Saliva and Soil

the voracious appetites of uncolonized plants

You know what it’s like.

I know you do, because I can’t imagine there is one listener of mine who isn’t a seeker.

The kind of person who wants to recognize depth where it can be found.

I have too many years under my belt to bother with making some sort of rigid, final, one way or the other, announcement.

But it’s probably quite obvious to you now, that I too, am a seeker.

If Aslan is on the move, then so am I.

Don’t think I am not aware of the violence and pain and puss excreting out of the cracked, aged, pattern of one of the kingdoms of this world: the land of an eternal Monochrome Winter and never a birth. (Or if there is a birth, the baby is rubbed raw of its skin biome, and taught separation from the get go.)

As we’re all free falling, I’m also pressing into the soreness of wherever I used to react, massaging these places, and teasing out the energy, so sensuality and beauty has an actual chance to arise. Like Brigid the foster mother and patron saint of lactation, I offer my breast to the babe, and absorb the aseptic world of separation, skin to skin.

It’s time for us to get friendly with the voracious appetites of uncolonized plants.

Saliva and soil may very well come with the territory of eye-opening.

We are pollen, and the wind is blowing.

As an artist, and as a being, I am not a closed system… back or forward, up or down, or sideways or any other way.

On Friday I drove to spend the day with my mixing engineer Don Benedictson, to really dig into each song from my upcoming folk opera album Cianalas/Tãsknota.

On the way home, I listened to where the album is at, from start to finish, a number of times… and even though it may be heard as a “departure” by some, I was so proud at how it feels like a brave deepening, and a vulnerable opening, of what I have continued to intuit in different ways my whole life, but especially these past ten years.

My hope is that all my music has been dancing with what my folk opera is deeply dancing with. There is no departure to be found. No exile.

And speaking of pollen and wind… as we continue to reexamine how to bring my music into the world… and how to serve best… one of the many considerations on the table this week is whether or not I will continue with CD inventory. So next week, signed copies of what remains of my inventory will be offered, as potentially the last of this modality.

Otherwise, I invite you to make your favourite hot drink, find me and follow me on your favourite streaming platform, and once in awhile, buy me a virtual coffee as you listen.

I have some very fun ideas up my sleeve for how to engage in more tangible ways.

More on that later.

Now… I invite you to read a working “definition” of where my heart and art is dancing… (some people call this a “mini bio”):

Alana is a singer songwriter, recording producer, a folk opera composer, an essayist, and a willing canvas, who makes (and is) art, enfleshed by contemplation, Christianimism, story, and reimagining devotion. From polyculture farming to Jean Gebser, from ancestral healing (human and otherwise) to Silence, from the desert (and beehive hermitage) Abbas and Ammas to ancient magic and myth... Alana continues to journey, and deepen, and do the hard work of taking what we are tempted to exile, into her art, to be metabolized. The working hours of her day, and the whimsy and challenge of family life and community, are devoted to an expression of her fidelity to, and willingness to coalesce with, Longing.