Dear Reader,
A little over a year ago I started this (mostly) monthly journal to log my path back to music-making, wherever it may lead. As I'm looking out my apartment windows open wide to a breezy mid-August evening, I am at the same crossroads I have kept coming across for the past 5 years or more: where to live that's free of mold. And until this question is solved long enough for me to finish the healing process, everything else remains a blank page. I had such high hopes for this year, too.
I wanted to be pre-producing my next project; I wanted to be finishing some Kickstarter rewards that I owe. I wanted to be feeling good day to day instead of these varying degrees of awful. When people ask – or these days people don't really ask anymore – I have kept quiet about the malnourished hell scape of getting by. But a wasting hell scape it is.
This week, I am awaiting lab results from my work location to pair with my apartment results, which were showing elevated levels of black mold. Should the work location show anything out of sorts as well, it appears I'll be attempting to lay the foundations yet again – my 7th move in 5 years, my 6th new job (where oh where?) in the same amount of time.
Midlife is a wild time to experience this level of initiation and yet it's also somehow fitting. To continue into the 2nd half of life means to learn the lesson of saying no to every opportunity to betray myself. That said, there is very little poetry to be found in survival. It is brutal, quietly grateful work and not the stuff of songs I'd want to sing when it's over. The lyrics are, "Thank you to the pain that is showing me what is no longer working in my life." And remember to breath. Singing it when I wake up and try to walk off the ache, singing it when another migraine sabotages my entire weekend, singing it when I'm vomiting in the sink, singing it when I try to run to the bus stop before it arrives and realizing all I can manage is a limping lope, singing it when I'm completely spent from my survival job and have no brain function left over to sit at the piano and write, or hum. Every week has been an inflamed, diminishing dream.
Today I am tired of putting my wellbeing in the hands of landlords, who are about the business of making money. I have a longing for a place of my own, where the safety is mine alone to secure, and where I can write my life as a love letter to all things nourishing.
Which is simply to say, the path for me back to music-making has gone on full pause mode – or rather, it is the path but it's the part where no music is being made at all. If I may, allow me instead to point you to the new album of Mindy Smith. It's been about 12 years since her last release and I take hope that things come around if you keep going. Her first single “Quiet Town” is beautiful. Have a listen and be well and I'll see you down the road. XO