Bliss and Drumming

And just like that, everything stops.

I come out here to the window seat with my tea and the pug, and crack the window to let out a fly that’s buzzing around. Birdsong enters the little room from the mockingbird I was aware of during my meditation this morning, as well as from seagulls and crows, and small fits of what I guess are warblers and sparrows. The city is quiet now with the shutdown, and it feels so strange to be able to pinpoint the sound of the ferry motor in the distance, heading to Sausalito over the glassy Bay.

In a way, I feel as though I’ve been planning for this my whole life. I flash back to all those hours during all the various day jobs, wishing for time to just be, fantasizing about time spent doing those things I most love to do, with no where to go and no demands. All those fleeting ideas of creative projects put off, all those things I wanted to investigate and learn and create. Here I am now, and the weight of possibility is so heavy it takes me a few days to get used to it. Continue reading “Sheltering in Place”

Finally, the fog has come back in. As I sit in my morning meditation the call and response of the near and distant foghorns are like cosmic singing bowls. For a while I indulge in a little movie that pops into my meditative state, of enormous foggy elephants in tutus dancing in the middle of the Bay, Alcatraz as their footstone and the Golden Gate a sweet hurdle. My imagination was honed by Disney, apparently, and I guess this will always be with me.

My first blog post in a month. Why haven’t I been writing? I mean to, and every day I think of it, every night I make a plan that the next day I will carve out some time, but I guess what happens is everything else. I’m so admiring of the folks who can be steady in their work, even and consistent. Even and consistent has never been my strength. I seem to work in bursts. I go to where the fire is, and I guess I’ve had a lot of other fires taking priority. I’m happy to come back to this blog, that I love to tend.

Continue reading “The Right Foot and Other Openings”

While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.
― Willa Cather, My Antonia

Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
― Willa Cather

Tonight, The Drover, Omaha.

There are some things special to this town: the cobblestone streets of the Old Market, the inspired music scene, the range of funny old bars. The old steakhouses are another. Which is saying a lot, since I have been a vegetarian for most of my life.

Continue reading “Meeting Barbara Stanwyck, The Drover, Omaha”

This Thanksgiving holiday was a quiet one, delightfully quiet. Snuggles with the pug, delicious food, and mild flu-like symptoms that gave me a good excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway, which was to lay on the couch and watch movies and read and doze. The rain was a gift.

I needed to do something “productive” so I decided to go through old music I’ve recorded and update my YouTube channel. Talk about going down a rabbit hole. 11 years ago I started writing songs. I had a day job in a law firm and when I had a weekend off from the band, I would head to my studio on Friday night and just camp out there for the weekend. The door would close and I was in Playland, with instruments and the computer and drums and my voice and all my little black books of scribbled lyrics. Continue reading “Our Default is Joy”

Home from a 10-show tour to Denver and the Pacific Northwest. My bandmate and I flew in and out of Colorado in 24 hours and then starting driving North from San Francisco. This is a relatively new project, just the two of us, so we took it on the road to break it in.

I was not playing drums, but triggering electronic tracks and singing. I’ve written before here that singing has been a long process for me. The technique of singing is like that of any instrument: it can take a lifetime to develop. Then, letting go of technique and of self-consciousness, doing the internal work to really own the performance, this has been the biggest hurdle to being a decent front-person. Playing drums, I have had stage fright exactly once, at my first show. Singing, I have overcome a ridiculous amount of terror, shaking violently on stage and sort of blacking out during performances. Continue reading “Stepping Out of a Box, Singing”

I’m back in San Francisco for a little while, sitting in the window seat and reveling in the morning. A big cruise ship rests at Pier 27 and I put myself in a state room for a moment, gazing through a porthole at the pastel hills of San Francisco and I can feel how I would long to live in such a lovely landscape. Outside this window, hummingbirds are doing that funny thing, hovering, lifting out of view, then dropping like little green daredevils into the fig tree below.

I have been spending so much time in the Midwest, helping family members, that people have started asking why I don’t move there. My ring of friends there is wider than in San Francisco, and the city of Omaha is finally booming, with art galleries and concerts and restaurants flourishing. The standard of living is gentler there, and even the location is more conducive to touring bands. Continue reading “An Ode to Cali”

Dear Humans,

First off I will say, so there’s no misunderstanding, I love you.

This is not love that needs something from you, or is some sort of burden or expectation you need to carry around with you. I love you with our common heart. Common molecules, common history, common planet, common energy. We are One. I know this is not a popular belief these days with so much side-choosing, but it’s a fact. My love for you is the same energy that lies underneath the love I have for my self and for my family and my pets and my place of manifestation. Love, at the core of myself, this energy shared with you. Continue reading “Dear Humans”

Out the window, morning. There were thunderstorms last night and now the sky is gray and dense, monochrome against the rolling ridges of tree. I imagine it will be another thick day. Someone must have turned the air conditioner down because the pug is stretched out in the center of the bed instead of pressed up against me as usual. I can actually stretch out a little instead of being pinned at the edge of the bed by 25 pounds of dog. Pinned by pug.

I’ll miss this house. I’m here to help a family member move out. I’ve been coming here for 18 years, to this big house on a hill overlooking the little old town of Elkhorn. The town is adjacent to the original trans-American highway, a bumpy brick deal of which about a mile is still intact. It runs along the train tracks and the sound of the train is a frequent gorgeous and wistful reminder of long-lost days. There are wooden buildings along the tracks that I love, whitewashed, leaning, and oddly shaped from when there were horses, not cars. Continue reading “Notes from Elkhorn, Nebraska”

Life has been interesting lately. I find myself very aware of the rollercoaster of the mind: the freak-outs when things don’t go exactly as I planned, the sometimes feeling that things are stagnant and the worry that gets created with that, and the absolutely peaceful moments in which I truly feel as if I am just putting one foot in front of the other. I feel I am forever taking a breath and falling into that true self place, that heart energy, that vibratory field of consciousness. Then, watching as the small self scrambles to get out of there like she’ll die without the tension she’s always known.

Small self, true self. I write frequently about these concepts. The small self I mean to be the self that interacts with form. The ego, the history, the personality, emotions, thoughts. The true self, I mean to be the unchanging field of consciousness or awareness that seems to be watching the small self interact. Continue reading “Awakening: The Cosmic Joke”

There is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation in which you remember a time you were wrongly accused. You bring up this feeling, and in doing so, you identify what is called the False Self, the egoic sense of self.

“How dare they.” With just that thought, it’s easy to feel this false self very strongly. How dare they think the worst of me; how dare they misunderstand, mistrust. How dare they hurt me? Me??

Once you dial in that feeling, then it becomes easy to question this false self. Who is this Me? What does it feel like to feel injured? What am I attached to that has built this solid sense of self so solidly? Who is it who is injured? What if I let that part that can be injured go? And most interesting: what is there that can never be injured? Continue reading “Viva La Revolucion”