and what if we, like the sweet autumn clematis, were each merely one featherduster, one long, wispy tendril birthed from a maroon-brown pod joined with other maroon-brown pods on a single branch of a single vine.
what is it we would do with our wispiness, our soft fluffy plumes, tiny jet engines to propel us near and far? what seeds would we disperse, what knowledge would we dispense, what silvery sheen would we spread?
what would we choose to do with our one, wild featherduster life, our one journey through air, aided by wind, abetted by the twirling of our feathertail? where would we go, what jet stream would we join? what earth song would we sing? what would we touch – ever so lightly – brushing past, barely felt, a tickle of plume?
what if that were all we had? would we join with all the other featherdusters, an intertwined community seeding community? or would we spend our time engaged in disjointed competitive infighting with the others? would we choose a path on which we might twirl through together or would we choose to shoot off, like that one plane in a memorial fly-by, forging a new trail in air, bushwhacking through underbrush? what would our desire path be?
what if that had been our passage in this place? what if our featherduster existence had been it? would we have been all in? would we have given our best? would we have embraced seeding more clematis – like seeding more shimmery goodness? or would we have held back, continually waiting for something glorious to happen, for better weather, or for whatever later might be?
it’s the last two. the very last two jalapeño peppers. today or tomorrow we’ll make ann’s jalapeño poppers recipe and celebrate the crazy-abundant harvest of these two relatively small plants. their season is clearly over; there are no tiny flowers left, there are no miniature peppers. these plants are done producing. but, in a new discovery, i have found that we can overwinter these perennials (more easily sustained in warm climes) – if we bring them indoors before the first frost we can give them a headstart for next year.
last year we only had one plant. its harvest is what convinced us to have two this year. maybe next year it’ll be three. in these last years, we have discovered the equation of this garden – what we get out of this garden is a direct result of what we put into it. it – and the experience of it – remain part of us, for we have paid attention to it.
like artistry – if you follow the imperative – being true to who you are – and who you’ve been and who you are becoming – and not beholden to societal expectations or fiscal returns – its produce potential is crazy-abundant. amorphous, ethereal, it will shape and re-shape, build and break down, condense and stretch – you are feeding it always. in the quiet and in the noisy, in season and out-of-season, overwintering. it’s all fluid, continuous.
i wonder when i will compose again. sometimes i can feel it building – the tension of the imperative. on those days i walk into my studio and touch my piano. it’s just a gesture, an acknowledgement. but it counts. it connects me back and forward, both. it is perennial.
and i can see – they are one and the same – these jalapeños and my music.
“not even the tiniest perennial grows only to die. it comes back again and again when the season and the time is right.” (kate mcgahan)
“live as if you were to die tomorrow. learn as if you were to live forever.” (mahatma gandhi)
the last time they were here, we made them promise that they would keep nudging us. we urged them, “don’t let us get lackadaisical!! just keep pushing us to learn new stuff, try new things.” they laughed and promised, but i hope they know how much we mean it.
it is too easy to become sedentary about learning, to be aloof to new technology (or, worse yet, to be rigidly opposed to it). it is too easy to be mired in the-way-it-used-to-be-done or to be too lazy, overwhelmed, or afraid to take on new challenges and attempt things that are hard to grok, things that are difficult to wrap our somewhat-older brains around. and so, we are placing the onus of responsibility on our kids (though our daughter doesn’t yet know this) to make sure we keep growing, to encourage us and, mostly, to help us as we try to keep learning. we don’t have too much of a problem at this point – we love to learn new things, even if we have to wrangle with complexity or confusion.
anyway, we are committed. and we hope they will help.
it is in that very spirit of things that we have signed up for classes or taken on new software or attempted new gardens. It is in that very spirit that we have books about writing poetry or youtube how-to-fix-stuff or google new recipes and the best way to store fresh herbs or stream our son’s EDM music.
so when we walked outside and found a few gorgeous sunflowers growing next to our old garage – in the spot where we have unintentional composting – we got excited. the birds frequenting the birdfeeder several feet away clearly planted these beauties and their very tall successes got us dreaming a bit.
“wouldn’t it be just perfect to have sunflowers growing all along that garage wall in between the garage and the fence?” we pondered. it got us to thinking and googling and a little bit of research.
and there is nothing like a deep dive into sunflowers – or sweet potatoes or wellness or newly-found poets and recording artists or emissions or old appliances or yep-roofing fixes and options or hiking boots or thru-trails or history or fact-checking or antiques – to take your mind off the obvious.
albert einstein said, “once you stop learning, you start dying.”
henry ford’s “anyone who keeps learning stays young” resonates with me as well.
we saw it on the wall: “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (mary oliver, of course)
and nature hung chandeliers all over the woods. shooting star chandeliers in celebration of warm spring days – tucked next to majestic oaks, stars flying across the meadow. but not for long. as summer heats up these will fade. everything has its time.
aging is a funny thing. but it is not in the way of the enchanting shooting star – for those will come back the next spring, ever-resilient, perennial.
instead, aging is a bit more like an annual. periods of growth followed by fallow. uncertainty. we struggle with what is ours to do – we struggle with how that changes – we recognize endings and, thankfully, beginnings. but our time as chandeliers is not limitless. and, as we process that, we are less devoted to the zealous striding of our younger selves and more to the mission of the expression of ourselves.
i have thousands of cds in the basement. all cds with my name on them, ready to be shipped. smack-dab in the heyday of my career-with-a-much-delayed-start, writeable cds became a thing and streaming became rampant. it changed everything. dramatically. suddenly, the tens and tens of thousands of cds i was selling – which merited the thousands in waiting stock – dropped in numbers. streaming and download reports showed hundreds of thousands of hits but merely tiny slices of a penny for each one. it is stunningly gut-wrenching to look back at the shooting stars as they burned out.
people ask me if i am still “doing music” when they see me. because it is who i am i always say yes. and then i think about the boxes of cd stock in the basement and any latent desire to record more. it is hard to justify. very.
but the call of a piano and a boom mic on a stage or in a studio is ever-present. they are part of my chandeliering. and – like wishes on a shooting star – i wonder if one day pale purple flowers might bloom out of the fallow and i might give myself to the astonishing and to the illusion of the standstill of time.
“you are a child of the universe. no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here.” (desiderata)
i don’t suppose i ever really fit in. i was the youngest in my family – separated by a decade – while most of my friends had siblings their own age. i grew up in a neighborhood where the kids were somehow athletically gifted, while i took organ and piano lessons and sat in my tree writing poetry. an early entrepreneur, i pulled a wagon around our neighborhood selling baby cactus cuttings and candles i had made. i didn’t go to – or get invited to – wild parties or cut class or skip my homework. i took bike-hikes and walked on the beach in the winter while everyone was at the mall or the bowling alley or the movies. i didn’t listen to the stones or grateful dead or led zeppelin (with the exception, of course, of stairway to heaven – everyone’s prom theme). i listened to john denver and gordon lightfoot and the carpenters. i wore off-brand clothing and didn’t keep up with fashion trends. my momma bought me less expensive boy-pants and found the offbeat stores for shoes-that-look-like-trendy-shoes-but-are-not, like my cherished construction boots. my first car was my dad’s vw beetle, nothing fancy but beloved. i had numerous part-time jobs through high school and then in college and knew the joy of serving corn flakes to both me and my dog missi for dinner. i never thought of myself as weird. but i suppose – if one considers the definition “may have unusual habits, interests or ways of thinking that set them apart” it could be true. i don’t see that as negative, though i also suppose that – depending on the way you see yourself fitting into the world – one might consider it such.
so the sticker “stay weird” hung upside down and backwards made me laugh aloud. somehow my laughter summoned mary oliver and she and i enjoyed a good chuckle about the infinite extraordinary of the insignificant and the everyday, the value of seeing the usual through a filter of unusual.
weird took a very long hiatus – it was safer, less vulnerable, and kept me out of trauma i had shelved. i pursued the inevitability of having to make money, to help support a household in a more meaningful way than the way of an artist. for this society – though its love for the arts is profound, its support of the arts is less so.
it was after my children were born, after the imperative was too loud to ignore, after the perils shushed a bit – when it was time to start releasing music. writing, practicing, recording, performing, marketing, booking, hawking – none of this is necessarily standard-work fare – it is unusual, it is tenuous, it requires a bit of courage. it doesn’t have the same parameters as a workday in corporate or structured america. it has no guarantees of reward, no regular paycheck. it is steeped in personal challenges, the need to be scrappy and the sisu to put it out there.
in the time that was the heyday of my recording career i would call absolutely anyone, regardless of their position. as the owner/artist of my label i have talked directly to vice presidents of sales of barnes and noble and borders books and music, owners of publishing houses, the personal managers of ridiculously successful recording/performing artists. i’ve sat in j. peterman’s messy office chatting (of the j.peterman catalog and seinfeld fame) and in the spare chair of radio program directors. i’ve danced across the stage at qvc-tv under a disco ball and played songs live over phone conferences with oncological pharma higher-ups. i’ve stood in the rain on flatbeds playing, embraced boom mics over my piano on theatre stages of all sizes, sang in front of 35000 people in support of cancer survivorship in central park. pushing the boundaries, carrying a little chutzpah along with belief in my own artistry was everyday life – and necessary. and i’d remind myself each time i picked up the phone or stepped into the unknown the very fact that we all breathe in and out the same way. this thing we have in common, i would tell myself – breathing. surely i could connect on that most basic of levels.
as outside the conventional box as it all seems, i didn’t feel weird. i felt in my skin.
and so, apparently, the weird continues. we know we are different than others. we have a certain run-and-jump into vulnerability that others do not. we have a certain pull towards creating, experimenting, learning – all in the public eye. we share because we have to, not because anyone has to receive it.
so, yes, the “stay weird” sticker really spoke to me.
though my life – and our life – is quite a bit different than the traditional lives or retirements of lovely people we know and care about, it is somehow just right for us. i never forget the corn flakes and he never forgets the sleeping bag in his studio space. every everything counts and we are reflexively careful about not being frivolous. for us, weird has granted us a certain appreciation of the littlest things, honoring simplicity and leftover pasta, redundant black thermal shirts and a shared bin of socks, used notebooks and repurposing taken to a new level.
what one does with one’s “wild and precious life”*…
they unfurled from their tiny seahorse stage into real-live ferns in what seemed like moments. all of a sudden, there they were – a whole corner garden of ferns. so incredibly green. lush.
but – even in their zealous and prolific growth – they are fragile. their fronds fall victim to the wind or the dogga’s curiosity, and they are knocked over, with – seemingly – no chance of revival. it seems – perhaps – safer to be in the middle of the bunch of ferns in the garden, rather than on the outskirts.
and i find myself nodding my head, as any artist might nod her head. yes. indeed. safer to be in the middle than on the outskirts, than life as an outlier.
when i finally felt safe enough – when the imperative was too much to ignore any longer – for me to pursue my own artistry – to leave the middle – i knew it was a different route. it would not be the interstate to success. instead, it would be a challenge to stay upright – to keep reaching – when the perils of the outskirts were plentiful.
i knew i should have kept on the road earlier, but there were things that precluded me – that hushed me – and i largely put aside that desperate voice inside of me begging to come back out – the one i had quashed so many years – decades – prior.
but the tiny seahorse fern in me didn’t give up. it kept nagging me until it was finally ok to face the perils.
and i began to write – with the fervency of the ferns in our back garden. my piano was never silent. i kept unfurling, reaching to the sun – an artist coming out of fallow.
and there was music. and more music. the compositions, the songs, the albums populated the garden rapidly – there was much time for which to make up. stages and boom mics and product boxes were the accoutrements of my life. and i could only imagine – and still wonder – what might have happened had it all started earlier, had i fronded in earlier life.
it remains a mystery.
even now – in which the unsuspected and life have mown down some of the outer fronds – there is a core, a center of gravity that holds the fern-muse.
though fragile on the exterior, we are never really broken to the core. there is still time – there is healing, there is a new spring.
i have always been drawn to notebooks. composition books, spiral notebooks, journals, graph paper pads, legal pads, pa-pads – really, i guess, any kind of bound group of paper. blank paper.
it all represents a beginning. “begin anywhere,” john cage urges on a piece in my studio.
but sometimes there is a paralysis. sometimes there is something – some quirk – that stops me from starting – it stops me from putting pencil or pen to the first page. i feel this very big responsibility to the new blank paper. sometimes it feels like what i might write, compose, jot down may not be worthy of the first pristine sheet in a new paper vessel that could – ultimately – contain hundreds of writings, compositions, jottings. i haven’t yet gotten over that.
and so i dig out old spirals that my children used in elementary school – with wide rule lines – or high school – with college rule lines. their names are on the front and i can – delightedly – still find scribblings inside the notebooks. lab results or math problems, vocabulary words or drawings or paragraphs of tiny stories they were creating – it’s all thready for me and so this stack of old spirals and folders speak to my heart – in so many ways. i can easily write in these.
but there are those really delicious new books, new pads, new journals. and i glance at them, wondering when i might think that anything i might pencil in them would be worthy of their newness.
just staring at the beach was zen-full. it was quiet. almost pristine.
the beach had been combed – stunning horizontal lines – raked, perfectly clean but for a few sets of footprints walking – along the horizontal and taking the hypotenuse to the water.
the orderliness was just a tiny bit interrupted. and the orderliness was waiting for more disorderly. the disorderly would mean people – walking and running, children playing and building castles in the sand, seagulls clamming, dogs digging, sand flying.
even as i write this, i think about pulling out one of the brand new notebooks. taking my ever-present mechanical pencil to the first page (or maybe the second – to leave the first page clean and blank).
it makes me think that maybe the disorderly – the walking, running, building, digging, sand-flying – might actually be the real joy.
it makes me think i just might walk the hypotenuse across the college-ruled page. and wreak a little havoc on some clean paper.
“sometimes it can feel like you’re never doing enough. but to touch the life of even just one animal or one person can help heal the world.” (hellen rescue centre)
the golden rule is a relatively simple concept. basic moral compass stuff. “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” universal. ethical. compassionate. conscious.
it would seem that we each – in this world – would feel an imperative to strive for the best we can do, with these words as a north star. it would seem that we would wish to lead with goodness.
and we are surrounded by real people who do just that. people who reach to others, sharing abundance with those in need, caring for those in despair, giving a hand to those who feel forgotten. we have been the recipients of this sort of care and we are grateful – not only for the aid of wisdom or resources we have received, but for the reminder of what it means to be human in a world of humans.
in turn, we try – best as we can – to be helpers. to lift spirits and, as we can, to lift the circumstances of people who have been less fortunate. we try to live thinking about others, treating others, as we would want them thinking about or treating us.
as artists we are entrusted with the creating of work that might somehow touch the world – change it – if even only the tiniest morsel of a bit. we write many words a day, never knowing if anyone will read these words, never knowing if any of the words make any kind of difference. we do it anyway. we paint, we compose, we take photographs. we just never know where any of it – all of it – might reach. and every now and then – out of the blue – someone we do not know, someone we will likely never meet will let us know that something has touched them, something has moved them, something has made them think or question or linger. and we know that the concentric circle has widened, the ripple has rippled. even a little bit.
as humans we are entrusted with short lives of being humane. we have every opportunity to show care and concern, to reach across differences, to offer kindness and love to others – people or animals. every single time we do even one small act we know that it impacts the world, that there are cells out there vibrating with the frequency of grace.
our presence in and with life – life itself – grants us the ability to appreciate it, to live into living. we know that – in the very end – all will fall away. and what will be left are the heart impressions we have made on others and they on us.
even if we have touched one person or one animal – in our tiny time here – we have healed a morsel of hurt in the world.
it doesn’t seem like that hard of a concept. it doesn’t seem that hard of a job.
in the end of ends, isn’t it the only thing that matters?
reverse threading 