Today I discovered another way to shift the gloom of the dark blue place:
SING
as loud as you can, holding the notes as long as you can.
You cannot feel despair or anxiety and sing at the same time.
So sing as long, as loud, as fearlessly as you possibly can.
Don’t stop until the dark blue lightens.
Last night my students labored over 10-pages of Irish exam, packed with verb conjugations, prepositions, noun plurals, conversations, proverbs, and important questions like: An itheann tú sushi? Do you eat sushi?
The cardinal-rule of exam-taking in my classes is to take a shot at everything. I am the Queen of Partial Credit, so it just makes sense to guess rather than to leave things blank. And I love to see my students act boldly, to make an attempt, and to succeed – even partially!
The same is true of music & life. Let’s leave no blanks, friends. Let’s hazard a guess on every score. Let’s squeak out something – a song, a quatrain, a vase, a sketch, a love affair. Let’s not let the fear of being wrong freeze us to our chairs. There are far worse things than being wrong: being dead but technically alive, I think, would be the worst of all.
We are far better than we think we are. We know more, are capable of more, are more impressive and powerful than we ever dreamed. Recently I said of one friend, “If he just knew how cool he was, he’d be AMAZING!”
That is true of you and me, too.
And while I may be the Queen of Partial Credit, life itself is the Goddess of Partial Credit. Wrong answers still reward us. Passionate failures teach and spur us. Just showing up earns us an easy ten points.
So lets fill in every blank – preferably with a pen dipped in star dust, a joyful purple crayon, or even finger paints dipped out of a jar marked HOPE.
We really could celebrate anything. Imagine: Festival of the First Snow, or Cupcake Day, or Commemoration of Our First Kiss. We could make a lovely fuss about strawberry picking or Emily Dickinson’s birthday or the full moon. Or fireflies. Or the first kayak run of the season. Or the last kayak run of the season. Or the Blessing of a New Piano. I love to think of all the cakes, the banners, the fireworks, the champagne, the hugs and kisses and congratulations. Anything we love or that has special meaning for us is game!
Yesterday I got to take part in one such celebration in West Groton at The Clover Farm Market, one of my favorite places to get a sandwich, buy a bottle of wine, munch a Squannacookie, or chat with Jan, the owner. Jan is the coolest – artsy, friendly, welcoming, and a brilliant cook to boot. For a long time, she has dreamed of drawing attention to Edmund C. Tarbell, a 19th century luminary of West Groton who became one of the best-known and respected of the American Impressionist painters. To that end, Jan and my friends Nancy Beaudette and Christine Hatch, worked with local businesses to organize Tarbell Days, a week-long festival that commemorated Tarbell’s beautiful paintings and also the beauty, spirit, and neighborliness of West Groton. What a menu of fun they arranged, too! Outdoor painting, a photography contest, children’s activities, a wine tasting, and even a man carving a canoe paddle down the road at the Nashoba Paddler (which is a great way to taste the delights of kayaking if you don’t have your own boat, by the way). The festival culminated yesterday with music all day and into the evening, not only at the Market but also at the nearby Groton Nursery and Garden Center.
I just love how inclusive this is. Jan’s dream bore fruit in so many ways. We were educated about Edmund C. Tarbell whose art inspires us to even more deeply enjoy our beautiful area AND to look carefully for inspiration in everyday life (where he seemed to find it regularly – everything from children eating breakfast to watching his own sons and daughters on horseback in the woods). We were brought together with our neighbors and friends in the warmest, most casual way. Here are two of my friends listening to another friend, Louis Arnold, a guitar master and exquisite musician:
Carolyn and Margie listening to Louis Arnold
The Clover Farm Market and other local businesses got a little surge of attention and business. And we felt great pride and delight in our neighborhood, in the talents and ingenuity and spark of our friends and neighbors and even our ancestors here.
All of this can come from the simple desire to celebrate, to make a little fuss, to throw a party, to bestow honor, to cook up some fun. So hats off to Jan, Nancy, Chris, Pat at the Garden Center, and everyone at the Paddler, and to everyone who threw such a marvelous party for all of us. I feel inspired to follow your example! Here’s me below singing a May Day song, happy to be alive and celebrating art, friends, love, and the first of May:
Kate laughing at the Clover Farm Market
Recently I’ve watched a few episodes of “Planet Earth” and “Life”, and I must say: I’m mesmerized. The beauty, the wildness, the eye-popping ingenuity and diversity of life on this planet – all of this is just riveting to me. Both series let us peek into the dining halls and boudoirs of other species, and we see that animals, plants, insects, birds, and fish lead lives every bit as complex and meaningful as ours. Here we see their ability to improvise, to solve problems, to adapt, to create, to share humor, to express love. All of the old truisms about what is unique about us as human beings – humor, love, tool-use, problem-solving, so-called “higher thinking” – break down in the face of such evidence. I’m happy to see that wall crumble. Living as one creature in a world of fascinating, busy, gorgeous, brilliant creatures, makes me feel somehow more at home.
One example of creaturely genius is the multitude of things we all eat and how we catch, grow, kill, trap, outsmart, discover, and otherwise happen upon those things. I watched in amazement as hammerheads dove into shimmering spirals of shoaling fish, or bearded vultures threw down bones from dizzying heights to crack them open and get at the protein-rich marrow inside.
That got me thinking about my own nourishment – and particularly of all the things that feed the Kate that creates. Recently, that creature has dined well.
I attended the Unicorn Writing Conference last weekend, and there I gobbled up a smorgasbord of practical advice about publishing as well as inspiration for new poems and stories. I must say, too, that my fellow diners were delightful, and if I ever needed any confirmation that someone, somewhere, is writing a book on pretty much any subject you can think of, I got that here!
This past week, a new friend sent me a poem written by her 8-year-old son in hopes that I might be able to set it to music. Delicious task! And as it turned out, deeply nourishing both because his poem was astonishing and visionary, and because the process of making a musical setting for it brought me back into alignment with the deepest joy I know.
I’m snacking on all kinds of yummy things lately:
And I recognize that like any other creature, I’m always on the look out for opportunities to feed myself. I’ll eat anything if it is tasty and nourishing to that part of me that makes poems and songs and stories. And so much is! As I learned watching “Life,” one creature’s parasite is another creature’s four-star meal – and so it is with creators. Somebody’s throw-away line overheard in a cafe can find new life in a poem. One person’s poem sparks another person’s essay. A sculpture can grow up out of broken and discarded bits – even the broken and discarded parts of ourselves.
I’m embracing the life of a joyful omnivore; perhaps you are, too? If we’re canny and creative, if we’re creaturely and courageous, we can eat well anywhere we go. It’s all food. It’s up to the best parts of us to make it delicious.
I’m intoxicated by the changing light, heartened by it, buoyed up on the extra minutes and last moments of slanting golden light. My friend Nick Roosevelt is offering a retreat in May all about the light that different spiritual traditions can cast in our lives, and the beautiful possibilities of tasting some of those traditions and experimenting with a blend of them. I’ll be there to talk about the nature-based spirituality of the Celtic tradition and to perform a concert of songs and tales on Saturday night. I’ll also be drinking up the time with Swami Dayananda, whom I adore, and learning from her and the Quakers about the questions and practices at the heart of their worship. I attended a version of this retreat last year at the Summer Solstice and felt changed and enriched by it.
Here is a flier for the event with Nick’s contact information in case you’d like to attend. The pdf may be a bit slow to load but you could consider it a practice-run for “waiting on the light”!
I’ve been a bit shy about youtube – well, about appearing on it anyway. I LOVE the chance to see and hear some of my favorite musicians and authors, and I love the big zany grab-bag of everything posted there. But until very recently I haven’t felt sparked to capture myself on film and share my image with the world.
What changed?
I took part in two events which matter very much to me.
The first was a clinic on creativity and songwriting my dear friend Lauren Passarelli and I held at Berklee College of Music on February 23. Lauren is a professor of guitar at Berklee, and she is passionately interested in the creative process and in sharing what she has learned from a rich career of making songs and performing music. One of her students – a brilliant young songwriter – filmed our discussion and performance, and I’m including the links here in case you’d like to see it:
The second event took place at Club Passim this past Monday – a tribute to Seamus Connolly and Gaelic Roots, sponsored by the Boston Celtic Music Festival. I was deeply honored to be invited to take part in this wonderful occasion because as I’ve written here before, I ADORE Seamus Connolly, and performing with the likes of Laurel Martin (fiddle), Brendan Bulger (fiddle), Mark Simos (guitar), Aoife Clancy (songs & bodhran), and Jimmy Noonan (flute) is pretty much my idea of heaven on earth. Sean Smith who organized the event took some film footage of two of the big group tunes and posted these on youtube:
If you know me, do not look for my familiar face. You will catch a glimpse of me instead in my white hands in the dark, merrily vamping along with the fiddles and flute and bodhran.
Will I do more with this medium? I think so. At the very least, I am so grateful to have the “souvenir” of youtube footage from both of these joyful occasions. And as long as I don’t have to operate the camera myself and if I can be spared the worst of seeing myself in the contortions of extreme emotion that sometimes happen when I sing and play, I am game. And someday, oh someday, how I would love to make a little film – a video – to accompany some of the poem-songs I’m making these days. Just imagine the images that might float along next to “Recuerdo” or “The Fire of Driftwood” or – oh! – “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”
So a little stretching with new technology is all for the best because it leads me to delicious new dreams.
What do you do when you feel desperate, sad, beaten, worried, tired, worthless, or uninspired?
Perhaps these emotions simply do not occupy any place in your life. Well, they do in mine, so I’ve given this question a bit of thought. If bringing a map on a long journey makes sense, then it seems equally smart to plan ahead for other journeys – inner journeys that also offer the chance to get lost, to spin off on confusing detours, to suffer a puncture, and to run out of fuel. Happily, these journeys also offer chances to witness wonders, serendipity, and even miracles. But usually before the light breaks through the clouds and the voice sings ethereally from heaven, there is darkness.
So for the dark journey I carry this map to what brings a little relief:
That’s it, really. There are lots of things which in themselves make me feel happy – Zentangles, painting, making envelopes, baking, dancing, going on an adventure – but when I’m in the darkest blue place, I’m unlikely to be able to do them. All I can do then is put on my shoes with great deliberation, move very slowly to the door, and know that once I’ve reached the lake, I’ll remember a thousand reasons for living.
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