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.