't get off my front page. Plus I've just had this feeling for a few months that I'm missing something, and it's not a conscious something, it's something else. I will, indeed, be meeting a shaman next week.

Then there are day jobs. God, what a weird concept, no? If I ever start a podcast or something I will interview artists about their creative process, sure, but what most fascinates me is the 'day job.' People that we just assume are working full time as artists, are they really? Or do they have a day job? Or do they have passive income, or are they living with their parents, or do they have a wealthy spouse? Much as I am grateful for the many day jobs I've had over the years, there's something about that model that has made me literally sick. I'm starting to wonder if I should just accept the fact that I don't actually work well with that model, much as I wish I did. But if not this, what?

So I've been ruminated a lot about the known and the unknown. What do I hold on to just because it's known, and where do I get the courage to push beyond that into the unknown? While I mull that over in everywhere but my mind, I shyly reach for shaman truths, and soak in Irish love songs. Maybe someday I'll shed the day job, and be an entirely new kind of snake.

Good Medicine

Honey cake for Rosh Hashana.

Been thinking about good medicine and how much we need it. Good medicine is what we do to prove we're more than what we thought we were. In my case, it's about cultivating joy. Every day I ask myself, "What is one thing I can do today that will make me ridiculously happy?"

A random list of incidental activities appear: Novels. I love to read novels. I'm reading Eat, Pray, Love, and I'm delighted by the advice of Ketut, the Indonesian healer in the story, who tells the author to "smile in your mind, smile in your liver." I've been imagining my liver smiling for days now. I have been baking foods from religious traditions I know nothing about, from ingredients I can't eat, just because I love the smell of things baking on an early autumn evening. I have been attending random community meetings just to hear people wrestle with the world, and watching episodes of Mad Men for hours, just because the fashion is sharp and the sound of drinks pouring over ice at 11 A.M. is decadent. I've been listening to new albums (Brooke Annibale, PJ Harvey, Irish music).

All of these things are unscheduled, and on a whim. Good medicine, indeed, for a gal who's life has been a strict regimen of medical routines and work, work, work. Can anyone relate?

By chance, a good friend sent me a 20-minute video of Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love author) talking about "having" a genius rather than "being" a genius. I string that happy thought like a bead on my bracelet of delights.

So, even though the adrenal fatigue has returned, I resolve to give myself a break. I resolve to prove I'm more than a herb-popping, couch-slouching woman who must languish through her condition. I resolve to find my joy, and cultivate delight, free my mind, and smile in my liver, savour my prescription of loving life on a lark. I resolve to dally a little.

What do you call good medicine? How do you shift the paradigm, and stretch your imagination? Does it work?

WHAT the---?!?!

At Googie's Lounge in NYC

Well, I'm totally floored. Two years later and I just did 5 days of travel, 3 nights of work, and more socializing than I usually cram into a month, and I came home completely healthy and non-fatigued.

I think we have a new paradigm.

So on Monday, with my willpower in tact, I started the next phase of getting well -- the dreaded parasite cleanse. I'm using a product called Parastat, tested via applied kinesiology for my correct dosage. Not that I'm done with the heavy metals detox or the modified diet or the mudpacking. Oh, no. 

So I'm keeping things low-key. This month shows are casual (radio interview, farmers market, etc.) and I'm planning to take a little break from all things music so I can enjoy the summer garden, finish some house projects, and watch how those parasites wriggle on out. So gross. 

This winter my hope is to finish those elusive songs that I want on the next album, and continue my process for finding a producer.  It's so nice to be able to make plans. I still don't take that for granted.

Summer Weekend Tour

Travel isn't as simple as it used to be, pre detox era. Now I've got to spend a half day or more prepping for how I will thrive. I make my little supplement/detox meds packs, mix up my nano vitamins liquids in little dark bottles, get bottles of non-tap water from the store, and make up little snack packs and buy little boxes of rice milk, so I don't starve at rest stops that only serve wheat-wrapped and milk or soy-imbued everything. Even the fries are fried in something other than olive or cocunut oil, I'm sure. But I get those anyway. :-)


I have to eat at religiously regular intervals...before 9 am, again at 10:15 am, at 11:45, then at 2 pm, and fiinally and early dinner by 6. Maybe a snack later and early to bed. Yeah, this is tough when traveling.


Still, a summer weekend music tour is worth it. I get to see the American landscape, which I love, and friends and cities. New York has some amazing eateries where I can eat EVERYTHING. As a foodie this is like a good death where heaven is on the other side. 


I rehearsed on a grand piano (Steinway) at the nearby Unitarian church yesterday and re-learned how amazing an acoustic instrument is and how totally unworthy my songs and piano skills are. Lots of my songs don't work on a grand, I found, so I adjusted my set list to more appropriate stuff. And I started writing a new song 'cause the instrument just wants to do certain things. Loud-mouth pianos. They know what they want. Such a beautiful thing


So, I'm packing up today and looking forward to the next 5 days on the road....

Under the Pine

I just watched Sally Potter's Orlando last night. A few days prior I went to the theater to see The Tree of Life. Both are visually stunning, and somewhat stylized, symbolic and non-linear in their approach. There's lots to love about these two movies, but I think what I love the most is that they use the medium of film to its best advantage. It's like you don't ask a strawberry to be a banana. The strawberry is best as a strawberry. That's how these films are to me. They exploit the power of moving images to affect us, not necessarily to tell an easily understood story by the mind. The mind works, of course, to organize...but often I found myself just letting go of making sense in that way and falling into the world of moving color, design, wonder. It's like what I imagine telepathy might be like -- their vision straight to my head. And the little things became stars -- the way light plays off the planes of a glass building, the way Orlando would gaze suddenly straight at us shattering the lens that separates, or the sounds of trees rustling and insects humming on an otherwise silent summer day. Trees as architecture, or as filterers of light and love, were truly lead characters in The Tree of Life. 


It reminds me of a time when Liz, my high school social studies teacher, rather mocked someone she talked with who said to her, "Have you ever really thought about trees?" "Have you ever really hugged a tree?" She thought that was sort of laughable and that the guy certainly must have been stoned. But somehow those questions have stuck with me. Because, no, I never had really thought about trees and I realized at that moment I wanted to.


So, 20 odd years later when I do my mudpacking to detox I have a lawn chair set up faciing a large pine tree in my backyard. For the 10 minutes that the mud is soaking out toxins from whatever part of my body I have it smeared on, I sit there in silence considering the tree. For the 10 minutes afterwards when I must be outside with my feet on the earth to ground myself, I consider the tree. And then for the 10 minutes after that when I soak my feet in salts and clay to draw out any remaining toxins from the session, I consider the tree.


I have to say I really have no words for those 30 minutes of my morning. But The Tree of Life seems to capture how sublime it is. That pine tree will probably be there for another 100 years or more. It'll just be there, in silence, a home to birds and squirrels, moving in the wind, standing in the snow, sending out little bright green shoots on the ends of its branches every spring. And I will have lived all motion and searching, and brief. We are not immortal like Orlando. Nor are we ageless like stones or still and planted like trees. We do not live from age to age. We are that brief burst of color, and longing, and wonder, bearing witness to what we are not.


And through that we learn what we are. The people who help us there are doing amazing, important work. Our consideration is important work.

Open Letter

I've been reading this really fascinating book called "Spontaneous Evolution". It explores the world of healing and humanity's evolution by recapping our biological, religious, political and scientific histories through a lens that marries spirit and science. The book shares how our commonly held paradigms of "how things work" has been dramatically challenged in the last 100 years by science, and our public perception has yet to catch up. Our modern thought is not so very modern after all. The future, so to speak, is already here but many don't recognize it.


I love books that bend my mind. Because of books like these, and because of my journey with art and healing over the past 2 years, I am starting to wake up and become a little bit more of an activist. I'm less satisfied with stressfully living my own life and more interested in being a part of a movement that wants to illuminate beauty and connection. We live is startling and magnificent times. I will recap some of my favorite 'new facts' in a post next week.


For now, I wanted to share a letter I sent to the Obama Campaign headquarters this month. I'm urging them to consider crafting a new American Myth that lives in balance with this land. I encourage every reader to find a way to raise your voice for one another. 

To the Obama Campaign,

I have emailed this letter to your campaign but I also wanted to mail it.  I feel compelled to let you know about an important issue that will decide who I support for president in 2012.

Hydrofracking is taking over my neck of the woods in Pennsylvania and I -- along with a growing group of citizens -- want it to stop. The President's position on natural gas harvesting of the Marcellus Shale is more or less supportive and I think it's worth it to share that he won't get my vote this time around if he touts this fossil fuel as the answer to our energy future or new sustainable jobs. I suspect I’m not alone. This is a tipping point issue.

I have become increasingly concerned with this administration's leadership on environmental stewardship as it relates to energy production; it's not nearly creative or inspiring enough. We as a nation need a vision to embrace when it comes to making these changes, we need an ambitious and seemingly impossible goal to strive towards, we need a new national story or new American myth of living in balance with our resources. I expect fierce and committed leadership on this issue as there is a clock ticking. Employ the youth and children in this endeavor and it will get done. Employ our president to lead the way and it will get done.

I had hoped that when I saw Obama stumping for election last time – when he very clearly said we'd bring about the end of the combustion engine -- that this would be a man who could lead us into a truly visionary future.

I haven't seen this future. I've seen nearly the opposite. Time and time again environmentally sound vision and policy gets woefully compromised. The natural gas drilling via the hydrofracking method is just another example, and I think people who care about this have had enough. We see the planet changing right before our eyes. It’s breaking our hearts.

Pittsburgh has an incredible resource in abundance of water. To use gross amounts of that resource for non-renewable fossil fuel extraction and to risk the pollution of that resource for future use, is doubly reckless in my view. The Obama campaign needs to know that simply getting clever or ‘smart’ about monitoring this type of drilling is not only reckless for the environment and our energy future, it’s also reckless for re-election. 

This is a real and very personal issue for me. I have been detoxing from industrial pollutants for the past 2 years and been feeling pretty awful for about 4 years (which suspiciously coincides with the uptick in drilling downwind from where I live).  Environmental illness causes job loss due to fatigue, lack of mental capacity, and frequent infections, and potential financial ruin due to expensive medical treatments that are outside of health insurance coverage. I'm lucky -- I'm recovering slowly but surely from my illness. However, if the environmental assault continues how will I ever become a fully productive member of society again?

I won't be silent if Candidate Obama campaigns on the back of my and my neighbor's health and the dangerous extraction of this region's resource, in exchange for the pollution of our other resources. I will actively campaign against him if there is any alternative to put someone in office who will do right by our planet's energy future, whether that person can win or not.

Don't get me wrong. I want Obama to be the guy, I truly do. I just haven't seen it yet on these issues. The chemical warfare waged by corporations because of the Marcellus Shale is the tipping point. 

                                                                          

I don’t presume that one letter will change his mind or your plan of action, but I thought it was worth mentioning so the re-election campaign could consider this new reality coming out of Pennsylvania.

Thank you for your time and for listening. I am open to further conversation if you have any questions.

Best wishes,

Heather Kropf

Singer-songwriter

Pittsburgh, PA

Quiet minds and global surrenders

It's been months since I've logged on to this blog. I think that's probably a good thing. I started feeling pretty awesome around the time I was songwriting. Then, like a runaway train, I kept on rolling just a bit too amped up, a bit too intent on getting somewhere.


And I crashed.


One of the things I've begun to really care about is the hydrofracking natural gas drilling that's every expression of imbalance, corporate domination, and backward energy-thinking, that's infiltrated the state of Pennsylvania. I kind of started caring a bit too much.


Question #1: How do you become an activist without losing your center? 
Answer: I'm thinking it's Buddhist in nature but I don't know what it is.
Answer #2: Love.


My heavy metals detox has progressed pretty well, I think. My second labs show that of the three highest metals, one is now totally gone and the other two are within "reference" range. So, I've got some work to do but nothing is elevated anymore.


My adrenals started acting up and I started getting sick a lot, again. So I'm taking a break from the sauna and the detox for the summer in favor of a few other things.


The other things: I had been on track to start making my 4th album, and on track to begin doing repairs on my house to get the mold remediated and get it ready to sell.


But I crashed, remember? 


So I started seeing a new person just for some immune support and adrenal recovery. We found out my entire system is all compromised, so I find myself on a new regimen of products. This time, it's all about getting my body alkaline. And interrupting the interference caused by scars. In my case TB and Small Pox vaccines.


Question #2: How do you know when you're too much on the journey? How do you know when to take a vacation?
Answer: I think it's got something to do with accepting that your timeline isn't really your timeline. My boyfriend reminded me that this is my journey and I'm on it. Although I want to fix up the house and make an album and do all the things that give me pleasure, I'm not done healing. This is my path.
Answer #2: You know when you no longer ask the question.


So, more Netflix movies (been watching all about Ancient Aliens!) and staying home and cooking alkaline meals and juices. Marveling at the wonder of early summer -- my nasturtiums are poking out of the ground. So are the basil seeds and mexican sunflowers.


I started 30 wysteria from seeds and one grew!!! Then the cat noshed on it yesterday and it's looking a little sad. Maja barfed it up and we monitored her pretty closely yesterday to see if the poison was doing more damage. She seems fine.


Meanwhile, I practice being who I want to become; I wait for a time of a quiet mind and a massive global surrender to love.

8 days of beautiful

I have had 8 straight days of feeling fine. It's been almost 2 years since that has happened and so I'm feeling like the luckiest woman in the world right about now.


One reason might be I'm so obsessed with songwriting that there's no time to obsess over symptoms. I'm doing this thing called February Album Writing Month (FAWM.org) where I am attempted to write 14 songs in 28 days. I've completed 3 songs so far: a pop-rock tune, a pretty folk-country number, and a spacey velvety esoteric song about The Wheel. You can hear demos of songs and read lyrics at my FAWM page.


I forgot how much I love writing songs, but even more than that I love being caught up in something. My brain is at a smorgasbord of sounds, images, words, ideas. Challenging myself to push past my self-perception as a "slow songwriter" has been the perfect way to brighten up perhaps the most depressing month of the year (in Pittsburgh anyway). Not every song needs to be a hit which is a relief, if not a revelation. AND, I can now see how the hit songwriting factories of yesterday happened -- you just get on a roll and then it rolls you along. Finally, being able to write alone but having a community of people doing the same thing is a perfect set-up. 


If you're creative at all -- and I believe everyone is creative at something -- then it's worth it to get the environment right. We have to get the details right so that we can fall into who we are. If you know that you can't paint unless the dishes are done or off the counter, buy a dishwasher. If you can't invent without good light, find the right room. Stuff like that.


8 days of awesome is making me a cheerleader. I have a short while before getting my next test to see how I'm moving out the heavy metals. I have to remember that even though I'd rather write a song, I must resolve to stay a little aware of the details of purification, too. I've been relaxing a bit, but it's worth the extra push for 3 more weeks. Anything to stretch these 8 beautiful days into 8 years and beyond!

holding on

Clearly I've been holding on to something. For weeks I've had that tight feeling all over and I can't relax no matter how many mind games I play, no matter how much deep breathing or how long I sit on the couch "doing nothing." I'm just all wound up and I don't know why. I wonder what it is that I can't let go?


Today I met a man who kind of blew my mind. With simply a look he was able to unwind me. At first I felt a myself relax, then a sensation at the back of my head, and now I'm home making dinner and I still feel unwound. How extraordinary.


It's causing me to rethink everything I've been doing in the past 2 years to approach my chronic junk. What if it's as simple as a look? 


In the same way as learning that the healing process might be simple, I'm discovering all this on-line business might be simple too. Applications have developed over the past 5 years to assist artist in ways that just didn't exist a few years ago. I've wanted to explore this but it always overwhelmed me -- too many options, too much time, too much maintenance. I've been doing it these past few weeks and it's SO EASY. I just began to set up my bandcamp page, and I just developed a new music newsletter for my fans. It actually looks like what I want to present to the world. 


Poof. More chronic junk gone. Why hold on?