Namaste

It's International Yoga Day! Also the Solstice, wherein we celebrate the longest stretch of daylight all year, so--suprisesurprise--I took a beautiful yoga class at my home studio, I pulled weeds in my sweet friends' vineyard, sipped homebrew on their porch overlooking a day's work, and then invited some fam over for an impromptu swim / sausage-and-garlic-scape-(a.k.a. grilled garter snake)-bbq / lightsaber-duel (cousins!kids!) ~ I just wanna give a heartfelt shoutout to all of my [yoga] teachers, especially mi prima, Larita, whose passion brought me to the mat from the start and inspired in me the pull to keep showing up.

Breath::Motion::Peace

To me, yoga is everything the same way music is everything--it is accessed in pulling vineyard weeds while cursing at the most stubborn roots and returning the chickadees' mating volley; in answering sixty-seven questions a minute from a seven-year-old who wants her pond-soaked butt on your lap and in whose wild eyes and sunny freckles you see your entire past; in walking to the grill with a stack of plates in the crook of one arm and her hand in your other hand; in the way you don't just say 'fuckit' and call someone you know you cannot but breathe and change the radio station instead; in squeezing a wedge of lemon into your morning cup and in using the last of your freezer vodka to mix drinks for a houseful of road-weary lunatics at 2am; in vacuuming the ceiling cracks with an extension before strangers arrive; in assuring your best friend who just bought a house that you will be there after the closing to scrub the cupboards before her dead father's favorite pint glass finds its home there; in watching, with beaming admiration, your husband in his grout-caked work pants put on dorky ear protection and hop on the John Deer and mow for hours with his bad posture; in each dip, swallow, and melting exhale; in every slow swooping note and in the sticky staccato ones too; in your hand to your heart when there are a million questions and in your hand to your heart when you are the void with not a thing to ask; in the meander and the punchline and the thesis and the epilogue; in the journey between disregard and supreme care...

Vira. Viraviravira. Warrior. Baby. Old, old lady. Thanks to this practice for letting me in.

Thanks to the sun for shining so long.

Thanks to you for reading and for reciprocating. 

"The light within me honors the light within you ~ Namaste."

M’AIDEZ! M’AIDEZ!: We are stuck, but we’re still moving.

The dandelions are closing up shop as the sun dips behind a mountain in Reed Point, Montana, population 96, the “sheep drive capital of the world.” Lethal, the bartendress at The Waterhole Saloon, fed us deep fried “rocky mountain oysters” (bull testicles) on the house while we waited by the wood stove for the mechanic to call us back about the busted bearings on our trailer. I ordered a burger and two Buds, Suave played Neil Young and The Doors on the jukebox, and Khris lost some money in a slot machine with neon lights and nailed a quarter into a knotty beam alongside hundreds of others—a tradition in this rustic dive, for luck or for wishes or maybe just to kill the boredom—a thing to do with one’s hands and spare change in a place from which some people never leave and to which no one ever comes to stay. We are crawling along I-90 East at five miles per hour, stopping every half mile or so to let the bearings cool again with fifteen miles to go until we hit the town with a mechanic, who is done working for the day and may be able to help us tomorrow, so we’ll likely sleep in the van again until sunrise. Zach is wrapping some sage he found on the side of the road, and Suave is snoring softly again. I may have enough water left in my bottle to brush my teeth, but what I really want is the longest, hottest shower followed by the deepest, darkest sleep. If it sounds like a complaint though, it isn’t—I have made such bold, oddball choices that could have led nowhere but here, and even in my cross-eyed exhaustion with every muscle sore and a touch of homesickness for my mama and her broccoli-tofu-kasha and the big rock by my pond and breathless chatty hikes with my darling Maria, I am fine…we’re all fine. We’re not even silent. We’re actually still laughing.

Our president has declared May 1st as Loyalty Day, a day on which we are asked to blindly and generally assert our national pride, with the tenants of freedom, justice, equality, and independence (“limited government”) in mind—the very tenants that his presidency has repeatedly threatened. He also “humbly thank(ed) our brave service members and veterans”…right after we watched in horror as he congratulated (not thanked) a soldier who lost his leg in battle; trump casually, almost patronizingly, patted the Purple Heart onto the chest of this hero whose life was forever altered after serving his country…He actually congratulated this man for the great honor of receiving a Purple Heart, which allowed him to meet the president, rather than thanking him for his service. May Day, among other things, has been known in the United States as International Workers’ Day, wherein people protest for workers’ rights and other issues of social justice. To celebrate the rights we haven’t yet been granted on this particular day is such a farce and such a transparent attempt at placating a struggling populace: say loud enough and enough times that things are great—“tremendous”—and even those people who can’t feed their children or pay their rent will feel grateful, at least for a moment, to be part of something powerful. They’ll have something to celebrate under a “leader” who promises (in the simplest terms, with no substantive content or plan) to pull them out of the muck; and they’re told that that mucky buildup is the fault of someone else and that we’re on the right path up now. But conmen don’t clear the way for anyone but themselves, and the paradox of asking people to declare loyalty on a day traditionally dedicated to protesting for their own fair treatment is perplexing. It’s downright dizzying.  

Pema Chödrön, from the Afterword to her 20th Anniversary edition of Things Fall Apart: 

“There’s a famous dharma saying that goes: ‘If you want to see what has brought you to this point, look at your past thoughts and actions. If you want to see your future, look at your present thoughts and actions.’ What’s happening in today’s world is the result of the collective thoughts and actions of everyone on the planet. We can’t just erase everything what has led up to this and make things better all at once. But we can each take responsibility for our own state of mind as we for forward into the future. Instead of continuing to close down and defend our own territory, we can learn to relax with the true nature of reality, which is uncertain and unpredictable. This is the only way to transform the world from a place of escalating aggression to a place of awakening. Learning how to relate sanely with our chaotic world is no longer a luxury. It’s our responsibility. Good thing it’s something we’re all capable of doing.”       

Upon the second vehicle breakdown in the same day, I texted a friend asking if it was okay to cry yet. I asked it in earnest in that brief moment, but truthfully, I know how much control I actually have over these thoughts and over the prospect of falling apart or not. Our human capacity is kinda miraculous when we find ourselves living full of dedication and sacrifice to something we believe in. To live true is energizing and is the escape route out of so much injurious inertia; we apply our force to move forward when we BELIEVE. trump and his flying monkeys would prefer us paralyzed in fear and miseducation, but we are better than that. We see clearly, and we can choose to be unrelenting. Tonight from I-90 straddling the rumble strip at 5mph, I’m casting an intention (a prayer if I prayed) for the people I know, for those I haven’t met yet, and for those I never will: I wish you such passion that it renders all the labor—all the bullshit, the soreness, the pitfalls and potholes and breakdowns and bruises—a desperate act of love. I hope you love what you do so much that you’re never bored, and I hope you fight for it every day. M’AIDEZ! M’AIDEZ!—We are certainly stuck here, but we’re still moving, and I hope you whip up all that stuck-ness and longing and frustration into a fiery affair with the ride itself… I mean, how else does one meet a bartender named Lethal in Reed Point, Montana and sample fried bull testicles?  

Meet me there, huh?

Last night, with John Prine on low and the gentle screech of permanent markers to poster board, I made my sign for the Million Women March with my mom and her old friend—an auntie to me, who knitted my green baby blanket. We noticed some flashing lights down by the road, so Suave went to investigate: a man in a pickup truck had come flying around the corner and crashed into a tree. He had been taken to the hospital, and the paramedics said it looked pretty bad. We colored in the block letters on our signs, ate some chili, got in the hot tub, looking down often to see the lights still flashing, then dying out, and finally when just one flare was left, a neighbor called to report that the man in the pickup truck had died…right there in front of us, at the bottom of the driveway, as we colored in the block letters of our protest signs and drank wine and talked about wearing coats with lots of pockets and sighed about the repeal of the healthcare act. A man died. How fast, this life…How fragile. Was he drunk? In a rage? Did he just get some bad news? Was he listening to his favorite song? Who did he love? 

This afternoon, a friend with years of wisdom and good sense on me invited me into her home, cracked me a beer, and let me cry all over her kitchen counter for hours. Kind and sharp, she said things I’ve avoided and needed to hear. What a total miracle people like these are who randomly (or not so), answer the call and say quickly and unequivocally, “C’mon over.” We look into each other’s eyes, when we can.

Straight to rehearsal, loud and bodily and cathartic, where I closed my eyes and sang with my whoooooole being. That shit is freedom. Afterwards we stacked rows and rows of wood in the dark together—bandmates, who are family, who are ridiculous, and who are each other’s company on the weird, weird road. And just now I got off the phone with a friend living far away and fighting a very personal, ongoing, quiet battle. She reached out because I had opened up. What a gift. All this reciprocation. Identification. Acceptance. The guts. The web. 

My darling friends, we are here for each other. That’s the purpose of here, I gotta believe it. There is reason to be open, right now maybe more than ever, because connection between humans is what keeps us afloat in this sea of predators and divisions and hooks and anchors and toxins and fear. When we all show up, the job gets easier; we form a raft, and the seams get tight and true. 

She said it: “Take your broken heart ~ turn it into art.” Repeat. Repeat again. 
I’m showing up. Meet me there, huh? 

"Take your broken heart ~ Turn it into ART." - Carrie Fisher

Key West, Florida is a place of transients, lost souls, guiltless daytime drinkers, corporate burnouts, retirees, northerners downright fed up with long, muscle-tense winters, and broken hearts trying to mend. After a 4:45am drive, three planes, a four-hour bus ride on the one long water-bordered road from Miami (the winds on the key being too wild to land the plane there), and one final cab, I arrived here for the first time with my mom on a rather extravagant birthday excursion and found myself at the hotel bar drinking piña coladas with Susan the bartender who moved here twenty-two years ago after her husband left her for her best friend, taking two of their four cats. And Randy, thin, leathery, flamboyant, and charmingly garish in his love for this place, who owns a members-only restaurant bar and has two black labs he adores, bought me a shot of tequila and took my business card. He has some connections to music venues here, and even though I arrived in a total state of stormy disarray and haven’t been able to make eye contact and greet people on the street the way I often can, I am once again reminded that you get what you give; you cannot make connections if you don’t open your eyes and look into the eyes of others. Ask questions. Be open. Own your heartache. And the empathetic nods and parallel stories are coaxed gently from strangers, who quickly become less strange.

There is a difference between privacy and secrecy. Because I write and sing, I stay pretty wide open. I’ve made it my job to observe, reflect, create, and share, forever seeking deeper connection with whoever is on the other end, hoping to shrink the divide between us, because I really believe (pardon me: my hippie roots are showing) that we are put on this earth to love and take care of each other—to reach out and connect. That’s always been it for me. People. Love. Forming the bonds and tending to them. The past year (ten or so months, to be more exact) has taken that formula to task. I have been quiet. I’ve been private. I have kept secrets. And for someone like me, that can be very harmful. So in the interest of saving the bond I have with myself, which may be the most important one each of us has, I’m going to write my way through my pain and share what I can, in hopes that a healthy dose of harsh truth will simultaneously dip into someone else’s pool of secrecy and make her or him feel a little less guarded, a little more open, and maybe even less alone. While we all maintain the right to hold our truths silently to our chests, sometimes the sweetest gift we can give ourselves is to simply open the cage and watch our own wild, aching birds burst forth into the sky in a flurry of old feathers that no longer serve the wings.

Here goes nothin’. In the spring I fell in love. She is a classically trained viola player from the south, currently an investigator by trade, and she is dynamic and powerful and fun and surprising and bold and frightening, often exceedingly kind and generous, and just as often hot-tempered and rash with a tone of voice that can go from sweet syrup to bitter citrus in an instant—and the sting of that sour note is remarkable, and unforgettable…it’s effective, and it’s excruciating. She has smooth brown skin, she smokes cigarettes, and sometimes she stays up all night partying and sleeps the whole next day. She works hard and shows up to marches for justice; she is trained in it, knows the chants and battlecries, shouts for the crowd to “Stay tight!” when they wander too far outward, and delivers water to weary protestors. She says “Fuck the po-lice,” and she means it. I've wished I was beside her every step of those marches. She is a Bernie supporter, who like many of us, voted for HRC because that’s what the DNC gave us, but she wasn’t proud of it. She considers herself a kind of witch and “manifests” things, willing what she wants into action. She loves lavender and rose gold and pistachio ice cream and elephants. She is passionate and angry and unafraid. These details are only important because I know them. In your story, they are different details, but you know them, so thoroughly, so intimately, and with such deep reverence. Loving her has been one of the most exhilarating and painful things I’ve ever done. I didn’t have a choice…and I didn’t stand a chance.

Falling in love is one of life’s most daring, insane, involuntary, and beautiful events. It’s miraculous. It’s all-encompassing. It’s gigantic and strange. And it’s new every time. But when you are married and falling in love with someone who is not your husband, that love turns strained and desperate. It’s considered shameful. It’s a secret. And it cannot breathe. It is conversations on the phone in dark parked cars. It’s selfies in bathroom stalls. It’s letters. It is broken plans and tears and frustration and longing and apologies. It means that you are deeply disappointing people and yourself, it is often characterized by monstrous guilt, and it becomes a relentless brand of self torture, minute after minute. It’s the rollercoaster ride that doesn’t end because you are strapped in tight and because the track is growing out of itself in real time, the loops and twists built the instant before you reach them, and there is no foresight or prediction, just gut-wrenching swoops, the momentary steady climb, and then the devastating falls. It is revolving ache and relief, euphoria and pain, and it often feels like hugely failing. 

What I haven’t said yet, but what I suppose is implicit, is that I’ve been faced with a crisis of identity. I’m married to a wonderful man who is my best friend, my co-writer, my bandmate, my family, my partner in everything…but he is a man. And where I always figured I fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, I didn’t know, because I never tested the waters before I met my life partner—and once you fall in love with the person who will become that life partner, you kind of just assume that the wondering piece is over, and you forge ahead with joy and hope and plans and the best intentions. In our case, we threw a music festival on the property of our converted barn; our neighbors hosted the ceremony officiated by my uncle, and they made the carrot cake and provided the champagne for the toast; my dad wrote a wedding song, and we sang to each other’s faces; I wrote a poem that my cousin read, and in front of everyone we love, we recited the lines of commitment, and we meant them. Blissful and secure and full of a shared appetite for adventure and the desire to experience everything together, she appeared, and we thought, we can do anything. 

I never knew the fissures were there. She found them. She seeped through, pulled at the walls of our good house with her talons, ripped them into gaping holes, tore the whole foundation apart, stomped on the splinters. And I was a part of all of that destruction; I felt it, watched it, helped, covered my eyes, threw my fists into the walls, bandaged them up... Once we were left sitting in the wreckage, unable to see each other through a thick cloud of ruin, she lifted her gaze, saw a bird of almost mythical beauty approaching at top speed, and she reached out, caught hold, and just like that, she was gone. She is gone. Soaring, elated, far away, high above, in some other atmosphere, and she couldn’t care less about me. Or us. Or the damage. She’ll never own it. She feels justified, vindicated, and she let go of me like I was a stack of plates on fire. She saw the route away, and the cycle begins again: she is in love. 

And the shitty truth is that I’m not a good enough person to be happy for her. Not yet. Maybe never. I told myself I would be, when and if this happened—that the best parts of me would surface, and I would turn the wheel, hand over hand, accelerating as I hit that high road; I said I’d choose tenderness and that because so much has passed between us, over a thousand songs and all that hanging on, that the care is what could persist. But she dismantled me. Violently. I am not vilifying someone I have loved this way—it’s just the truth. And now that she’s gone, all I can do is ache and ache. All night last night, not a single minute of sleep, I held my hand to my heart in the hotel bed with crisp white sheets, covering my body (foreign, inferior, not enough) with the extra pillows, breathing, each inhale a labor, not one exhale letting any of the hurt escape…but I’m told (and maybe I know) that over time, that begins—that the breaths get smoother, and the heart stops quaking, and you look up and out and into people’s eyes again and find those moments of connection…and maybe you laugh and laugh and laugh. Grief is unsustainable, thankfully. And I’ve never tended toward it when I can help it.

So what is left of me? Of us? Are the pieces salvageable? Is it maybe the greatest love story of all time? Does the retirement plan on that Tuscan hillside still exist, Suave stirring the sauce as I pluck grapes from the vine and drop them into a bucket for the wine-making? Am I worth forgiving? Can I be with a man, even if he is the best person this twisted, knotty, booby-trap riddled life has shown me? Can I come back? Is there a return path? Can anybody tell me anything? Suave, are you still there, and do you want me, and can we find each other’s hands again? Where is this place? Have I lost altogether?   

I’ve outed myself because silence, for me, for a songbird, for a person built of words and music, is impossible, feels like choking, feels like drowning, and I have kept my mouth shut for too long. And ya know what else?—I need you. I need people. I need your connection, even if you’re angry as hell at me, and you think I’m selfish and horrible. Just say a thing to me. Say anything. I am exhausted by my own silence. I can’t keep it anymore, and I’m desperate for the sound of your call. When I was a kid walking to meet my cousins halfway between our houses in the woods, we called out “Keee-wahhhh-keeee!” to gauge the distance between us. Did we start running when we caught sight of each other? I can’t remember. But I’m calling out to you: Keee-wahhh-keeeee! It’s nonsense, but if you call back out into this cavernous space between us, this colossal, silent space I have wedged between myself and everyone else, I promise I’ll start running as fast as I can.

The only thing that makes these revolutions of new mornings worth their salt is the promise of that connection to other humans—the whole choking, thriving, dying, screaming, terrorizing, warring, fucking, losing, playing, singing, feasting, agonizing, loving lot of us. One day I will likely say I’m glad this all happened because it knocked me down so low that I was forced to use every muscle I have to climb out. I am worse for the wear now, and I will be different then. Tougher too. Love is still the best thing. I believe it, even here, in the January of my heart, disparately sitting on a poolside patio under the brilliant sun by a plantain tree, pop reggae blasting from the tiki bar, the smell of Cuban cigars wafting from the hot tub. I am falling apart in a beautiful place. It’s so strange to be one of the heartbroken here in paradise; I guess many of them must figure it’s easier to heal here than anywhere else, and then they just stay, because when you finally come around to your own happiness again, how totally glorious to be in perfect harmony with the world around you. One day soon, I will look up and there will be a vast murmuration of starlings shifting as one across the sky, and I’ll put my hand to my heart again, find a steadier beat there, knowing that when connected to each other, we are our very best. We can fly. We can do anything. With you, I can do anything.

~

*Suave is strong and steadfast and remains my biggest support. He’s read this piece, and he asks you to please not call him.    

To Have Been Many Birds and Whales

A crazy thing about singing is that sometimes it makes me silent; choosing to do what you love most in the world as your career has a tendency to wring the joy out of it, strip it of its simplicity, expose all the rocky terrain around it, demand that you use your bare hands to scale impossible grades, force you to profess your love for it over and over and over again, and if it’s singing that you love you’ll do that at the top of your lungs until your throat’s gone raw and the pit of the thing you love so much—the singing itself, such a universal human habit…a response…a connector…an expression…a means of joining the larger and continuous hum of everything—causes you physical pain and shuts you right up.  How counterproductive.  How perplexing…  

I’ve been quiet for a while, trying to figure this out.  When I feel joy or when I’m not thinking or when I’m alone and graced with a moment where no other sound fills the space, I am always singing.  By the kitchen sink washing dishes, in our old car when the broken antennae won’t let any stations through the static, when the house is empty, when the moon is full, when my mind is spinning and I’m burdened and jumbled and nothing makes sense because there’s just too much of it, there is always still a wordless song to sing.  It’s the anchor.  It’s the gift for which I’m most grateful, forever regenerating itself, and it was totally accidental—just genes.  I turn to it involuntarily yet with deep-rooted dedication.  I’d call it a practice if it wasn’t so unconscious.  If the soul is a thing at all, this is what is written all over mine, and if reincarnation is the way, I have been many birds and whales and will be many more.  This is the simplest, purest thing about me, and it’s the best of what I have to offer, even though it has very little to do with me; this part of it, anyway, is just there.  

And there’s the writing part, which feels like necessity and is often the only freaking way to iron out the whole wrinkly mess.  Categorization.  Writing furiously to pull one’s self out of a dank old well and back up into clean air.  Survival.  Writing toward resolution, even when there may not be one; at least with words and sentences and gushing openness, a path is lit.  I don’t know any other way to do this.  Kid fiction and journals gave way to bad emo high school poetry, which led the way to maturing poetry workshopped to death in circles with other writers at breweries, which began to manifest itself as sprawling nonfiction prose, and somewhere along the way (not the cap or the bookend but more an extension), an old man with a thick white beard loaned me a mandola with a great blue heron emblem on the headstock, and those two- and three-fingered folk chords bridged the gap: songs.

And so there was a choice, and when I made it, it all seemed very bright and shimmery and dreamy and powerful and right, and I was full of sweet, naive hope and the support of family and every friend I’ve ever had—“Fucking go for it,” my dad said when I told him I wanted to pursue a career in music, so I did.  Seven years later, I’m still trying, getting better at some things, making new mistakes, learning stuff I never expected I’d need to learn in order to sing, toughening up and becoming a bit ruthless even, navigating the best I can a business that is harsh and unpredictable and pocked with snares.  My face has changed.  My friends are having babies and making money.  Suave and I are renting out our house to stay afloat, staying in my parents’ basement when we’re not out playing shows so that we can spend our time making music…when what that really means often is that I wrap cables and restock the merch bins and send booking inquiries and post the shows online and promotepromotepromote until I’m nauseous and draft contracts and negotiate meals and mail press kits to radio stations and schedule meetings and research labels and agents and update the website… And there’s a shit-ton of off things I know now, like what the bathrooms of hundreds of rest stops look like—the one that has the weird, grainy soap for greasy hands to the right of the sink and the foam stuff to the left, the one whose doors open all wonky and leave you standing half-in, half out if there’s not a free stall, the one with the good potty poetry, and the one outside the building that you need you need to ask the cashier for a key to and that key is attached to a two-by-four.  I know that I should never opt for gas station pizza but nuts and hard boiled eggs instead, and I keep earplugs and an eye mask in my wallet so that I can sleep whenever there’s a chance.  We don’t have pets or plants of our own to care for anymore because we’ve committed to only each other and this, and some days, after too little sleep, too much to drink, too little exercise, and a few too many sent emails that will remain forever without response, I feel the weight of this somewhat insane choice, which I absolutely didn’t understand fully when I made it and probably still don’t.  But since one of my biggest flaws may be my excessive stubbornness (my high school English teacher called it “tenacity”—isn’t that nice?), I will likely bang my head against this particular wall until the bricks begin to crumble… but what will that mean for my head?

I’m passionate about too many things.  Suave and I talk in the car about how twisted and sick our government is: that in the 1950’s if you worked forty hours a week, you would undoubtedly reach some level of comfortable success.  Hard work actually equaled success.  But somewhere along the way (in the ‘80s maybe?) that narrative changed, and if you were too stupid to get an education and then a better job, you could work forty hours a week and remain impoverished for your whole life and give birth the the next generation of folks at the bottom.  Too stupid.  Or lazy.  Stupid and lazy.  How did that happen?  What crafty fucker changed that?  The people boisterously calling for tighter immigration laws are the same people who hire Mexican migrant workers at $6 an hour to work their fields and factories.  Albino children in Africa are being attacked in their sleep and having their limbs hacked off because they’re believed to have magical properties.  Rhinoceros tusks are being brutally severed from the animals’ faces, and the rhinos are left to bleed out in the wild because there are men who believe that the tusks, ground up and in pill form, are an aphrodisiac.  Black Lives Matter.  #BlackLivesMatter.  Shocking video footage of police brutality.  Shootings in movie theaters and churches and on live television.  The very real threat of hydrofracking right here at home and its potential to destroy our fresh water lakes and all of the life and business that depends on them.  Overpopulated American prisons and the corporatization of the penal system.  The fact that there’s even a discussion of defunding Planned Parenthood.  Donald fucking Trump… It’s a raging swirl of psychosis, and I hear all of it shouting some nights when I try to fall asleep.  

Sometimes I want to hide, while other times I want to go back to school for my PhD so I can help guide kids and maybe have a couple of my own in the process and watch them all flesh out into the shells of their potential, and other times I want to ask my brother to take me with him on his next trip to Africa so I can get outside of my own stupid world and actually help some people who need it; commit to a thing that’s bigger than me and actually has nothing to do with me, because man, I get tired of me.  I get tired of the work that doesn’t feel like singing anymore—doesn’t even resemble it sometimes.  I didn’t mean to sign up for a life of unrelenting self-promotion.  That wasn’t what I meant.  But because Suave is good…and smart…and because he knows me better all the time and is learning what I might need to be reminded of, he always reels me back in…  

There are an infinite number of ways humans can contribute to the healing of this giant catastrophe that we are and have always been.  Because I have a voice that I use to sing, my place is within the music.  Without a doubt.  And even if it isn’t something concrete or necessary to our survival the way that crops and roofs are, I wouldn’t want to live in a world devoid of art—to me, that isn’t living at all.  I might not be able to grow or build or protect things the way some people can, but I can write, try to translate these experiences, watch things, notice, and yank the meaning out, and I can sing about them out loud, and maybe, if I’m really lucky, those songs will help someone make better sense of her or his existence, even if only for a minute.  Who can really say what the value of that may or may not be?  Diamonds are only diamonds because someone decided they were.  I can come back around (after some rest and some time in nature and some deep, deep breaths) to feel my gratitude radiating in full as the old anchor within me touches the floor and I open my mouth to sing.  This is all I can do… or it’s the best I can do.  So all of the other things about this job, this choice, can go ahead and get melty and blurry around sharp-focused center.  It’s still there.  It always will be.  I don’t mean to complain, so I’m sorry for that, okay?  Bear with me.  I’m trying just like you are.  And thank goodness, I can still write myself out of the well—it just happened again.  Sweet dreams, dreamers.                           

Drop Your Screen

I’ve got to find a way to write myself out of feeling like my current collection of pure, worthy, beautiful moments is too thin and feeble and stand up to the collection that is marked and removed and even harmful.  Addiction to screens is making me sick.  When I’m not absorbed into my own, which is, admittedly, often an act of will—something I force myself not to do, the way you force yourself not to eat a piece of birthday cake, or smoke a cigarette after a couple drinks when everyone around you is exhaling joyful streams, or lay around all day ignoring the sink and clothes and counters—I watch other people totally absorbed into theirs, everyone always in some other place.  No one is ever anywhere.  And none of this is real.  We are missing things—so many little things that we have no image or opinion of the actual world, as actual as it can be anyway, because our senses are all divided, and we receive absolutely everything in glimpses and flashes, gone again, replaced by another one and another one… And when there are opportunities to truly experience a thing, we can’t do it without sharing; we’re so obsessed with recording moments (I am the capturer!—ME!) so that we can share them, that the full picture is further compromised—and that means we never, ever see a single thing.  Nothing registers.  How could it?  Nothing is slow.  We are impatient, overburdened, over-stimulated, desensitized, and we are sick.  I’m sick.     

I’m exhausted by the economics of sharing information — the photos, the videos, the online events and invites, the rsvps and the comments on that rsvp, the misinterpretation of flat words typed on a screen and the way that multiple-meaning can even become a manipulation strategy for people who are good at it, the advertising oneself or one’s cause, the pleas for money and prayers and “likes,” the need to be the one who discovered this joke, this artist, this song, this quote; the proving it—I was there!  SEE?!  All of this shit that apparently makes us a part of the world takes us away from actually being in it and doing the things that bring it color and motion.  At our shows, if people come at all—since Netflix and Facebook and video games and Instagram and tagging and hashtagging and commenting and postingpostingposting are so easy and so addictive—many of them are either hidden deep into the other worlds that those screens offer up, or they’re holding up those screens to us to record what we’re doing, so they can then post it, tag us and tag their friends (the friends who are doing the same thing) as proof, over and over again, that they are HERE…Here now, always, doing things out in the world, SEE?  But they’re nowhere because they’re already in the next place, and the desperate need to capture and share this moment has already carried them away to another one… And I don’t see a way out of this.

Last night Khris’s sixteen-year-old cousin, who is a sweet and smart and loves horses and writing, brought me a gorgeous pink peony to the show, the stem wrapped in a bit of damp paper towel, warm from clutching it in her hands on the drive over.  She was nervous to give it to me.  That gesture and the flower itself was the most alive part of the night.  

As an artist trying to make a living from a craft that enriches already stable lives, which is nothing like making a living providing food or water or fuel, or making and repairing shelter, I spend more time shouting about it, building a fortress around it that people can see for miles, polishing its windows, keeping up the grounds, than I spend living and working inside of it, creating the only thing I set out to create: they’re simple songs.  I write words based on the life I’m actually living (the bits of it I’ve strained my eyes to see), and I use my voice to sing them.  Suave and I physically sit down with his guitar, without screens, and we talk about what matters to us.  It doesn’t have to be serious — it’s often totally ridiculous.  But it is real.  It has to come from someplace of either observation or imagination.  And if all of our time is spent being distracted and obsessively sharing the things that distract us, there is nothing to observe and nothing to imagine, and our whole castle is empty.  I cannot live that way.

Give me Moby Dick—long, sprawling scenes that transport a reader into the ocean on a boat with a mad captain and a vexing, unpindownable beast.  Give me Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” with its pages and pages of run-on sentences celebrating the sweat, stench, and profane beauty of Life.  Give me an afternoon on my belly in an overgrown lawn watching ants work and blades of grass twitch in the wind.  Give me a yoga class that is near-silent and slow and long and makes my muscles shake and asks me to take the deepest breath I’ve taken all week.  Give me a day without tasks and miles and trying to catch up and tough plans and incessant blather.  Let me feel this day: it’s seventy degrees outside this old hotel in Greenville, South Carolina, the sun is shining through delicate scallops of cirrus clouds, there’s pollen on the pool, my stomach is growling, and I’m biting my nails between these words while Suave works on a Spanish-sounding riff on his guitar beside me, knowing that I’ve been feeling desperately unsettled.  He’s wiser than I am; he just keeps playing, fuck everybody else, and he’s always creating.  He doesn’t share every step of the process with the world through screens; he shares a song when it’s complete and we’re on stage where he can connect, human-to-human, sound to ears, live and for real.  I’ll never stop learning from him.

I feel this need to apologize for my “negativity,” because the persona I’ve created doesn’t do this.  According to no one but myself, I’m supposed to see the best parts, and I’m supposed to relay them.  But I look around and see a world of people trapped in their screens, addicted to this split way of existing, missing everything, no one ever anywhere, and I’m sad.  And even sadder still is that if you’re reading this, you’re in a place where you really aren’t.  Drop the stupid fucking screen, and go the fuck outside.  Get a bug bite or feel the cold or smile at someone or engage in confrontation or flirt with your librarian or try a cartwheel or sprint across a parking lot or shout something obscene or just look up at the sky with your arms outstretched and spin around like an idiot.  Put it down.  This very minute.  I want to get well with you.  I hope our eyes will meet.

Yes, Further From Here

I’ve started several times…and then things keep happening and there’s less time to record them than there is to be inside of the happening.  What an intensely sustained high—how can I stop?  But here is a quiet moment, and I’m aching to release some…   

I.) Miami

The festival on Virginia Key in Miami was a dream.  Familiar faces, new ones too, SO much great music (Rubblebucket and Telekinetic Walrus have my number), sore calves from so much dancing, daiquiris and piña coladas in the sun blended up on our merch table by the van, singing Grateful Dead and Beatles numbers on the dark beach with Suave, Deb, and some random festival goer whose guitar was covered in stickers after all the shows were done, picking through piles of weird sea stuff tucked into the white sand bordering a curl of aqua blue water, stretching our limbs, sighing a lot, shielding our eyes from the sun and letting our shoulders burn, diving right in and spending an afternoon treading water with some girls from North Carolina… And the very surreal moment that was sitting in the Songwriters’ Circle on the main stage on Sunday morning beside some of the finest musicians I’ve had the pleasure of watching perform since I was a kid—contemporaries now, kinda.  (Secretly/not-so-secretly, I sometimes still feel like a kid, in over my head and awed at the invitation, but what a joy!  What an honor!  I’ll take it.)  The untamable cacophony of the last big night, countless musicians crowding the stage, dancing, singing, celebrating, sharing—what insane beauty.  Just crazy.  Thank you, thank you to everyone who helped make it possible for all of us to be there together, out of the snow and into the sun, just when we needed it most.  I’ve taken it with me.         

That sun roasted us out of our tents and back into the van on Monday morning, and we waved goodbye, blew kisses, and flashed peace signs to our camping neighbors, then headed to a Cuban food joint called Tuto’s, where Tuto himself bustled around cracking crass jokes, putting the six pack we brought into the cooler and delivering frosted mugs to pour them into, and before we left, he tacked our band sticker on the wall between all kinds of goofy paraphernalia.  And into the Everglades to follow Alligator Alley toward Panama City where it didn’t get old to shout out at the sight of a black-green gator (there were hundreds), stacks of big turtles, cormorants with their wings flexed, great blue herons, egrets, and ibises all along the swampy canal.  We didn’t see any panthers along the panther reserve, but we kept our eyes pealed for 'em.    

II.) ZigZag Around

The club in Panama City was a big, airy, youthful space attached to a 24-hour record store (with a dangerous $1 bin) and sandwich shop, and on a Tuesday night after Trivia, the porch was packed with an odd mix of cigarette-smoking hipsters and Florida rednecks, sharing photos on their phones of guns and dead animals.  We met Kenya out back as we were loading out: a large, chatty, philosophical, middle-aged homeless black man, very concerned with color coordination and fashion.  He wore huge pieces of blingy costume jewelry and told me about his sisters and daughters, who wouldn’t let him out of the house if his clothes didn’t match.  He followed us back and forth to the van as we loaded the gear out, and he said one day, when he finally had all the money he wanted, he’d paint the walls of his dream house red and put images and statues of Jesus in every corner.  He had a big smile and a great laugh, like a kid’s, and I gave him half of my sandwich, a CD, and a big hug before we left.  

We spent the next day driving around in the rain and meeting people at every local music venue, trying to score a last minute gig (no luck), found some good Mexican food at a little cantina (called Maddie’s!), hung out for hours with the cool folks at Leitz Music store where Khris was an inch away from buying a new bass, caught an epic sci-fi movie at a $2 theater, and shared an oversized bag of buttery popcorn.  Suave cracked his beers during the loud parts.  That night we slept in a meditation room filled with silky pillows, a bubbling fish tank, Tibetan singing bowls, and crystals at a retreat center owned by a first generation hippie named Darce with long white hair, whose sweet granddaughter, recently off parole from a seven-month stint in county after a stupid misunderstanding, we’d met the night before — she had an awesome little poodle named Falcore who dragged his bed wherever the people were and fell asleep right there in the center of everything.  They invited us back, and I’m sure we’ll see them again.  

Heading from Panama City to Mobile, the sign welcoming you to Alabama doesn’t say “Welcome to Alabama,” but rather, “Sweet Home Alabama,” so by default, we sang.  I talked to the owner of the club for a long time after our show, and he shared pictures of his two-year old and hooked us up with a nice hotel room where his friend worked, so we all slept in comfortable beds with clean white sheets for a night—a huge step up from the van in the Walmart marking lot or the motels we coughed up $50 for.  I hit up the gym with my key card before meeting the guys at the complementary hot breakfast bar where we loaded up on fruit and oatmeal for the next ride.   

We didn’t see much of Pensacola, and there weren’t many people at the show at the start, except for a young, pierced up punk couple playing like puppies at the bar, pinching, twisting arms, giving charlie horses, and smoking smoking smoking.  A crew of locals came in late, and I chatted with a toothless older woman who called herself Judy-ism (“It’s not a name—it’s a state of mind!”) who desperately wanted us to play “Great Gig in the Sky.”  My favorite was Carl, a grizzly bearded ship captain who joked that he was really just a pizza delivery guy (but don’t tell his mom) who drove a boat 20 mph hundreds of miles into the ocean to deliver four tractor trailers' worth of supplies the people drilling for oil out there.  He probably didn’t like our music, but he made us feel welcome, and out of nowhere, right as we were about to drive away, he started talking so eloquently about the power of art—that “when the whole shithouse goes up in flames, the apocalypse, ya know?  Music’s gonna be the only thing left that makes life worth living, so you just keep singing, y’all just keep playing yer music, and travelin’ around, and doin’ it.  I think you got the right idea there…. And I like that trailer.  I could fit two bikes in’ere.”  Carl made Pensacola.  

III.) New Orleans and Sweet Leyla

And New Orleans.  Hot damn, where do I begin?  Maybe it’s too hot to touch… I could try.  Our darling hosts turned friends—a couple of hip Ithaca transplants with a killer costume collection, a neighborhood of wild new friends (some of whom hosted a boozy, crash-worthy karaoke party on our first night), and the right plan—offered up the spare beds in their gorgeous uptown house with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and all the cool shades of carnival; Suave’s and mine was a king size, which we hadn’t slept in since we moved out of our house in November, so we sprawled like starfish and slept like royalty.  

The shows were booked haphazardly and last minute, so we played them recklessly and with great joy—just to be in such a magical city, with each other, with our instruments, playing them in New Orleans, Louisiana for folks we’d never met, who’d never heard of us and may not have cared—but it didn’t matter.  It was a thrill, and I’m sure my face showed it.  And in between shows, a speakeasy in a jazz singer’s house: big dinner, open bar, full-on Absinthe ritual, horns and keys, two white wolves in a pen out back, a table full of handmade pendants up for grabs (Gypsy gave me one with a chili pepper on it…and a gold cape.)  On our days off we rode the streetcar into the French Quarter to listen to buskers, eat and browse the music stores, stroll along the Mississippi through the thick fog, drink coffee and marvel at everything.  Tourists walked slowly in groups with slushy drinks, shopping bags, and sequined masks on, and the side streets were crowded with packs of gutterpunks, all tattoos, torn fishnets, and dreadlocks with their pit bulls, loose compliments, borrowed buzzes, and shitty manners, demanding hot dogs and the shorts of Khris’s cigarettes.  All a gritty and glorious sanctioned spot of chaos, like one long burlesque show where the dancers cling to cross sections of frayed ropes above, on the brink of crashing down but forever suspended there, the threat part showbiz, part real danger—perfect.        

And the food—holy shit, the food.  Boiled crawfish, filé gumbo, seafood sausage jambalaya, beignets and coffee, shrimp creole, mint juleps, red beans and rice, French martinis… All masterpieces, no foolin’, and the culinary highlight of the whole adventure was Jacques-Imo’s, where I got to meet Jacques/Jack, the owner and chef, who is my paternal grandmother’s godson: the parish priest in Cortland, NY brought Jacques’s French-speaking mother, Beatrice, to the doorstep of 28 Pleasant Street with a baby in her arms when my dad was seven years old, and they lived there with the Walshes for quite a while, some of the many satellites who passed through that house, before settling close by in Port Crane.  Beatrice and my grandma, native French-speaking, Ottawa-born Olive Beauchsne, remained close until she died, and my dad and his siblings keep in touch with her still.  I’d heard of Jacques’s place in New Orleans for years, and when we met, we hugged like old friends—like family.  He told us about the rockstars who’d eaten there, like Robert Plant and Metallica, and the food just kept coming.  I think we tried everything on the menu, and we left so stuffed, we missed the Rebirth Brass Band show a couple doors down.  Next time.  The food was art, truly.                           

And I suppose it was fitting that in the beautiful home of our new friends, Dusk and Eileen, I woke up one morning to the sound of birds and knew there had been a shift—Leyla.  Something in my heart told me.  And the birds—           

Everything I tried to say and the whole way I walked around that day after the news of her peaceful exit felt a little off, not quite there, so different and strange, and I did my best to see everything around that glittery city with wonder and joy, the way she would have, living it like Leyla, but there was an ache I couldn’t escape, which I’m sorry for; maybe if she’d been a little less wonderful…but therein lies the painful paradox—she was too wonderful to lose without leaving a giant cavern in her wake.  Luckily, there is an army of people who love her rushing in at home, the way water does, to grab each others’ hands, pull themselves in, huddle and help, feed and patch, soothe and sing, to be both the tide pool and the buoy for each other in that giant, open space.  

What a gorgeous human motion that is—it's what saves us and makes us a better race, this love, this ability to swoop in and lift each other up.  Leyla built this beautiful wave by living in the graceful way she chose to.  The loss is still unfathomable, but here we are in it.  It’s tough to be so far away, but I can feel it radiating from here.  

~

Dear Leyla, 

       I need to say a quick thing to you, even if it’s not you so much that can hear me as some folks who loved you well— 

       There is a deep-rooted, palpable, bloody and real kind of love that I learned way too young how to respond to and take inside of myself—I grew up with a lot of quick loss, and by the time I was eighteen, older than you, this stuff, however shocking each time, became something I understood.  I grew up (with it, out of it), I moved around, fell in love, broke my own heart, moved some more, let the wrong people in, let some great folks in too, stumbled, admitted everything, did my best to make new without leaving anything behind, and I move forward still, trying to take it all with me, incorporating every bit of the pulp it took to get here.  I lost people early, and with that, I learned the best parts… And I’m just someone; a wandering blip on the current of a million mad rivers—the ones that carry and carry and carry.  And you, darling girl, you’re the force that pushes the current through the rock.  And lucky me, I knew you for a moment in time.  You tripped the breaker and broke open a fresh sector of my heart.  I am new.  Thank you.  

       And I will always sing to you.  I’d say I wish I said that to you…but I think near the end, you knew that kind of thing anyway—knew it about everyone you touched, as that wisdom wove its way into the language you used to assure us that you were at peace and that everything—everything—would be okay.  On a morning in New Orleans to the sound of birds singing, I let you go.  And I’m taking all of this Love you gave with me.
Always.             

~

Before we hit the road, we walked solemnly through some crumbling cemeteries, and I thought about all those lives lived, the people who loved them and felt lost and broken when they left—the mourners who purchased those headstones; there were ceremonies and tears, depression, long recoveries, people who never recovered and just died of grief themselves because to be here on earth without the one you love can be too much; others got stronger, fell in love again, had more babies... Such a cycle.  An unavoidable, integral piece of the passage of time.  Oh, Leyla girl...

Afterwards, we rode an elevator up to the fifty-second floor of the tallest building in town, and from a conference room in some office, we looked quietly over the whole mess.  You’d have no idea from so high up, where all you can see is miles of grey and brown rooftops, the muddy winding river, the slate-grey grid of streets, the black plots of parked cars, just how vibrant it is inside—all of the color and culture and roughed-up beauty on the ground.  Man.  N’awlins.  There’s a lot I still don’t know about it, and I’m certainly not a child of its truth, but I’m busting with gratitude for getting the chance to paddle around in it for a spell.  We'll be back.

IV.) This is Only the Beginning

I can’t speak to sweetness of Tallahassee or the raucousness of Daytona Bike Week yet—I’ve already said too freakin’ much.  (It’s easy to get behind when so many things are still happening!)  And although we’re nearing the end of this tour, we’re nowhere near the end of this story—this blog, this journey, this pumped-up life, these wild adventuretimes that just keep piling up and expanding and spilling over the sides and toppling into the next thing, nudging it, knocking it over, bumping into something else, which strikes up a new conversation, and then we have something in common so we move onto other topics, and then someone eavesdropping joins in, and it’s a bigger dialogue, it’s the discourse of a community, it gets important, it takes itself too seriously so it starts laughing, and the laughter is contagious, and it spreads and spreads, on and on like this, and on…… I made a crazy choice, and even when shit gets rough, I’ll do my best to remember that even one solid night’s sleep in a decent bed can change my whole perspective and renew all the reasons for making it in the first place.  So with that, and with my being super stubborn and restless as hell and relentless in my quest for moremoremore, there is nowhere to go but Further from here.  What a trip.  ’Til the next quiet moment, rage on~