The Blizzard’s Promise:  to bring us all closer. We look out of snow-packed windows at white white nothing but white and wind and remember how wonder feels.  What warm is, what nourishment tastes like. It tastes like time.  Like open, endless time. Time tastes a little like fever. Now finally I can… and then I […]

Every once in a while I see a bald eagle in the sky,  like poetry so beautiful and alive I stop breathing. We have entered the long cold of January.  Winter came early this year – two months ago –  to invite us deep inside where we can tend to the root of things, tune […]

I love this big, fat blue world.  All of it. Happy 2014, everyone.

There was an impossible amount of STUFF going on in my family when I was a kid.  It’s only been in the past few years that I’ve realized my then-body had figured out a strategy to remove myself from the obligation to participate in the stress:  I got sick.  There were lots of options, some […]

I’ve known many…. The trick with the key, the turn of the doorknob, the double beat of the door closing – like permission to lay the day’s burden down.  I’ve had hollers from the back room, running tackles from the dog, slow blink from the cat – but always the awareness that time moves more […]

Although I can’t see it through the opaque winter sky I can feel it:  the moon is full. With the able help of cellists Carol Mulder and Sibylle Ruppert my excellent mom and I performed David Popper’s Requiem for three celli and piano for our Industrial Ancestors yesterday evening.  Folk came out to witness as […]

It’s the kind of snow there’s a constant More of.  The plows and trucks and blowers, out all night long are still going strong at 10am.  Cars slide gently sideways to stop signs. Kids and grown-ups both are thoroughly snow-suited, booted, winter-gloved and touqued as they kick & trudge through piled white, falling white, blowing  […]

We have a poet Laureate in this town of 22,000 people, and have had for at least a decade.  Her job is to lift us into a place where we remember to breathe. Here’s a bit the current PL recently posted on facebook that has stuck in my heart like cupid’s dart: “Someone forgot to […]

This morning’s cold has made the rain weightless.  As I watch from my third floor window I can feel the pull and flow of ocean, save that it’s air – currents made visible by tiny crystals of frozen water.  The north wind, playing. My walk at dawn was full of the promise of this; I’m […]

We were in my studio where almost every inch of wall, floor table and shelf is crammed with stuff in process and use, with tools, & paint & vine charcoal & buttons & books & thread & blank paper & other paper covered with notes or ideas or solo, duet, trio, quartet or orchestral music.  […]

Every year has different elements & configurations, but as of December first each year I look at my calendar in wonder and love my job all over again.  Who gets to do this?  Musicians. shorthand: December 8, 12, 13, 14; Dec 16, 18, Dec 21, Dec 22  (I believe that’s 8 for 19 days?  2 […]

..if you find a loose end, then follow the thread back to where they all connect to the same warp and weft, where the shuttle sails on,  left to right, right to left, and the pedals shift the taught colours up then not, then down again, humming. I can’t express how significant the changes in […]