The Sweet Ouch Home to find the Shire bathed in sunlight and still buried in snow. Three days home and yet another winter storm howls and screams at my north windows. It’s mid-march. I don’t feel in any way inclined to take pictures of this weather. But oh my studio is warm warm. Full of echoes left from hours of cello practise: Faure, Brahms, Bach, Schubert, Dvorak. Endlessly gratifying workout-studies. Every muscle hurts. Including my heart. singing, now…. Paintings all leapt ahead and comparing their new selves – mirrored across the walls, watch me move, see how I am, now. More more more. Wires like the promise of further connection: 1/4 inch to loop pedal to Soundboard to speakers. xlr from MK40 to board to speakers. These wait on new arrangements written in the car, on the road, in waking moments – and time… after the meetings, the rehearsals, the photoshoots, the graphic design, the lessons, classes, visits…. Tonight. Tomorrow, and then the tomorrow after. my friend’s house I’m bigger somehow, since I’ve been away. So is the world. Didn’t think I could love more than I did when I left. Turns out I can. To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time. Leonard Bernstein
Lip service One month: Corelli to Handel to Brahms and Faure to Jensen to Patootie to sereda to Kurt Cobain via Drew Wright. In between some work re-arranging songs by JTaylor, Norah Jones, Kris Delmhorst and other specials for cello and voice. Or just cello, or just voice. And thumb piano (note to self: revive and nourish friendships with sweet tasteful drummers). Our Band, Catchpenny, somewhere in Toronto, sometime in the 1980s. Aruna Handa, Frank Klaassen, Michael Klaassen & me This sounds urgent, but it’s not. It’s more like breathing. Or working out, with the intention of finding muscles that haven’t been used for a very long time, and… using them again, even if it takes a rebuild. And yes, yes, all that about pain and gain, too. wild carrot I believe it’s important to Do the thing that you feel compelled to do. There’s a reason you feel so compelled, after all – you can probably trust it. If there are obstacles to your Doing of the thing, don’t waste time blaming them, just remove, or find a way around. Complaint and self-defeat have never once written a song or painted a picture: dump them. You’ve got better things to do with your time. St Lawrence River. Jump in. Do the work. It’s warm. Oh, and if you see someone else who’s doing the work, love them for it.
Saturday morning, 4am Yesterday was requiem day as I worked in the studio, which seemed fitting, somehow. Every layer of grief and joy is expressed and exposed in them – the Mozart, the Brahms, the Faure, the Rutter. Outside my windows there raged a storm that tore hydro lines and uprooted trees – for a while my phone and my internet was dead, and I was startled that this made such a difference: me utterly alone with my grieving, raging, joyful, impossibly beautiful requiem (Mozart at that point). Some deep internal things happened then that were very good indeed – thank you Bruce Telecom, Mozart, and the Storm. My work continues to go well – barring another major dharmic intervention, two very large paintings will be finished by the end of Sunday Nov 3, which is also the day of an eclipse of the sun. We will rehearse another requiem (the Popper, for 3 celli and piano), I will get some deep practise in, and the weekly routine will dance on. For me, though, there will be a rich, indescribable difference, thanks to the Storm, the Requiem and Bruce Telecom. I’m humbled by it, actually, in an empowering sort of way. a yellow christmas cactus that I raised from a wee thing. Blooming like mad in my eastern window… The tectonic plates beneath us are shifting. Can you feel it? There is an air change, a sea change, an internal change wherever you look, if you look for it. How wonderful it is to be alive.