gillian chadwick

Today I walked down to the riverside and listened to this song while taking in the flashing bright static of sun on windy water.

This was a stage perfectly set for existential thinking, and one I sought deliberately. It’s part of a promise to myself this year to have more real experiences: to live in the world of my body and nature and less of the endless meta echos of my mind. The reverie is the muse of my greatest works, but if left unchecked it turns in on itself a thousand times, like damascus steel. It’s a beautiful blade but I’m the one who eventually gets cut.

So after moving my legs and ascending a great walking bridge that arcs over the highway and displays an excellent vista of red tugboats, distant wind turbines, and silvery water, I found a place by the docks and did some quality staring and brooding.

At times like these I am most acutely aware of the sense of a dual self. Most religions and belief systems call on this idea to some degree, but I’m content to just employ it as a useful model of understanding experience. As an agnostic mystic who is dedicated to pragmatism, I’m not after proof. I’m hunting for effective lenses.

So the dual self model goes something like this: There is a part of me that is part of everything, and a part of me that is part of my place and time and circumstance. My old T.M. guru called it “The wave and the ocean.” In Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein summed it up as “Thou art god.” I tend to sense these two in a practical way as the ego’d, temporal self and a greater, cosmic self. I should mention at this point that this greater self is not some mist over a mountaintop – it is still recognizably my own voice, though it’s usually laughing about something my ego voice is sniffling over.

So as I sat there watching the river dance and be enormous and nameless and whatnot, I had the distinct impression that this greater self was trying to coax my everyday self out of the dark corner I’ve painted myself into this past week. The last week or two has been a struggle, to be honest. It’s no huge shock – a few months ago I threw myself out of my nest to acquire stronger wings (by moving and starting a new life in a new city away from my wolf pack of friends and family) and this process involves a certain amount of floundering groundlessness and whacking of branches on the way down. To protect against these shocks, I’ve been retreating into smaller and smaller spaces and trying to feel that I’m holding onto things that I own. This past week yanked one of those carpets I was trying to steady myself on out from under me and I bruised my knee in the stumble.

None of this is any surprise to the greater self: this life change was designed to shake things up, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this world, it’s that truly owning anything is an illusion. If you don’t have a home firmly planted in your heart, you’re doomed to feeling homeless on a regular basis.

So It’s times like these when I drag myself to riversides and get to the only real witchcraft I know: aligning those two selves. As a musician the most palpable metaphor is tuning: my more expansive self is the pitch pipe, and it is my job to smooth out the wrinkles of this everyday person to meet that tone. Rising to meet, I should say. For this greater self is the one that hikes up to lookout points and takes in the wide horizon with glee and elation, knowing that we’re all made of stars and that the fire in the belly is a raging thing born of the sun itself.

When the two are tuned my little eggshell heart, the one I’m at pains to protect in smaller times, cracks right open and turns out to be a glory inside. When I say I’ve had a lucky life, it’s because the line between my everyday and my eternal has always been there, even if it’s as quiet as a tin can telephone – I always hear the whisper that, really, things are going to work out fine.

I’ve tasted that elation and power of the cracked-open heart, and once on the tongue it’s impossible to fully forget the taste. I know what that bigger voice sounds like (hint: it’s kind but laughing), and I know the default magic spell for letting that power back in the door – stumble outside, blink like a pale blind thing in the light, and get thee to something as big as a river. In that reflection you can shut up the fretful voice and recognize yourself in the light glittering on the skin water, and the infinite depth beneath.

Here’s how it went for me: as a teenager I was very independent, mostly playing my guitar and writing songs and making art while my peers coupled up. Even then I had my eyes on traveling the world and playing shows first and foremost, and I always assumed I’d marry or have kids decades later than my girlfriends. So for those formative teen years I partied and adventured with tons of friends and then did as only children like me do – always returned to the haven of my own space for peace. Back then my writings were filled with the idea that to be a fully realized person you had to be able to feel complete in a solo, autonomous state.

Then, through a truly rare and bizarre series of events, I came across my ex-husband. “Ah” I thought, as our unusual but healthy partnership got underway, “this is what a good boyfriend is like”… and continued thinking that until the day he suggested we get married. So instead of marrying late if ever, I laughed at that crazy trickster Fortune all the way down the aisle and got myself a ring on my finger by 22, years and years before any of my friends. For about ten years we had a largely successful partnership, full of personal development and joy. Then it was time to part, a painful but necessary fact of life.

To be newly single for the first time in your adult life at 30 is actually kind of amazing, if you can stand being humbled early and often. I’d say it was about 4 months of wicked fun, 12 or so months of public meltdowns and weirdly projected anguish, another 12 or so of quiet repair and pulling inward, and then a lovely, glorious ride of zen autonomy. I grew to love my solo life and get as protective of it as any confirmed bachelor. Nobody had a right to any opinion about what I did with my time, and my future was 100% mine to dream up and pursue.

The “happy bachelor” is no more black and white than the “happy marriage”, though. Life is like that, isn’t it? The Tao of the river changes under you even if you stand still. Companionship is neither the be all and end all, nor is it easy to live without. During my fabulous year of crying in front of Philadelphia bars, I still had companions to get me through, and they made all the difference. My lovely platonic wife Kristin, for example – we were partners through some dark hours, and surely that alliance made the difference between moving forward to the next step of healing or languishing longer.

Being free to spend your hours without comment is one great thing about being single. No one knowing whether or not you got home safely is another thing entirely. I remember my shock at realizing, soon after my ex moved out, that if I tumbled down my steep flight of stairs it might be hours before anyone came looking for me. From prancing single girl in high heels to elderly woman needing MedAlert in 2.5 seconds.

As the solo life transitioned into a true groove and things got brighter, I learned the ropes and practical fears lessened. I grew to even balk at the idea of a live-in partner – wouldn’t they just distract me from my projects and curtail my goals? I could go on like this for pages, weighing the advantages of each lifestyle without a clear answer. It’s a balance, and that’s the only real truth.

For me the balance is pretty great right now. Back with a companion, learning how to do our independent pursuits together. This week I got my first miserable little cold in a while, and I was instantly reminded of some of the more pathetic moments of living alone. Heaving a fevered carcass down the stairs to make tea or order indian food delivery was never a great moment in Living Autonomously. I recall one particularly brutal illness making me feel like Laura from Little House on the Pairie, dragging herself through the dust to the well to get a ladle full of water for her whole family, delirious with malaria. I also get very dramatic and self-pitying when sick. Alec brought me tea and made me dinner, all while making me laugh.

So it’s the plus of the electrifying, passionate collaborative magic of a good partnership, as well as the not-minus of a companion who *wants* to help you with those little things in life need help with – that’s where the scale tips for me. I think the answer to the subtle equation has to do with incorporating both: being happy alone helps you be happy with someone else, as long as you can allow yourself to accept help in those moments when you need it.

In closing, I also recommend cats. They have the added bonus of not noticing if you’ve gone without mascara or changing your outfit in days:

…I saw it yesterday, much to my dismay. I suppose I should call it the right side of dawn: getting up while it’s still dark out. But I was wired to approach such an hour from an easy glide right through the night. Not to get grabbed with the mangling claw of an alarm clock after just enough sleep to make it hurt. In this case it was for a good cause: went to this very fun and well-organized craft show up in Maine: Picnic

Maine! That’s almost Canada, and I live near it! Only took about 2.5 hours to get there. The novelty of a slow migration north is still a marvel for this Virginia-bred girl. I’ve been working for my good friend Heather of Bright Lights Little City while living up here, and she’s deep in the craft show holiday circuit right now. We spent this week building a new display for her gorgeous antique magic lantern slides. The show was pretty great. High quality wares, great dj, and an astonishing amount of beautiful people. Apparently Portland ME is a bastion of handsome long haired men and their beautiful stylish ladies and babies. WTF, Maine. I had no idea.

Also in crafty news, this:

One of my knives made it to the Etsy Dudes email. Wooo! That explains this baby getting a ton of favoriting this week. Hooray for sales!

You can check it out for yerself: Golden Arrow Knife

And know, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make some of these…

I’m in a new place these days, in many ways. It’s been a few years now since I’ve lived without a roommate. Living with a partner is something else entirely. I’m not tiptoeing around anyone else’s separate life and I feel much more comfortable spreading out and making a real home.

Years ago I had a pretty little kingdom for a time. Tumbledown brick bohemian palace, with skylight and enterprising vines working their way through the crumbling wall. It was great while it lasted:

The best thing I’ve learned about life so far is that things can be great and then end, and more new great things can come along. Looking forward to building a new nest for this new bird.

Something with the spirit of these fine photos found on the internets (sources unknown):

But also…

This is my first full-length album. It was released in 2008 on the awesome label Language of Stone, and it contains many songs that were ancient to me even then.  I listened to this recording approx. 1879387431 times as it was being completed, as is the way with recording. In the years that followed the listening tapered off to became pretty rare. Tonight, while burning a CD of it for Domenick, the new guitar player in Ex Reverie 5.0, I listened to it for the first time in probably a year. Unexpectedly, the experience was kind of…personally profound.

It has been over five years (6 maybe?) since the intense two weeks in the basement of Hexham Head studios when these songs were recorded and mixed, and in some ways it might as well have been a million years ago. It’s Before Divorce, so the psychological schism that sharply delineated – almost Black Dahlia style – my old life from my new was still to come with all of its weird memory time distortion.

To my ears the record sounds dated, but not it a way that bothers me. It feels appropriate. I hear in my own (younger!) voice all of the optimism and wild dreaming of that era, with plenty of my oldest childhood fantasies and visions still chiming in to bolster it. In many of the lyrics I hear my own internal voice processing big changes that were just starting. It was the height of an empire, if you’ll forgive me the pretense, and with every peak comes a fall…every constructive cycle followed by a destructive cycle to clear away the old. Crest and collapse goes one line from the song “Clouds? or Smoke?” Indeed.

In the songs I hear questions that are now answered. It’s an emotional time capsule. Time travel, really, or as close as I’m likely to get to it. I’ll never know what it sounds like to anyone else, but I will say that in the substantial distance I can listen to some of the parts I’d forgotten writing and be kind of delighted that my brain dreamed them up. All in all I’d say it’s a pretty interesting album. There are falters here and there but there are an equal number of moments that make me smile. To gaze back at yourself through the looking glass and be able to smile is a great thing. Glad to be on this side of it!

Here’s one fever dream of a tune that seemed to strike people the most:

The Door into Summer is available for download through itunes and Amazon

and you can listen to some of it through Last FM

…and just like that, a couple weeks pass in radio (blog) silence. Lack of internet, travel, etc. Plenty to report and therefore too much to play catch-up in one entry, so I’ll just start with today.

It’s unseasonably warm here on the east coast, one of those spring-like days that pop up like incautious crocus blooms too soon before the frosts are done with their killing. I tend to think of these as a cruel trick – just when you’re trying to fit winter on for size and romanticize it enough to survive for months of darkness, fake spring flounces in for a moment as if to say “Don’t forget! Everything is glorious and eeeeasy when I’m around! Ok bye see you soon…or actually, not so soon at all!” Fickle bitch, leave me to my sweater fort in peace if you’re not here to stay.

Ahem. So that’s how I usually feel. Today, though, it seems a little bit more like a chance to get an extra quick round of cleaning, organizing, and planning in place by the light of the sun to prepare for the long haul ahead. Nerd that I’ve become in this nesting decade of my life, I’ve been pondering productivity and new strategies for my whiteboard. I’ve decided to try a new method with it. Rather than keeping it with lists of major projects and goals, I’m going to try to just write specific goals for the week. New commandment:

Thou shall not keep items on Whiteboard so long that thy eraser cannot wipe it clean, lest thy be haunted by faint reminders of goals too lofty or vague.

It’s all about momentum, at  least for me. Crossing things off feels good, and keeps adding to my identity that I am a Person Currently Getting Things Done, which in turn makes getting things done easier.

Another thing I’m pondering is how to frame the long periods of internet rabbit-hole tumbling I’ve been doing lately so that I can put it in its proper place. It’s one thing if I’m zoning out because I’m stressed or overwhelmed and it seems easier than having a real life. That’s zombie territory and not a good thing, generally. But there’s a useful aspect, as well – gathering information and idea seeds, sparking conversations and renewing friendship ties…these are healthy. Lately I’ve been following some pretty interesting paths through topics I love, or finding banks of images that take my breath away and inspire me in huge waves of exhilaration. Gathering the raw material of ideas and aesthetic is one of the best things this multiverse can do for us.

With that in mind, here is a link to my Pinterest, which I finally understand and find pretty awesome:

http://pinterest.com/gillianhays

and my main Tumblr, which I’ve vainly utterly in love with: Stone Lion in the Snow

I also have a fashion-specific one. Since you can’t see me right now, just assume I’m dressed like this, ok?

Elf Glam

One of the things up on my new weekly whiteboard is “Blog daily”. So…let’s see how that goes, shall we?

Sneak peek from December 1st Courtney Brooke magical adventure…

My week has looked like this:

I’ve been wearing the same outfit almost every day, since I wake up and head two feet from the bed to the workbench/command central:

I’ve been making these things, in a quest to turn craft into money. This money to pay off the car I’m getting in order to try to have adult levels of transportation autonomy for the first time since my divorce.

With all the train travel and handcraft this year audiobooks have entered my world. Lately it’s been “The Story of Philosophy” by Will Durant. Even though it was written back in 1926, it’s extremely lively and engaging for a book on a notoriously dry subject. Since I apparently spent tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree in philosophy, according to these constant phone calls from American Education Services, the least I can do is remember who said what.

20 yr-old me missed some details back then, though, so I’m really enjoying panning for a few new flakes of gold in the sand. For example, I had no idea Spinoza was such a cosmic guy? According to Durant:

“The mind of God,” he wrote, “is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time, the diffused consciousness that animates the world.”

Perfect for 2am and beyond…

There’s ice in the air today as I type.  I slept hard and overlate last night with strange dreams. In this state the mental theater is ripe for woolgathering, and indeed – spied a photo of Luzern on the internet and was immediately transported into deep memories of Switzerland.

Unlike my motherland of Wales, or my family Mecca of Paris, or even the deep love of hedonism that draws me to Italy, Switzerland doesn’t hold any ancestral or vacation longing for me. Nevertheless, my visits there have affected me profoundly. It’s an otherworldly place, more like dropping into a Dulac illustration of a winter kingdom than an actual place to live.

The first time I saw Switzerland was when my train rolled into it on the Rusalnaia tour in ’08. Suddenly the countryside was speckled with Hansel and Gretal houses, and we arrived in Geneva to cold clean air and friendly anarchist faces. Sharron and I both fell in love that night, with the city and everyone who attended our show. Held in one of the few remaining squats in Geneva, this was unlike the lousy and unwashed squats I wrinkle my nose at elsewhere – housing a cafe, venue, and rows of well-kept apartments, our promoter hosts explained that the government had recently cracked down on the city’s rich history of squats and this one was somehow able to petition to become legal. With fingerless wool gloves around cups and over a plate of delicious food, these earnest and intelligent people quizzed me about the state of America at the time, and the upcoming election. Everywhere on that trip I found people worried about the direction America was taking, as they saw the conservative movement ricocheting through Europe.

The venue in Geneva.

Sharron in front of the squat apartments attached to the cafe and venue.

We found our groove that night, playing a great show and eventually closing out the bar with two hilarious and intelligent stylish Swiss men, all of us rolling cigarettes (me as badly as always) and drinking until the chairs were up on the tables and we departed to our band apartment with fond adieu to the gents. The next day on the train we chattered excitedly and the rest of our tour was filled with a special electricity that I believe Geneva helped spark.

The next time I saw Switzerland was the following year on tour with the Castanets. My dispatch home was as follows:

first view of the alps: covered in tiny dashes of trees like the bones in a tin of fish. shadow and light very extreme – lots of pyramid beams cutting across the valley as we drove. later our horizon would become the range of snowy tallest peaks. All crystal & blue & cold smoke. Switzerland is stunning.

I stumbled into true Tolkien elf-country.

That night we played yet another staggeringly un-squat-like “squat” venue. With lofty ceilings, excellent food, and premium sound system, and lightening-fast wifi, it still stands as one of my favorite shows I’ve ever played. They put us up in an upscale hotel room that would not have looked out of place in japan.

zurich was crisp, unbelievably clean for a city, even in the sex and drug district where we stayed. truly a fresh faced and stylish young lady of a town. it was also far and away the most expensive place I’ve ever been. We were starving and thirsty by soundcheck, holding out for snacks rather than spend 18 francs on a kebab and fries.

played in a modern, awesome squat venue. the show was probably my favorite yet, even sans guitar. learning how to be onstage without my safety net! sold a ton of merch apparently. today is luzern: pretty much the perfect city at first glance. we walked in to the venue & found out they had laundry AND could fix the broken guitar.

Driving into Luzern we listened to Johnny Cash singing “Mercy Seat”, and saw the dazzling town. I didn’t take a photo but this one from the web matches my memory:

Luzern

Mural in the band apartment.

luzern replenished the tanks: guitar fixed, clothes cleaned, and they even had black duct tape for me to punk-fix my nearly broken purse. truly, it´s the little things. freiburg was picturesque to the max: cobbled and gabled. swissy german. i skinned my knees slipping on wet stone in pirate boots. Drank pear schnapps and ate schnitzel. Sold some ex rev cds this week.

Ok, I’m back. Back from Philadelphia, where I was all last week, and back to writing. I’d expected that I would continue to update this from my perch in Philly, but the week was so intense and exhausting that I’d leave for work in the morning and get back late at night, too tired to even turn thoughts into keystrokes.

The week started with my car producing some truly bone-chilling metal-on-metal groans from brakes that need to be replaced. Bad enough that my plan to limp it through one last week’s commute had to be ditched. A week of hassle-y logistics and begging favors ensued. Yum, my favorite! I’ll spare you all the gory and boring details except to say thank you again to my angels who fetched me to and fro all week (Leela, Daylen, Sarah, and of course my own dear Mum).

Oh, and there was a little thing called the election of the US president, or as I like to think of it: The Tourniquet or the Machete: You Decide. As it worked out, I don’t have immediate plans to turn expat now. So that’s good. More on politics and the future of the world some other time…

Friday morning the real wave of surreal and scary life events hit the shore: got a call from Alec as I was heading in to work that his lifelong best friend, Don, had a heart attack. I’ve been working for Don’s wife Heather and spending lots of great time at their house laughing and making crowns, so it felt like a true community crisis even though I’ve only known them for a year as opposed to Alec’s 20+. Yesterday we got the joyful news that Don got through his second surgery well and even got to go home today. Thank you universe!

Alec & Don laughing at the manger last year at La Salette. So grateful we can keep up the tradition of smart-ass miscreant charmers strolling through the light display at a Catholic shrine this year. Praise be!

2012 has already been filled with too many reminders of that one big lesson…appreciate every single day, and all the people you love. Trite but true.

More in that vein – about 5 minutes after we got the call we’d been waiting for, that Don’s second stint surgery went well, Alec got word that his Dad is in the hospital. They’re still trying to work out his condition, so send some love to Alec Redfearn senior, will you please?

Here’s AR, sr, at birth in one of the most amazing photos of all time. As far as I can tell he must have been born in a convent on a space ship.

1945.

Now, to finish this chewy week’s report with a sweet dessert – we had the wonderful honor of hosting two of my favorite all-time people, Sarah and Phil, at our place this weekend. They are my first Philly kin to make it up since I “moved” here, and it was awesome for me to have my friend-family in my new life. They drove me up, too, and Phil managed to bend space and time and find a route that took 5 hours…instead of my normal 6.5-9 hour car journey (depending on what level of hell CT decides to be on a given day).

In return New England put on its Sunday best and cooperated with glorious sun-dappled quaintness. We strolled and feasted on delicious food for every single meal. Not only are these two the best cooks I know, they also seek out and find the tastiest things life has to offer. Living alongside them is a delight!

Best humans at the always-adorable Duck & Bunny.

Ok, I think that about catches us up on the major points. Hopefully life will get a little less drastic this week. I’m ready for some slow and sweet winter novelty times.

It’s Sunday now, long my least-favorite day of the week. Sunday always seems to say: Ok, that’s enough, pack it in early and get ready for the grind. As Sundays go, though, this one is nice enough. Leaves the color of a Bartlett pear on a picnic are fluttering and winking in the sun through my window. It’s real-cold now, not just the introductory chill of early October. Daylight savings time ended last night and gave me an extra hour of bizarre dreams, but in exchange has us by Faustian bargain roped into months of dark to come. Sigh.

Hmm, if there’s grimness to my tone I should also mention that it is travel day – heading back to Philly tonight for a week and it’s become my custom to be a little morose on travel day. I enjoy being here and I enjoy being there, and in every other context I enjoy travel deeply, but somehow the pieces don’t add up for this two-city commute. I’m working to tweak the formula!

So, this weekend was nice. Spontaneous dinner and hang out with Ms. Marissa Nadler, songbird extraordinaire:

Photo by AKR. I met Miz Missy about eight or nine years back, when she was on her first record and played at the Compound, where I lived. We’ve crossed paths and kept in touch over the years. Always a pleasure.

Pardon those lazy black bars – I instagrammed this Garden of Eden photo originally. Eve & Lilith? Bacchus nymphs?

Last night the Bacchus theme continued and Alec & I went out to a house deep in a state park, rustic and wood piles and inky trees against pinked waning moon sky. It was a Samhain/Guy Fawkes/session jam/fire ritual affair complete with ancient wood stoves. Definitely scratched an itch for me since I’ve had a faintly ridiculous level of longing for the UK this year. This could easily have been Sharron’s crew in Oxford or Wales.

Watching Alec play is good for my soul:

The effigy looms behind, waiting to burn away the woes of the people.

Fire, I bid you to burn!

At the helm of this fantastic group of musician was a local player I’ve already come to revere. His name is Chris Turner and watch this film Alec made of him playing. I promise your mind will be blown.

Peridot briolette gems twisted on silver wire on a silver chain with peridot rondelles and silver clasp. This is a design for my Etsy store, and it sold immediately so I’m making more. The wired fern method is something I came up with years ago when I was making headpieces for a living. Not having formal jewelry training back then made me pretty gonzo freestyle about the whole thing, and so I approached it from a sculptural point of view.

It started with wanting to add sparkle to my floral-based pieces. The whole totally impractical business plan for the headpiece company involved being a stickler about top quality, so I added actual faceted gemstones (like, carat weight) set in sterling and on sterling wire. Seriously, with metal market prices today you could sell one of my old tiaras for scrap and make back the cost!

So the wired gems started taking stylized shapes and the fern became a favorite. This necklace is a like a lone leaf from one of those headpieces, and is high on the fae and ladylike meter.

Antique brass necklace set with large smokey topaz drop and faceted metallic Czech glass beads/Garnet briolette and Czech glass headpiece. This was a super fun commission from a great patron of the arts and intended for a well-known glamorous torchy songstress. I was given free reign on what to make and I chose this from what I know of her: classy, a little regal, and in touch with an older lineage of quality. The design is rooted in the ’20s, art deco and etcetera.

I decided to make a necklace set – there’s two separate pieces here with common themes, meant to be worn together but also autonomous. The longer of the two rests down below the chest bones, and the shorter is a slender choker style. Very dainty and ladylike but there’s also an edge given the darkened color scheme. Like the recipient herself.

The matching headpiece is a mini-tiara, meant to be work at the crown of the head. It’s mounted on a comb and is in a classic style of mine from the headpiece biz days. Nice to use my newly sharpened jewelry-making skills (Thanks, day job!) with my own aesthetic and favorite techniques. All in all, a satisfying project. Here it is wrapped to go out to the mail:

Pumpkin, sage, and brown butter breads. I made about 10 of these and gave them to the friends for the holidays. Time was short this year, as I’ve been traveling up a storm since the beginning of autumn. Even so, I knew I wanted to do another friend community gift. Coordinating groceries, baking, and drop-off times in the last week of December was tricky but I finally got it together just before New Year’s.

The first time I made the recipe it produced far fewer loaves than I anticipated, so I was forced to eat those myself and make a triple batch the next day:

Tripling the recipe made so much batter it only just barely fit in my biggest mixing bowl. A standing mixer would help in cases like this but damned if I’m going to buy one. If money is to be spent on a machine there’s a long list of guitar pedals that are way further ahead in line.

These breads were particularly tasty, probably owing much to the large quantity of butter steeped with sage leaves. Giving holiday gifts is a good excuse to drive around the neighborhood and reinforce the mental map of the fine community we have here in Philly. Our lives may all diverge domestically as time glides forward, but the love and good intentions remain.

Sterling silver necklace with pearls, crystals, and faceted citrine. I whipped this up for my mother for a Yule gift. She’s been getting handmade jewelry from me for gifts since I was old enough to string a bead, but I thought this year should be extra fancy. I’ve been making necklaces along these lines for a living this year, so this one is just a little more pro than my old designs. Cleaner wire work. Sharper technique.

The holidays came fast this year, since I was away for the month of November in Wales recording an album. Lots of prep for a trip, so the myriad smaller art projects had to go on hiatus for a season. December is always the zenith of crafting, though, so I jumped back into it feet first. I can make way nicer things than I can afford to buy right now so making it was! After about a decade of working my way through supplies from my old business I’m finally ready to acquire some new stones and chain, but there was enough left to make this sparkling number for my mama. She loved it, of course. My easiest-to-please audience ever.

Red Stone Fruit (Satsuma plum & cherry) Cordial. I wanted to harness some of the August ripeness, all sun-soaked and with fruit sugars at a delirious high,  as it crests and collapses into autumn. My darlings from up north, Christopher and Courtney, were due to visit and so I started this brew a couple weeks ahead for our celebrations. Easy, as I still had materials on hand from the cordial I made for my birthday soirée at the end of July. That one was strawberry-basil and it went fast on that rollicking, sweaty dance party of a night:

When I first starting making cordials years ago in the Compound era, we followed recipes (Orange Coriander Brandy was a winner) and made giant vats that infused over a minimum of two months in my prehistoric earthen basement. These were bottled & corked for holiday gifts. I have a few books on the topic but those first recipes came from Food For Friends , a lovely little guide to what my life will be in retirement age. Making lavender cakes for the neighbors and space operas on vintage synths in my basement studio (not shown in book).

For this summer’s brews, though, it was shorter term and I just winged it. Plain spirits (vodka is a simple base) went in a glass container (food safe plastic is ok too) with about a third of the container filled with sliced and slightly mashed fruit. The basil I tore – you want to get the flavor to release as much as possible.

About 24 hours later the strawberries blew my mind – they were ghost white and the brew was bright pink! Plums stayed in for about 2 weeks but I learned short-term infusing can still work. The flavor was lighter so I mixed them into cocktails with mineral water and fruit purée or juice just to be safe.

This method of preservation also works for tinctures & tonics with medicinal herbs. A true cordial also usually has a sweetener added, so I’d say these were somewhere in between. A tangible sip of the spirit of summer, tonic for the soul.

Hand silk-screened black light poster. My band’s new EP was ready to go, and I was trying to choose the release format. Vinyl is preferable but prohibitively expensive. Digital is practical but unromantic. For many of us the listening experience is linked to the physical artifact…especially if we’ve been vinyl freaks. For me that’s certainly true. I want to hold something beautiful while I’m taking in the sound. In this weird new era when the music can transmit through a short download code, the artifact can be almost anything though, right?  I chose an art poster, specifically one with the parent’s basement/stoner contemplation demographic in mind.

“Where is my Roger Dean?” I asked. Kind friends pointed me to artist and awesome fellow musician Jason Killinger, and I commissioned him to come up with the image. I threw out a couple of reference points and definitely said something about the cosmos, but was still blown away by where he took it. Mind-bending space landscape! Originally I’d planned to have it professionally printed, but when Jason said we could do it ourselves my irascible DIY/art nerd self brushed aside all planning concerns and happily agreed.

That’s how Jason, me, and my friend David Brant ended up in listening to prog, drinking beers, and printing the first two colors, the flourescents, late night in a heat wave.

I woke up the next day looking like an extra from some electroclash video: totally covered in day-glo pink and blue ink. That said, it was really Jason who did the lion’s share of the work. From design to burning the screens to finessing the registration of the three screens, he made the visual side of this project come to life. Here’s the man of the hour holding the first finished poster:

We quickly turned out the lights and huddled giddily around it as I snapped on the black light bulb. Success! Torrents of pink lava & eerie blue illuminating possibly my favorite part of creative living: quality collaboration.

Custom headpiece for the wedding of my dear friends Sarah and Phil. In my early twenties I ran my own business designing bridal accessories.  Each piece was made as the real deal, not a plastic sequin nor a poly flower in sight. My tiaras were solid silver & precious stones, my silk flowers were real silk or velvet…some imported from a tiny village in Cremona, Italy (had to Babelfish the hell out of that 2001-era Italian website). I’m still proud of my sourcing, obviously! Eventually I folded the business when I realized my daydreams were shaping up as crowns instead of songs. Not an acceptable trade of creative energy in my book at that time.

I love breaking out the old skills for friends, though. A custom piece is way more fun, and I get to fit it to the bride’s face instead of guessing. For this one Sarah had the idea of matching a beaded motif on her dress. I sketched the basic shape and started free-forming:

I’m still without a work table in my new place, so this was a spread-out-on-the-carpet job like my earliest art days. In addition to the beading we also chose some Edwardian-yet-kinda-Avant-garde stripped peacock feathers, and I decided to sew them to wire so they could be better controlled…an extremely delicate task.

Early on I concluded this should be several separate pieces to pin into the hairstyle for greater flexibility. It total we had the main motif, the wired feathers, and also several matching pins to continue the sparkle around the up-do. Fun fact: most of my headdress design inspiration came from close study of paintings. Thanks, Mucha!

Projects like this take quite a bit more time and thought than some others, but the payoff is proportional. I want the people I care about to have exactly what they want and the best I can give them, always.

(First & last photo by Love Me Do. See more here: http://lovemedophotography.com/blog/?p=2641)

Homemade almond milk. Just almonds, water, a few dates, and a little vanilla. This is one of those cases in which homemade is substantially better than store-bought. I learned this years ago when my friend Margie started whipping up batches of this stuff. It tastes way fresher, is free of weird stabilizers, and is ridiculously easy to make.

Put one cup of almonds in a bowl of water before bed. Wake up and rinse them off. Throw ‘em in the blender with about 4 cups of water and a few pitted dates. Maybe some vanilla. Strain through cheesecloth. That’s it. The almond meal that’s leftover is great to add to all kinds of dishes. Recipes abound on the internet.

My current favorite thing to do with this milk is make a smoothie with just it and a frozen banana. Wow. Try it! Milkshake without dairy coma.

I moved to a new house back in February, and my workshop is in boxes until renovations are complete. This means all art-of-life pursuits are concentrated in the kitchen. Sometimes this sparks a mild identity crisis involving too much domesticity (give me whiskey and tour vans, quick!), but I’m trying to keep in mind that it’s all part of a bigger beautiful-life picture. Drinking my own almond milk from a glass bottle makes me feel off the grid in some way. Knowing how to make things is part of how I like to live.

A trio of infused honeys for a bridal shower gift. Lemon ginger, rosemary, and sage. The couple getting hitched are both excellent cooks with exquisite taste, so I thought they’d appreciate having these to add nuance. I made a lavender honey from my garden years ago, and it was killer on roasted on figs with pink sea salt.

The infusing method is slow but simple. You start with a mild honey and warm it gently in a water bath, trying to keep it below 120 degrees (any hotter and the medicinal qualities of the honey can diminish). Add chopped fresh herbs or zest, let it steep, strain. I wanted a stronger flavor so I also added fresh herbs so they can continue to cold-process on the shelf.

There’s also something about hand making gifts for these life-milestone events that I find extra meaningful. Something involving an older sense of community spirit, the kin and kindred stocking the cupboards of a new couple or family to show support of their venture. One of my favorite gifts from my own shower, approx 100 years ago, was from an artist friend – a set of mismatched & lovely china tea cups and saucers she’d compiled from yard sales, all wrapped beautifully in a fabric in a wooden crate. In a bohemian world it was a queenly gift, and it showed me that she’d considered and comprehended my aesthetic. That thoughtfulness saturated the gift, and I still think of it today when I reach for one of the cups.

Feather-covered boudoir slippers, a housewarming gift for my friend/new roommate. I started with a pair of plain cork heels I found in her size and carefully glued on a design with feathers from my collection.

This project started as a half-joke. We’d been happily brainstorming about the household we would create together and the lifestyle it could inspire. Kimonos and feathered slippers, sunlit rooms. Quality conversation, convivial spirit. A bohemian salon, relaxed but rich with a spirit of artful living.

To honor my part in making that more than idle talk, I decided to start our time in this house with a ceremonial gift of the slippers. Research quickly revealed that most available feathered shoes are pretty hideous. Since I’m physically incapable of buying something I think I can make better,  the day before I moved found me surrounded by boxes at an empty worktable…covered in feather whisps.

A home frames a lifestyle. A lifestyle informs an identity. From identity we take action. The most frivolous of objects imaginable, an ornamental indoor shoe, becomes a piece of proof that a beautiful life is taken seriously. No moment is too common to celebrate.

I can remember the world on its side. I was lying in the grass staring at the grass: green, dry-veined but also lush. I could split each blade down the middle with my fingernail. Intense smell of chlorophyll. The taste, too. Green. I could see the particles of earth that clung to the root. Microcosms everywhere, worlds of raw, unfiltered sense information in each detail. I stared at it and made the knowledge part of what I am. I was a kid with endless hours, and I was seeing on a cellular level. Taking it all in.

Let’s flip to a nearby card in the catalog, there’s millions of them. Here’s a red rubber ball from gym class: smacking me in the face, bouncing exuberantly when I slammed it to the ground, the hollow pitch of the air inside. Again, the smell: plastic, faded red, school air. In childhood I collected entire libraries of these impressions. The shelves of this library are stacked with files filled with sense and conceptual data on the world around me.

The older I have gotten the less I’m lying in the grass, even when there happens to be grass under me where I lie. Instead I potter about in the rooms of my head, carefully arranging whole boxes of ideas to fit. When I do see grass I can glance at it quickly and think “Oh, some grass. I know about that” and be on to the next thought. If pressed on the matter of grass I could tell you about the way you can tear a blade into thin strips, or knot it to a jaunty twist, but I’d be referring to a sense memory, not contemplating those concepts anew. Plus this would be an unusual conversation to have with a fellow adult.

Far be it from me to wax tech theory, but from what I understand this is similar to the way some computer programs work. For example, in music editing programs the raw, huge data files of digitized analog sound are stored in one place, and the software interface with which you parlay is manipulating symbols of those files rather than the entire file itself. This allows idea-equations to get complicated and still work quickly enough to be useful. It’s symbol manipulation that refers to full files stored elsewhere.

When I’m sitting in the park with a group of friends it’s not necessarily the time to get my face in the grass and really think deeply about it. Or maybe it is, if my friends are children, the insane, or the very high. Those three states of being are the domains of a simple consciousness in which single-note ideas (the raw data file) are still commonly manipulated. In those cases the time is afforded to process raw files without concern for efficiency.

The word “efficiency” sometimes gives me the creeps. It smacks of fluorescent lighting hum, insincere voices, and stale coffee. But of when liberated from office-speak it’s truly a glorious concept. It allows me to have my moment of grass-recognition and then move on to fantastically more nuanced and complex equations like, say, conversations with other adult humans. I can even store giant idea-equations such as the old memories involving another person and let them be a reference in the conversation without being a viscerally current experience. Perhaps part of what happens in old age is that these files begin to leak, and we’re swept up in living the moment of the memory. A version of this can occur at any time, of course, too – smell in particular seems to be able to trigger a raw file access point without warning.

If we continue with the computer analogy, this raw sense data file is uncompressed and therefore interacts differently with our temporal experience. Hence the endless hours of childhood being the time for stopping and smelling the lawn. Compressing it to a quick recognition (“Oh yeah, grass”) allows us to deal in macrocosms, the lens pulled back to see a complex picture. Grass on a rolling field under a day of mixed sun. Grass in a park by a city river, bedding a scene of trees, bridge, smokestacks. Grass in a patch at a rest stop on a long highway, a brief barefoot refresher before a long trip.

Lately I’ve been thinking about ways in which to deliberately utilize the uncompressed files. Imagine that moment when a smell hits you and you’re awash in the full spectrum of the memory. It’s often unbidden and sometimes disturbing, perhaps too much emotion to be appropriate for your daily tasks. However there’s a danger to emotionless days of activity. Life can be too efficient, and the consequence is both a certain numbness and a feeling of time moving too fast. My personal experience of working in a depressing office was like this. Relatively free of sense data, except perhaps that whiff of stale coffee, the years seem missing, and like they passed in a blink of an eye. Incidentally it was the habit of us office robots to start stuffing our faces with food, I think as a way to force the sense data experience and remember that we were made of more mammalian stuff than the off-white plastic fortress around us.

To experience the raw file is to exist in the moment of the memory, and to be in the moment of the concept of the object or idea. To be in the moment feels like being more awake, and it feels like a larger kind of experience. Since it is usually not larger in terms of clock measurements, it must be larger in a different dimension of time. I call it density. This is a pretty important distinction for us mortals: the length (clock measurement) of our lifespan is not, as you’ve noticed, completely within our control. The density of our moments, however…can be.

This widening and narrowing path will happen naturally. You will, unless perhaps heavily medicated, be hit with the occasional breeze of freshly mown grass and the file will open to the raw file imprint (whether good or bad). Both the skimming quickly across the top of the water and the deep plunge are necessary for the fully-lived life. What I’m really curious about, though, is when we make the existential conscious. When we live deliberately, something interesting happens. The moment can become a ritual act, and a ritual act can be an existential tool.

Tools help us build and shape. What better to shape than the fundamental material of your temporal journey through life? To me another name for a deliberate ritual act is a spell. Here’s a spell, then, for awakening in grey times. Here’s a spell for the immortality of the moment. Use the spell when you need it: open the raw files of sense data. Zoom in. Refresh the original file with new data. Go to a field and be the grass again. You’ll bring back a vibrancy to your moments that you get to keep. Carry the vibrancy with you and live in a bigger dimension.

Time flies, time crawls, and time stands still. It drips and ebbs, dappling sun on trees like a Leslie speaker, slowly pulsing.  On a 100 degree day it hovers your dry, sun-soaked body just over the freezing mountain river before the moment of contact. Tempus Edax Rerum: Time, the devourer of all things. Time, the 4th dimension: the veritable Mobius strip of experiential existence itself.

Or, as I like to think of it: Time, the great Super Mario Brothers game in the sky.

As other kids raised on early Nintendo may understand, Mario Bros was set up to progress the action forward on a linear temporal plane. Even if you made no move – say you went to go get a snack and threw the control down – the left side of the screen would quickly plow up behind your stationery character and push you along forward just the same. Very likely this course of obliviousness would get you promptly pushed off a cliff, or smack into an aggressive force. Sound familiar?

So in one sense time is kind of a ruthless creep. Like the undertow, it has little regard for moments of dithering. Distraction will get you in trouble with both of these intractable forces. Life will happen to you even if you try to ignore it. Time ends things, too, and that’s the hardest of all. The very hardest of all there is to know, even when you know some endings are good, and no ending is necessarily ended.

At this particular moment, though, I’m more concerned with time as it wears its healer hat. I’m interested in how we can consciously use time as a tool in our lives. The first application of this principle is one we’ve all experienced but can’t be overstated: letting time pass after an emotional hurt will help you feel better. It seems impossible at first but that’s the trick of it. Learning this trick is a big part of maturity. Interacting with time in a manner respectful of its powers is part of growing up. Take love as a classic example: your heart may feel broken, but you know from experience that in a year it will resemble a bruise more than a break. It may even feel good as new.

Trusting time, even when the pain is fresh, shows foresight and willpower. The rational brain must insist on override. The situation may not hurt less but you know to wait it out. The most dangerous depression I’ve ever witnessed is the kind in which history is revised (“It has always been this bad”) and the rational brain is out-muscled by the raw heart (“It will always be this bad”). Past and future are warped or dismissed by an overactive pain response in the present. Trust can quiet the irrational yowl and show a path forward.

****

Time can also be applied like a compress. Lately I have been focusing on wielding it consciously, with steady pressure, to push through moments of anxiety. In the past my initial problem-solving response was usually to take action. This originated from a desire to control a situation, to fix it. It was a never-ending battle to bring my emotions back to zero setting: neutral calm. I was constantly putting out fires. I didn’t want to be a passive force being pushed through the video game of life. I liked to think of myself as an agent of change, that I had a dynamic role in the great balance. More than a little hubris was inherent in this perspective…and if there’s one thing I’ve learned lately, it’s the danger of hubris.

Over the years the approach of aggressive action has brought me any number of backlashes, amplified dissonances, and new snarls to unravel. It’s no surprise, really. The channel to which we’re tuned is the frequency we will receive. Taking action from a position of fear produces more things to be afraid of. Be an agent of change, sure. But dynamic roles require nuance. The hasty reaction/action has all the subtlety of a game of whack-a-mole. Like all things it’s a skill to develop. We must remain engaged and aware but also take the time to choose action carefully. Instead of the epic poem, try the haiku. A tough task for a wordy woman!

Using time as a tool requires a tremendous amount of faith. Trust is substantiated by a constant review of past experience. We must remember how quickly an argument can dissolve back into laughter, how the gossip spotlight swings to new star weekly, and how the heart itself is capable of phenomenal readjustment if we get out of its way.  Faith in the consistent patterns of human interactions is what tells me this week’s drama could be tossed over the shoulder without a second thought in a matter of days.

Utilizing time also requires an ability to sustain some discomfort. This has been my own biggest trigger in the past. If something is wrong I want to change it back to right immediately. However, enough years navigating the world of people and their story lines has taught me this is not always possible. Sometimes the splinter hurts until it works itself out. I’m learning to live with some amount of discomfort if necessary. I am trying to raise my emotional zero-setting to a higher pain threshold and accept uncomfortable situations with faith and patience. Fingers off the gun, rookie – get thee to a mountaintop and take some deep breaths.

At the heart of all of this duress is a faulty equation. Putting out fires is a backward response. It assumes that in order to be at peace internally, external situations have to be arranged to your liking. This is a losing battle. File under: Tomorrow is Only an Idea. If we want to be ok, we must be ok now. Be ok already. Trying to control the external world is thankless to the max. If we wait until everything and everyone acts the way we want before we’re satisfied with life we’re in for a life of disappointment. That control is not given to us. Luckily, there are some infinitely powerful tools we do have at our disposal. To review: we have our lens of perspective (see: The Honor in Happiness), the composition of our internal landscape (to come: Location of the Self), and this, our own relativity of time.

Our relativity of time allows us to work within our moments. Sometimes when I am in physical pain I can manage it by finding the place in my mind that is not hurting and staying “there”. I’m trying the same thing now psychologically. I find the sweet spot in each moment that is just fine despite whatever is going on externally and I hang out there. From this place I can gather an arsenal of support: all of my life currently that’s already fine, all that’s been fine in the past, and faith in all the fine to come. I emerge fortified by this little zen crux and I proceed through time as someone who is once more enjoying the game.

Integrity is starting to seem less boring to me these days. The word used to make my eyes glaze over. Trotted out ad nauseum in business writing, there it would be again: leaning pseudo-nonchalantly in header-size italics at the top of the page. It practically buffed its nails on its shirt. It was a word for the pacific northwestern venture capitalist wearing organic cotton. It bragged about not skimming from the till as though that was cause enough for praise. It all seemed kind of smug.

Integrity also seemed to crow: “Don’t succumb to wicked and decadent temptations!” Alright, logical enough…but how to reconcile the logic with the life experience? Frankly mine has been rich with evidence that some wicked decadence can be  invigorating. For many years a wild-heart, burn-it-down spirit suffused me. It was rooted in that exhilarating frisson of being at least a little bad, scoffing at rules and morals set by pious squares. Who wants advice about how to live from people who don’t seem to make the most of life? How can we trust any rule predicated on fear? Besides, re-inventing the wheel is a rite of passage. It’s the flag planting of individuality. I want to do things my own way, hell or high water. Even if that wheel doesn’t turn quite right…long live the hubris of youth. It’ll rattle proudly on half-wheels and polygons. The jet-fuel of ego alone will make the thing move forward, even if it’s in fits and starts.

Recently this bias has started to evolve.  I began thinking about integrity as a structural concept. From this position the term means a coherent system. A coherent system is built on solid principles, on equations that add up. Even the Hubble was crippled by a simple math problem. A system with integrity is free of weakening internal conflicts. Our psychological system should be the same. Of course in these lucky lives we’re always going to be faced with interesting new conflicts over which to puzzle, Rubik’s-like, in the long drives and sleepless nights. I’m not talking about that kind of conflict. I’m talking about the ones that go deeper. The ones you ignore.

In the final couple years of my old life, there existed fault lines I observed and did not know how to resolve. Memos were sent to my brain that went direct, unread, to the shredder. There were incompatibilities between me and a situation or between my abilities and my desires. When faced with such, I swept them back and rode forward on a kind of faith that it would all work out somehow. Riding the positive expectation horse through your badlands is usually a good plan in my book, but this is a little different. Things will still work themselves out, but if you’re not addressing the inconsistencies and working to shore up what you can, you’ll find it works out in a start-from-scratch kind of way. I saw fault lines, I kept building on them anyway. Soon enough, the city fell to the ground.

More recently I’ve also been noticing internal integrity when it comes to creating art. The aspects of my craft that I’ve most glossed over through the years are knocking on my door. I’m talking about the topics I’d think about, feel an uncomfortable twinge, and brush away. Turns out you can’t outrun them forever. At some point the whole operation is going to stop and wait for you to locate the missing part, or learn to fix it yourself. The artist needs a coherent skill set. The machine of life needs integrity to run smoothly and reliably for you through the years.

How does the system get integrity? For one, do what you say. Seriously, do it. This is coming from someone who firmly believes talking IS a kind of action. I do much of my best thinking in dialogue. Be it with patient friends over a beer or in dialogue with myself through writing, the intention to do something and the discussion of methods or motivations is an pivotal part of the process. Ok. But then…do it. Put your money where your mouth is. Put up or shut up. What a difference a conversation makes when both parties can reasonably expect that the intention has a fighting chance at being made manifest. How much we more we respect people who identify an intention, resolve to make it into action, and then act! At times you’ll find your intentions aren’t the right answer, but that information will at least get you closer to your goal. Stone simple, but true.

Also: don’t do things that feel wrong. I don’t mean fun-wrong. I mean living-with-it-in-the-morning-wrong. Do not do things to other people that would make you miserable. Do not do things that drive a wedge of internal inconsistency between yourself and the life you want to live. I have done this, as many have. In the darkest days of personal pain, I tried my hand at nihilism. If my life was unrecognizable, what did any of the living of it matter? This is earthquake survivor shock. Decision making in a landscape of rubble. But I am no victim; as noted above, if I hadn’t ignored the fault lines I could have been better prepared. Internal inconsistencies have a terrible quality of snowballing. When you already sense that there is wrongness, what’s the motivation to prevent more? Not much, and it gets less every time.

Face the faults. Don’t fear them. Don’t sweep them under the rug because you don’t want to see them. There is nothing to fear unless you believe yourself to be incapable of change. If you believe yourself to be incapable of change, there’s not much to recommend except that someone shake you by the shoulders and give a good: “My god man, wake up!” You can change. So do it already. Face the faults, work to improve them. Try. If you don’t, you’re not allowed to complain when things don’t work. Give your life integrity. The machine will purr and run like new. You’ll be on your way, and your trip will be a good one.

I’ve told this story more than once, but I think it’s a good example for a number of topics that involve my favorite tool, the lens of perspective. Here’s how it goes: I am walking to work. The job is one I took when I still had a car, I no longer have that car in the wake of my life implosion/divorce. So I walk. Let me be clear for a moment: it isn’t very far. But in this moment it is far to me. The weather is punishing, a seemingly malevolent wintry mix that fills my leaking boots and pelts my face. I am so beyond broke that I can’t buy new boots yet and I need to get to this job to not-really-quite pay my survival bills. A car drives by and splashes me. At this moment the litany, heretofore a muttering shadow, begins in earnest. It’s a riotous clarion of self-pity and it rings through the grand chambers of my present like the voice of a holy rolling revival preacher…and I’m just getting warmed up.

This sinker begins with the basic details of physical discomfort but wastes no time jumping gloriously to the general and absolute: once I had a house, I think. I had a husband, a business, a working band, a decent car, a well-run life. Images flash of a warm room, laughing loved faces, comfortable jaunts out in the minivan to Ikea to pick up some puzzle piece of cozy order for my cozy life. Who knows if these images are even filled in with my own details, at this point in the self-pity slide they may as well be the stock photos in frames sold at Target. Maybe we’re toasting something. Maybe I’m wearing a turtleneck. There’s probably a golden retriever with a dolphin smile on his face catching a Frisbee, for all I care about accuracy. At this moment the point is that I used to have it all and now it is gone. Fist shake at the sky!

“My husband left me and now I am reduced to the state of a wretch!” Now I’m galloping roughshod over reality, blurring edges with the fire in my eyes. I’m not even being true to the subtle truths about a long term love affair. The sad and decent complexities of a long love lost are trampled beneath the heel of my leaking boots.  Before I left my house I was a normal enough young woman heading to work, now in my head I am essentially a rag-bedecked hobo moaning over a barrel fire in a gloomy/blue-filter-heavy post-apocolyptic sci-fi movie.

Somewhere mid-hobo the meta-cognition kicked on with a clumsy hum and I started to laugh in the rain. Wretched, pathetic, maligned…or silly? The lens of perspective clicked down like a Viewmaster from childhood, and I saw myself ten years forward shaking my head at this bedraggled fool: “You are still young, rich with ability, and free to do literally anything you choose at this moment.” Ten years forward I hope and expect to have many of the comforts and successes I felt so sorely lacking walking in the freezing rain that day…but I know some part of me then will look back on this time as one of robust youth and opportunity and wish that I had fully appreciated it. To honor this perspective I choose appreciation. In appreciation peace and happiness are right at my fingertips.

Life feels difficult sometimes. In the relatively of our temporal experience, sometimes it feels more difficult than it used to feel. Sometimes it appears more difficult than a friend’s life (often). When the sense of humor is operational we can recognize many of our concerns as “first world problems.” Still, it’s the nature of our emotional focus that we get really relative, really fast. We could all find a reason to bemoan something basically all the time if we want to.  So I say to myself and you both: Stop wanting this. That’s what I am getting at. Let’s just give it a rest. Quit bitching.

Complaining is easy. It is satisfying on a very cheap level. It’s giving the crying child a candy bar. What is less easy is stopping the sinker and looking around at how good you actually do have it.That sinker train has gained momentum! As we saw in the earlier example, within in one block of 6th street I went from Normal Tuesday to Wretch of Misery. It was hard and uncomfortable to stop that slide, hard like…solving a tricky word problem in a timed test. Hard like…using your rational brain under duress. Sort of a wrenching sensation. A pull-up in gym class for the bookworm. It’s also hard to be faced with proof that you’re being a jerk. I’d prefer to keep my bad angles away from the camera, please. But if you are secure in your identity you can face your bad angles and your weaknesses and, by doing so, improve them with grace.

Self-pity is unattractive, but it’s greater insidiousness is the dishonor it does to genuine lack. Each day I get to walk myself through the sleet with all my limbs, all my mental faculties, and knowledge that my loved ones have the same is a shining gem of a day. It’s a ruby in the sun and I’d damn well better appreciate that it is mine. If I appreciate what I have I honor the time when time will take these away, and I honor all that’s come before to bring me to a state of such abundant wealth.

The state of appreciation feels like the easiest and most natural thing imaginable once entered. It feels right. But there are many times when getting there is incredibly difficult and requires a tremendous act of will. I make no claims to mastery on this front. It requires the acuity of a psychological lens able to project forward, to accurately survey the past, and even to broaden out to see the breadth of alternate options. It also requires the basic premise that appreciation is your desired state of being. I say do this. Aim for appreciation.

The word ‘honor’ has been dragged through wars and churches in our human history, but to me it is this simple and pure thing thing: try to be happy. Appreciate what you have when you have it. From this state your actions will be peacefully motivated. You will be humble and also more powerful, for you will have better stock of your strengths and assets. This is a state of honesty and also efficiency, as you will not waste your time. When you complain you fork over extra precious moments of your life to the very thing you’re against, whatever it is. Remove the fuel and watch it fade away. Look forward.

It is true that you can’t always control what happens to you, but you can control in what context you view it. Make the choice to adjust your lens out to a broader perspective. Let’s do ourselves and each other the respect of living in a positive story. Let’s walk in the sun.

Break the seal. Cut the ribbon. Get out the door. Jump in the puddles. Test a theory with practice. Leap with faith. Move. Act. You can walk on air if you don’t look down.

Sometimes I picture consciousness as a house. I like to spend much of my time way in the back, digging through the mysterious trunks and old books. It’s amazing what you can find there. Treasures. Sometimes I look up to see that the sun set hours ago. Weeks have passed and I’m still sitting on a stack of boxes, turning some interesting concept over and over again in my hands. I could stay in this reverie indefinitely. Ok. Wake up. Rub eyes with the heels of the hands.

Walk to the front room. Open the door handle and the pupils dilate at the brightness of a day out in the world. Molecules and light and activity. Oxygen and weather, everywhere. Go!

***

You know about top-down vs. bottom-up models of creation, right? In top-down you come up with the idea first and then try to make it happen. With bottom-up you improvise with available materials and see what comes of it. For many years I was surrounded by avant-garde noise musicians, near-religious in their devotion to bottom-up, and I went a little reactionary: “The emperor has no clothes!” I defended editing, planning, and the cerebral above all else.

It was an easy enough position, I’ve always love ideas. I love concept records. I love highfalutin mega-meta blueprinted storyboarded ideas. I love words that need italics. When I write a song I’m usually sketching the idea for an opus with some power chords, essentially just writing an outline that I’ll fill in later. “Later” is where it gets tricky…sometimes trying to manifest a concept with available materials or resources leads to compromised quality. Nevertheless I stuck doggedly to this concept-over-content stance until it struck me that, as with all reactionary positions, it was narrow-minded. If I love ideas so much I should allow them whatever earth they need in which to grow. Sometimes that’s a chaotic clatter of amplified silverware, run through loop pedals (rarely). Sometimes it’s a found material I get my hands in and start shaping.

Plus, both models have their own strengths. Top-down is good for plot, for dramatic arcs in emotion or melody, and for overall shape. Bottom-up is good for detail, for nuance, and for the surprise connection. For some time now a list of topics, titles, and outlines for essays has been growing over here. The day has come to start manipulating the raw material of words to see if I can approximate the shapes I have in mind. What will they look like out of reverie and into reality? It may be a loop of noise at times, phasing like a dog whistle and making wish you were in the back chatting with a pal instead of sitting here in the front row. Hopefully other times it will be two pieces I suddenly realize click together to make a single song. There’s only one thing I know for certain: if I don’t start it will just be silence.