Island Air

An artistic opening

I’ve been thinking about you.

meaning: there’s some sort of contraction-like movement beyond human comprehension occurring - and it isn’t lost on me that it can be difficult to be born into the era of the time to surrender self-consciousness.

We’ve asked to be here now. And a deep, soft, thrumming is resonant through our bones. A memory of what has and has not happened yet is striking us like a lyre string in the utterly sweet spot - that is an echo of eternity.

This time away from the usual, and this chance to breathe deep in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest, has unfolded artfully and decidedly. The vision of the film that will accompany my folk opera has transformed into a performance that could be performed live.

I’ll let you in on a secret: about 3 years after I walked away from my music career as an alt-country/progressive roots artist, I began having a dream that has become a recurring dream… in which I am all set to play a theatre like I used to perform in. The audience is there, the lights are about to light, and…

In every dream, some obstacle stops me from getting on stage. There are no strings on my guitar. There is no piano on stage. I forget my set list and am in my pyjamas, and my kids are hiding in the theatre and I have to look for them.

Someone from some past tour who abused me, shows up and slams me against a wall again.

And I wake up wondering...

Last night, for the first time in 10 years, I had a different dream.

I performed the whole folk opera in front of you… and the whole feast for the eyes - the head pieces- the symbols- all played their part in a symbiotic, kenotic, offering that had nearly nothing to do with “me”. Like performing it pushed me into subtle, resurrection territory.

The pandemic has done a pretty serious number on us. And we won’t be what we were before. There are any number of distractions to keep us from honing or surrendering into what might be “ours to do or be”.

This journey out west to visit my sister and breathe in this island time, has been about shifting gears, and ironically letting go of identity calcification that keeps me from getting back on stage.

To stop bean counting and gatekeeping and simply and gratefully open to encounter the visitations of the shaman of Nazareth.

And some unlikely poets, mystics and tricksters.

Over half of this dull, lifeless, pattern… of not walking out there, even if all I have on are pyjamas… is due to the shut down circuits in my heart - old protections - patterns - stuck - clenched.

I think there is a lot of unlikely flowering going on all over.

It isn’t painless. But it is time, and it is excruciatingly beautiful.

here I am by the lake that has been singing to me… it has chanted each night with the tree frogs, “Dream a new Dream”.