Autumn into winter...

...and I'm turning inward, where the light lives during this season.

For now that means retreating from this outer space for awhile.

Yes, even the duologues will be on hold as I adjust to the new Boston Band Crush gig.  Keep an eye out for my show crushes there and my (NEW!) lyrics crush column in the new year.

You can find me abusing Facebook day or night, of course, with plenty of This Blue Heaven and other news in a steady stream.  Maybe one of these days I'll even get a handle on this tweeting business.

Mom, don't worry, I'll call you.

Peace,
MacK

::Wordless Monday::

Wednesday Duologues: Beth Holub

Man... I'm such a slacker!  I totally spaced on the duologue this week and had to ask for volunteers on my Facebook page this morning!  lucky for me, Beth came through!  It was such a pleasure getting to know her better.... 

me:  hey! you're a lifesaver - again!

and actually this is perfect, since i interviewed all the other ladies who took part in our little leonard cohen escapade...

Beth: cool

me: here's the first duologue i did, with explanation: http://thisbluesinger.blogspot.com/2010/08/wednesday-duologues-brendan-boogie.html

so you can read it and opt out if you like :)

Beth: let me grab my breakfast really quick

okay

me: breakfast is key.

Beth: Hey. sorry my internet has been acting up

Blog sounds cool

me: no worries. got breakfast?

Beth: yup

me: good. i have coffee, so i think we're all set.

so usually i start with the question, "who are you?" but lately i've been thinking the chats are so abstract - we don't really have any picture of the chatters. we could be typing naked on a ferris wheel, for all anyone knows. (which would be awesome.) so i think i'm going to start out by asking: what's one object in your immediate environment?

Beth: Humm, I am surrounded by a ton of worldly stuff...I hat three hats from Mongolia I got as a Christmas present from my former boss.

me: wow! my boss always just gives me a desk calendar...

2010 is cats.

so not as cool.

Beth: that's a good way to have cats...as a picture so they can't sit ON the stuff you are trying to work on, or wine at your door for hours on end.

me: so true. i have one of those at home. major whiner. do you have cats?

Beth: no, no pets. I live vicariously through other people and their owning of pets

me: smart woman.

okay so - who are you? :)

Beth: Classical musician who started playing viola with rock bands when she was 15, ex-pat from Arizona, Arts Administrator

me: nice! what was your first rock band gig?

Friday. buh.

This is all I got today.

Maybe I'll write over the weekend?  Maybe I'll take a crack at this?

Summer into Autumn

What do school children reap at harvest time?  Summer's end, back to school.  The last letters you don't mean to be the last are addressed to camp friends, stamped and stuck in the mailbox.  The red flag raised, the apples dangling in the trees, the lunch bag packed.  The ruler.  The Elmer's glue.  The nametags on the desks clean, not yet doodled on or peeling off.  Remember the creak of opening your desk?  Remember placing everything just so?  Remember the girls who had more crayons, the right kind of jeans?  Remember the ones who coveted your headband, your panda bear eraser?  Did you smile at the new kid?  Did you glare at the mean kid?  Was your best friend in the wrong class?  Was the boy with cancer back yet?  Did you know you loved the scent of pencil sharpener shavings and the grinding sound of the crank?  Were you aware of the keen rush of relief at recess time?  Were you smack in the middle of the red foursquare ball, the pinching chains of the swings, the freshly painted yellow lines?  Did you stop at lunchtime to be thankful for the peanut butter sandwich in its ziplock bag?  Were you happy or humiliated when you found the heart your mother drew on your napkin?  When did you start counting the days till Friday?  When did you start staring down the clock?  What did you look forward to?  What were you ashamed of?  What instructions did you miss?  On the hot walk home, your new shirt dampens under your crisp backpack bearing rustling forms, notes to parents.  Maybe you're lucky and get picked up and driven to the Dairy Queen for a special dipped cone.  Maybe the city pool is still open for one more week.  Maybe you go down alone to the cool basement with a juice box and plop down in front of Full House.  Maybe you envy your young siblings too little for school yet.  Maybe you wish you had siblings.  Maybe dinner was served on the porch, grilled.  Did you tell your parents about your day?  Did you like your new teacher?  Were you put in the advanced reading group?  Did you remember eight times four?  Did the new gym teacher seem nicer than the old one?  What would you wear tomorrow?  Did you lay out your clothes?  Did you brush your teeth?  Did you pray for something? Was it the thing you really wanted?  When did you start wishing to be a grown up?  When did you stop?  Was there a line you stepped over?  A bell that rang?  Did the wind even rustle the leaves?

When I am an old woman, I shall have accumulated an entire closet of purple sparkly stuff

I often (very terribly often) lament (whine) that I don't enough have time to do normal grown-up things.  Go to movies, cook dinner, match socks, refinish my desk.  These things stay on the "I wanna" post-it list stuck up on the side of my brain, flitting around in the wind of all the things I really frantically have to remember to do.

Y'know like:  Obtain illegal wheely fireworks for CD artwork and set them off late at night in my back yard.

Or like:  Put my hair in curlers in my office bathroom after work hours and apply make-up for both myself and the boys & then break into another MIT building for a photo shoot with Boston's most amazing talented photographer, Kelly Davidson.

Or:  Attend a (sweetly air conditioned) band listening party of TONIGHT's episode of Same Sky Radio (<--- podcasts there; also live on bunkradio.com 8-10pm) to hear our music alongside some of the country's best unsigned rock.

Or:  Invite everyone to our show with The Wandas on the Cape this Friday and down to the South Shore beach house that night and then on to the beach the next day - to set off more illegal wheely fireworks.

Or:  Make a Facebook event for the seasonal Women Rock Brunch my awesome gracious friends (who cook more than I do) have agreed to join me in launching next month.

Or:  Confirm that my best friend in Austin is indeed gonna be coming up to sing and play guitar on a bill with me at the Armory Cafe July 14th.

Or:  Invite everyone I know to dance in our Slow Dance Slow video on July 24th (ummm and confirm that date with our brilliant visionary director, Chris Gaines).

Or:  Write to the five stellar kickass bands who are playing with us for our CD release show at the Middle East Upstairs on August 7th to plan a collaboration cover for the end of the night.

Ahem.


So as I dragged my tired bones out of bed after a late-night post-shoot band family dinner of pizza with beer in frosted glasses, as I dug through my drawer of unmatched socks for two that kinda sorta go together, I had one of those too rare moments when I stopped moaning and groaning and thought about the fact that when I look back at this time in my life, it is going to be punctuated with spinny shiny colorful fun.  I will not be an old woman who wishes she'd lived life more fully.

So that's pretty rad.

(But also, if anyone has experience refinishing antiques, lemme know - I WILL get to the desk project.)

To see and by seeing create majesty

I admit it.  I talk to trees.  Don't knock it - today's a great day to try it.

There's a perfect wind for the amplification of treespeak.

Happy lovely day.

Emerging: Soul

I'll push myself up through the dirt

and shake my petals free

I'm resolved to being born

and so, resigned to bravery

lyrics from Spring Street by Dar Williams (again... I know... I can't help it)
art/touch drawings by Deborah Koff-Chapin

Emerging: Thoughts of Persephone

Well friends, I have to apologize that my keynote Kentucky poet has been delayed!  Hence the crickets and stillness 'round here since that Friday.  Also, I got a crappish cold that took me away from all kinds of fun things.  So it goes.  We're limited, bodily creatures.  Anyway, the good news is that one day when you least expect it, a formidable Kentucky poet WILL be gracing this blog in beauty & provocation.

In the meantime, April is here!  my Starbucks drought is over (joy of joys, they've made me up a whole new kind of iced mocha!) and in celebration of spring, this week I would like to devote my little electronic corner of the webworld to the theme of emerging.

Today I'm thinking about Persephone emerging from the underworld.

Many times, in winter,

I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,

how can I endure the earth?

And he would say,

in a short time you will be here again.

And in the time between

you will forget everything:

those fields of ice will be

the meadows of Elysium.

Excerpted from "Persephone the Wanderer" (the second one) from Louise Gluck's amazing book, Averno.

Warmth has returned to New England.  Ice has melted and green and petaled things are pushing up and outward. I am rubbing my eyes to see in the glare of new light.  I've had cleaning frenzies to banish the dust.  And I'm trying to make out who I am now after that cold journey inward.  I'm trying to see what this revived earth means.

This morning I passed the towering line of seven trees that I call The Sisters in the secrecy of my own head.  They finally have green things springing from their branches.  I smiled up to welcome them back (a man I passed looked at me strangely).  I was struck by their indifference in return (go ahead, you can laugh, too).  The trees had endured the winter, but not in the way that we do - with a sense of relief when spring finally, finally returns.  More like maybe they are simply, stoically willing to forgo attachments in exchange for renewal each year, in exchange for the ability to cheat death, perhaps indefinitely.

Gluck's poems insist that nature lies to us; the dead stay dead.  Maybe unlike trees, our lot in this short life is attachment - to lovers and mothers, as with Persephone.  Maybe that's why these seasons take such a toll on us, forcing us to grieve and revise and wisen.

I had a long elaborate dream this winter, in which a young woman who had been banished to the bottom of the sea was called to re-emerge.  She was dressed in blue and green and purple batiks, as were her attendants, who formed receiving lines on either side of her and took her hands to steady her climb up out of the sea.  She had been banished by a white-haired villain; in the end, she had to fight him.  She was joined by everyone who had ever been pulled under by some darkness or other, which turned out to be everyone in the (dream)world.

Yesterday I clambered over some warm rocks on the North Shore and sat and listened to the rhythm of the ocean.  So like breath.  Such an enormous sign of our tiny spot in the universe's ballroom, our spinny dance between sun and moon that curves our psyches and our stories to its tune.

Speaking of which, did you see the new Alice in Wonderland yet?  In this one, Alice climbs back up out of the rabbit hole, pulling herself out with dirty elbows.  She has defeated Fear, her hair is wild and her muchness is restored.  And then she (quite anachronistically) refuses a stinky marriage proposal and trots off to become a trailblazing, world-traveling businesswoman.

I wonder what year it'll be when the story changes and the maiden emerges to choose a life and a lover, both of which encourage and enrich her deepest self?

I raise my iced dark cherry mocha to that day.

First blossoms

did we lose faith under all that snow?

death:  the unseen.

spring:  the unveiling of shapes that were forming all along.

winter:  a factory of renewal.

are you looking for heaven?

are you letting your heart melt, too?

(will you be at Church of Boston tonight at 8pm to celebrate with us?)

A hint about next week's blog theme!

Here's another poem for you!  Brand new, and a two-fold hint at what I've got up my sleeve for next week!

Till then, Happy Friday, friends!


Spring in Kentucky

I remember thinking that every shade of green 

had gathered at once - leaves on the dogwoods, 

stems on the lace growing wild in the ditch.  

I learned to harmonize on Russel Cave Road, 

clutching the passenger door round tight curves.

Singing gave the driver respite from shouting and 

I could hide inside the songs and watch 

the smear of hills and tobacco barns pass.

I often wished for escape on the white horse 

who faithfully waited alone by her fence.

Or to become the one creature on earth 

who could silence my belting companion:  

to slither away on a scaly green belly, safe

in the camouflage of endless bluegrass.

Spring on the branches of dream trees

Last night I dreamed of cherry blossoms appearing out of the darkness, and magnolias.

And I dreamed I had a baby and she was three by the time I noticed her standing there in the hospital room.  Somehow a hundred pencils spilled across the linoleum and so I taught her to catch rolling pencils.  How to put them away into the right cases.  We felt accomplished when it was done.

I used to have a pencil case I made from a chocolate box.  Godiva.  In the dream I had three.

There was a magnolia tree next to the house of my early childhood.  Inexplicably, at the end of spring, my sister and I once gathered the fallen petals from under that tree and wrapped them around rocks we found on the ground.  It seemed important.  To give those cold stones some soft protection.

There are cherry trees in Arnold Arboretum.  I used to pass them every day on my way to the train.  I could never stay on the sidewalk when I came to them.  I had to be under the branches, to step inside the world of all those blooms.  I was always late for work.  I don't think there are any cherry trees in my neighborhood now, but I do think I'll plant a garden.

What is it about dreams that tugs at me?  It is more than the message intended from my unconscious, it's the medium itself.  The images.  More real, somehow, than all the sensible hard things all around me.  Easier to engage.

If I am childlike (as I have been told), it is for this.  The better to enter into dreams.

When I woke up, I was dying for an iced cherry mocha (as I'm told Starbucks now has).  I guess after the dream, I decided spring had officially arrived and lent must be over.  I'm staying strong, though.  Office coffee it is.

March is on

Well, my mother was worried about me, so I'm back with the good news.

Spring has come!  It's light when I leave the office, birds (other than my neighbor's roosters) are singing me awake, allergies have kicked in, and new plans are in the works.

It seems the upshot of giving up your optimism is that you can clearly see the problem areas and begin to own them.  The upshot of giving up your forbearance is that urgency and yes-saying give you the motivation to do what must be done to make changes.  (What "this blue heaven" is all about, really - in spite of "optimistic" as a too-common descriptor of our music.)

Seasonal cycles, like so many other natural cycles, give us that:  growth, decline, death and renewal.  I'm beginning to trust that each is necessary, each has its own offering, and each will always make way for the next.  February's gift is to wipe clean your slate (even if it feels like you're being knocked off your feet).  March's gift is a clean slate to start drawing up new plans!

And so I am.

And you'll see the results, I have no doubt.

Lost to February

Oh, February.  You are a formidable foe.  You bring daylight back one excruciating minute at a time and while I know I should be grateful, I can feel in my bones that you are here to finish me off.  Or, if not me, the parts of me that winter set its sights on this year.

Two leaves clung, impossibly, to the tops of my branches all season long.  All through November, when the rest turned blazing colors and sparked triumphantly into the wind like fireworks.  Through December, when the snow came, a frozen blanket urging them to fall to the sleeping ground.  Through January, when harsh gales bright with shards of ice tore at their edges and bore holes around their spines.  Still, two leaves clung on for dear life:  forbearance and optimism.

Farewell banana chocolate smoothie with 2 espresso shots...

I've decided to give up Starbucks for lent.

No, I am not Catholic.  And I've never observed it before.  But there is something about a practice built so firmly into the changing of the seasons that really appeals to me.  I hope I won't offend anyone by borrowing lent.  (I'm going to meditate more, too!)

I've kind of had it with winter, in spite of my very best efforts to embrace what it offers me.  Other parts of this country are starting to thaw, people even have their jackets off - I can feel it on the edges of my consciousness, their reveling in the sun and in snowdrops starting to poke boldly out of the ground.  The smell of the ground warming up.

Here, I'm still making excellent use of my awesome, warm, waterproof Keens; but meanwhile I'm feeling stir-crazy and even a little stuck.  And my shivering muscles never seem to fully unclench.

So.  I'm starting a flavor-syrup-free journey today that ends on April 4th - a new season.  (I know.  It'll still be snowing in Boston.  But it will technically be spring.) Spring, a season of:

short sleeves
warm bicycle tires
tulips
baseball games
cherry blossoms
soft mud
lilacs
rain
earthworms
buds
skirts
picnics
magnolias
walks
bunnies
open windows
cleaning
robins
pale skies
e.e. cummings poems

and now - iced mochas!

Till then, I wish all my favorite baristas a good six and a half weeks!  (Honestly, Starbucks employees are the ONLY cheerful people in this town.  Especially on Ames St. in Cambridge and Arlington Center.  It's uncanny.)  I'll try to think of a good use for the bucks I'll be saving!

Wheels of life and death

My first writing class was taught by the truly wonderful Gurney Norman.  Someone in the class eventually asked where his name came from and he told the story of asking his (mentally ill) mother that same question.  Her answer:  Wheels of life and death.  Yes, as in, a hospital gurney.

A time to love

Nearly to work, walking in the shade and wind between MIT buildings. My cheeks and knees numb, the numbness creeping up my legs, across my temples. Cheerful orange berries on the vine starting to go black. Thoughts about winter, its wisdom: a time to die. When? And when to persevere? Another winter lesson. I must learn. What light can be found inside? Ahead, two kids standing a foot or two apart, talking. Not touching. Nodding, turning - she away, he in my direction. His chin tucked into his scarf, his grin unmistakable. Even from a distance. Did not see the ice raised from the sidewalk like fresh scars. Did not feel the cold. Grinned and grinned, eyes fixed blindly on his path, teeth to the cold wind as I passed by.

A Christmas List

1. My new favorite Christmas memory this year so far: singing the 12 Days of Christmas with the Bass Player to warm up as we walked to the Middle East show last Saturday night. "Eleven... uhhhh...." All told, he had a harder time counting backwards than remembering the pipers piping, etc.

Gratitude List for November

(I will do better at keeping up my blog... I will do better at keeping up my blog... I will do better at keeping up my blog...)

1. I LOVE New England in the fall. My iPhone is on the fritz and I lost my camera battery charger at Arlene's Grocery in NYC (I think?) so I have no pictures of my own to show you of the incredible colors I try to soak up every day on my walk to and from work, but I actually found myself getting teary-eyed over the combined color of some pink and orange chrysanthemums the other morning. Laugh if you will, but I'm so grateful that I'm still able to be so overwhelmed by simple, natural beauty. (And to find it in the city.)

2. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Smile + tee hee

Is it because I've been sick in bed for four days that now, stepping out into the sunlight and a world of strangers streaming through it, everything looks more alive than before?  The line of light surrounding every person seems to glimmer and wink at me as if to say, "Isn't it all just so lovely and terrible and grand?"  One man scowls at me as I look up from his gray-whiskered dog to his weathered face.  The man behind him, a bit more dapper, catches my face falling in response to the dog-walker and then I fear I've passed on the frown.  I only have a few paces to fret about this before a third man, this one in a tie, smiles at me the way a baby smiles at . . . well, almost anything it can hold in its pudgy hand.  Maybe it's just the coming of spring, but I want to pass on the smile and giggle at the frown, because it is, it really is:  it is all just so lovely and terrible and grand.