Miles traveled, journeys completed, contracts in the final approach to resolution. Dad’s passing was five days ago, my capstone presentation four days ago, our first family gathering now two nights past. I drove south through and out of the fog this morning, to find sanctuary. For the first time in many weeks of research, trips […]
My dad has died. Twenty-seven hours ago, now. Oddly, I have no sense of his absence, rather a steady, gentle regard, a muscled arm around my shoulders as I write and work. There are tears, of course. Of course. When Dave quotes Hamlet in an email, Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince; […]
When I told dad I would present my final masters research (with some bad-assery) in ten days, all the terrible anxiety and fear vanished from his face. He smiled. He is in the final, non-verbal stage of dementia, frustrated beyond imagining that he has no words and only emotion, no time, only an endless Now […]
Seven hundred pages and four years of journals, four hundred pages and four years of blog posts, two hundred photographs, twenty projects / performances, thirty poems, three notebooks, and three binders full of journal articles and syllabuses, a bookshelf of Community Music and related literature. All but the last two are my data, which I’ve […]
The morning is introverted and full of stillness. My ambition and drive are sleeping, I neither expand or contract, I am simple with my first coffee. Listening, in my purple slippers and with these six red candles, to the train, the starlings, the panicked robin, the traffic that sounds like wind. Cello is warm and […]
Time teaches that there’s more to this story we’re in now than ‘broken heart’. So many other hearts are broken, badly and beyond repair, in this world, across religion, family, geography, faith and belief, music and art, that there’s no room now for any one person’s ache and wrong. We are in an ocean of […]
It’s been a long transition, seems like, from Artist-in-Residence to Resident, at The Cotton Factory, and as of this week, in Hamilton. In fact it hasn’t been long, considering the details sorted and schedules set, leases signed and accounts set up. Futons purchased and assembled, movers booked, packing strategies set in motion… Two weeks. I’ll […]
On the eve of a research plan presentation with and to colleagues at Laurier, I surface from my muttered scribbled reading of journal articles to stare at the lamp… Okay, figure it out. Where do yellow roses, portable solar panels, flights to and from Dublin, camel trains, artists’ talks, nine amazingly diverse portrait commissions, Community […]
Lightning: it is wise not to make a target of yourself. I’m informed here by the following list of encounters, ideas and experiences, as far as I can name them in the moment: J.F. Martel, Guy Laramee, Brian Eno, Kate Raworth, Rebecca Solnit, Greta Thurnburg, Werner Herzog, my Masters study of Community Music, Rutger Bregman, […]
Manifesto woman does not know what to do next. Baffling. Maddening. Humbling. Ego-flattening. Intensely educational. I’ve made at least twenty clear plans for these pieces in the past three months of this residency, and the only one that has lasted the duration is Surrender. I’m thinking this is at the root of what’s happening here. The […]
Loud country music/talk radio and potty-mouthed men clear as a bell up through the floorboards, Mychael Danna’s soundtrack for Life of Pi here in this room – amazing how Danna wins. In collaboration, of course, with my golden chair and my 1956 singer, my cello and all the love in the world all over the […]
It seems to go like this: three or four intense 12-hour days working with huge wave of images connections paint insight epiphany, then a long day – like today – of disorientation. I think the undertow is strong. It feels like being pulled backwards, so I can go over things again, integrate what they mean. […]