Indeed, it is the end of December. Blueberries have been out of season for months here in the Northwest. Yet they are on sale at the local supermarket. The label says they’re from Peru and Chile. Again the question and thought arise: How has the world changed so much in the last decade? I will spare you my theories about that, I am working on clarity and not blaming!
Successes this year? Getting healthier, being more patient with my pup, who is now 2, helping my family, scads of work done on my home, walking regularly. And getting my book completed and published! Up on Amazon, so now the ongoing marketing.
Dmitri Matheny, my book, and I at the Anacortes Library in October.
A piece of clarity recently delivered was how the book, my pup, and the myriad of issues with my house have distracted me from my music. A couple of recent gigs and one coming up have brought back that missing element to my life. And it feels good to have it back, a void that I had not noticed until it said, “Hey, no practice, no gigs! No practice and your playing sucks!” Oh yeah, and I forget stuff! There is a richness and a being present when I play music, even practicing scales.
Practicing gratitude daily has also become part of my life. My opportunities, my freedom, my view of Admiralty Inlet, having a carport, my pup, caring and supportive people in my life, my adult children’s stability and families, my return to lap swimming. Oh yeah, and blueberries in winter.
All the best to you in 2023, it portends to be an abundant, productive year. Thank you for reading.
Would I kid you? They are really tasty. To me it tastes like a combination of a cantaloupe and a pear. It’s a new melon, a ‘proprietary’ melon that debuted a year ago. You’re on your own on that one, yet it sure is good.
Reminds me of when I saw a Picasso exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum many years ago. There was so much information on his life as well as seeing his works. When I was in Montreal in 2019, there was an exhibit of Picasso’s work related to the influence African art had on his art. Wow, that was an eye-opener as well. As you may already know, the Pacific Ocean is small compared to what I don’t know.
This morning, Dean Graziosi was talking about when tough things happen in life, and then thinking ‘I can’t do this,” is when you need to stop and see it as an opportunity. That’s a challenge to be sure. Yet, having come across a few of those in my life, as I’m sure you have as well, giving up is sometimes not an option. It is figuring out how to get through it. Recently, getting my book published has presented me with some challenges, perhaps obstacles depending how I’m feeling at the moment. These challenges were nothing like a physical injury or being served a divorce decree or an exploding water pipe in my wall or a tragedy in the family, yet I did not know what more to do. I followed instructions, to no resolution.
When I was walking my pupster at the off-leash park recently, I stopped to really look at how spring is abundant and verdant. The vetch is absolutely gorgeous in the acres of knee-high grass. Pup loves to run his huge zoomies through it. When he gallops back to me, there is a happy grin on his face. So much about being present in the moment, present in Nature, simply being. He sure knows how to do it. I’m learning~
My book. I am excited as it is now looking like publication around the end of June. I will certainly be announcing more information and the help I will ask for to promote it.
And a reminder to myself with melons and vetch, to take some time to just be, even when I am anxious and frustrated. Listening to the soundtrack from Michael Mann’s ‘Last of the Mohicans’ has been great. Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman wrote the music. Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVjwBNsiOv0. I love ‘Elk Hunt, The Kiss, The Courier,’ yet cannot rule any of the tracks out. When I first heard this twenty years ago, it shifted a few things for me as I was then doing a radio show, meeting musicians, reviewing books and movies, and started learning about Celtic music (here is where I was introduced to Clannad!)
Remember to be patient and kind to yourself. Try a piece of fresh fruit. Dance around to some music, even if it is just in your own head. Stop & look deeply at some flowers.
A loud wail rent through the room, its anguish and sorrow piercing the whole apartment, unrestrainable. Surprised even me, the source, and I could not stop it.
I rarely see raw grief, uncontainable and wrenching – much less experience it myself.
I had just hung up the phone with the animal hospital and made the appointment to put Monkey, my sweet tabby, to sleep. In two hours.
To end a life, and a life I loved so much was an enormous decision. My brain knew it was time, indeed, Monkey had shown me he was physically near the end and might be in pain. Yet my heart called, “What if it’s too soon? What if…?”
The remorse I felt fifteen years before came back to me, when I did wait too long. Our cat, Midnight, was in such pain before I could say, “Okay, we have to,” to my teen-agers.
Death is all around us, as is life. Two of Jodi Picoult’s novels come to mind, Leaving Time and My Sister’s Keeper. A quote from Alice Metcalf, an elephant scientist in Leaving Time, got my attention, “What I was really researching was not how elephants deal with loss but how humans can’t.”
There are so many folktales, myths, and stories about life and death, how they interact, and how we as humans, and a world, must have death in order to live. Great old 1939 movie, ‘On Borrowed Time,’ with Lionel Barrymore, takes on a version of the tale of when Death is tricked up into a tree where, in this case a he, where he can’t get down, nothing dies and the world gets too full. A similar one is a Spanish story, “Tia Miseria,” Aunt Misery. There are stories about dancing with death, making deals with death, tricking death, even preferring death to God or fate, as death eventually treats everyone the same.
Monkey had gotten tangled in the blanket on my bed, and was scared. He gouged a good sized scratch on my left arm in his frenzy to get free. Instead of an irritated sharp response that I might have made at another time, I put him down on the floor, “I know Monkers, I’ve been scared, too.”
It seems to me that going through the losses, dealing with the sorrow and the empty place in our world, teaches us how to live. All of us have losses, some are huge – losing one’s family in an accident, losing a child, losing a body part, etc. One friend told me when her mom disappeared into the jungle on a guided tour and was never found, that was harder than anything she ever experienced as there were no answers, no understanding, no closure.
Yes, I was going to publish my upbeat essay on how I jumped to my feet when hearing a piece of music, yet thought I’d finish this experience first, so please know I shan’t be Donna Drama indefinitely.
We all come back to, circle around, avoid, deny, yet at some point have to face the myriad of issues around death and loss in our lives. It’s been a while since I’ve had to, and several have resurfaced. What if? Maybe I could have… If only I’d… I still hear his claws tapping on the wooden floor in the hallway. I hear a bump in the kitchen of the towel drawer (he used to pull out the dish towels.) The dissonance of how can he be gone, yet he is.
Playing great CD’s I’d forgotten I had has been a balm: Jesse Cook’s The Rumba Foundation, Narada Decade: The First Ten Years, IZ Kamakawiwo’ole’s Future, Michael Gettel’s san juan suite. Like a lace tablecloth for the family dinner, the music didn’t change the event, yet added grace.
I told you he was smart!
So my generous friend, Deborah, offered to go with me to the vet. Monkey so did not like the pet carrier, and he had little energy, so we wrapped him in the sky blue fleece blanket and Deb held him for the short drive to the vet’s. I turned the key in the ignition, “I will ease your mind. Like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind,” floats out of the stereo.
Are you kidding me? Deb and I looked over at each other, our eyebrows went up and we shook our heads. Our eyes got moist, we each started blinking as I pulled up to the intersection
Friends. Community. Neighbors’ kindness. Empathy. Learning how to live and live with each other.
The scratch on my arm is healing well, there will only be a tiny scar. Scars can be our strongest parts – – if we let them heal.
Peter Yarrow. 2018Peter Yarrow had his 80th birthday a month ago. He wrote ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ fifty-seven years ago when he was in college, inspired by a poem written by Leonard Lipton, about children growing up and losing their belief in magic and wonder.
Last night at the Mount Baker Theater in Bellingham, Washington, Peter invited all the children in the audience up on stage to sing it with him as the closing song for the first set. Then considering the audience demographics, he added, “And if you’re a parent, or grandparent, come up with your child. Or if you’re a child at heart.” The audience chuckled. At least fifty people trickled up the steps to join him on stage, from pre-schoolers to elders.
I felt tears sliding down my cheek as he held the microphone to a 6-year-old boy who sang solo, “Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea, And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honahlee.” Then he held the mic to a little girl who sang it, to a middle-aged woman who sang it, then to a man in his thirties who sang it, and to several others who sang solo to the enraptured audience. And of course, for the rest of the song, the audience was singing with him. Peter encouraged that throughout the concert. “Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail.”
Peter Yarrow was himself. Calm, rich with experience, and experiences. He marched for civil rights in the March on Washington, D.C. in 1963; he was at the bedside of Pete Seeger in 2014 as he was dying; he founded Operation Respect to reduce violence and bullying in schools, and as part of the iconic trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, released something like thirty albums.
Calm, funny, relaxed, sincere, heart-touching, Peter made no attempt to break new ground. He sang what people loved and were moved by. Folks songs, songs by Hedy West, John Denver, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, as well as gems by he and Paul Stookey. He told stories nearly as much as he sang. He threw out invitations, and challenges, to build bridges and community. He was himself, doing what fulfills him.
This was about legacy. He no longer needs to prove anything to anyone. In his relaxed manner, his generosity seemed endless: he talked with scads of people, posed with countless folks for pictures, signed books and CDs. The concert went nearly three hours.
A legacy of the strength of music, of respecting diversity, of building community and relationships, of honoring our military personnel, and of speaking up for what’s right. A legacy of hope.
“Light one candle for all we believe in, That anger not tear us apart.”
Drawing by S., CP Elementary student“I stayed in from recess to make this for you.”
She reached out tentatively to hand me a water-color drawing she had made. She being a 6th grade student who had been in the first class I performed for that morning.
“I just had to do this. When you told the story about the two sisters with one’s name like mine and the harp made of bones, I had to draw this.”
What a picture: there was my harp, me, and three of the stories I’d told! She’d heard, she’d listened, she’d thought.
No wonder I do this.
When I was in Juvenile Detention last week, the jail facility for kids under age eighteen, I was in the library waiting for my first class of kids. One of the boys saw me from the hallway and snapped, “Oh f—.” Not the usual response when kids see me, I am happy to report, however, it was his that morning. The boys trooped in and sat down in the semi-circle of chairs facing me. He pulled his tee shirt up to below his eyes, crossed his arms, and looked down at his feet, legs stretched out in front of him. Thirty minutes of stories and music later, he was sitting up asking questions, and forty minutes later he was telling me how he would have changed one part of the folktale from Ecuador I had just told them. After the Haitian tale, “One My Darlin,” he made a comment about forgiveness, which started a discussion among the boys.
No wonder I do this.
Jill Johnson, an accomplished writer, teacher, storyteller, and actor, wrote about when she was telling to and with elders in Auckland, New Zealand in February of this year, that when she saw the elders tell family stories, the youth listening, and the priceless connection being made, she said, “THIS …. is why I do this work.”
I get it more clearly every time I perform lately – telling and making music for elementary school kids, incarcerated kids, or my neighbor. The connecting, the re-discovering the truth that people have common elements of being human be they from China, Patagonia, Egypt, Saskatchewan, or Iceland. You never know what will reach someone. My part, and privilege, is to deliver the story, keep out of the way the best I can, and let the story spin out its storyness.
