Blog o' Gnosis

I woke up one morning recently to a brilliant sky, cold and clear. When Vince and I stepped out for our morning walk, I caught a whiff of something on the wind that it took me a moment to recognize. It was familiar but strangely out of place; something not quite a perfume yet a grassy smell, not quite an incense yet it made me think of blessingways. Finally my nose caught on: sweetgrass. Pungent sweetgrass hung low over the street like it had just been harvested from the fields, or lingered after burning for hours in some temple nearby.

How close outside the door chaos dwells. And closer still the faster we race, the more details we leave to chance, like stitches dropped in a daisy chain. It is crazy season out there. The rain drives everyone into the ground, we are drenched before we reach the car, and there is never enough time [...]

I spent this evening with magazine pictures spread all over my dining room table, sifting through them, cutting and rearranging my favorites on a big piece of black paper. Also at hand were scissors, glue stick, clear contact paper, and a brand new spiral-bound journal. I was assembling a collage to cover my new journal, an act I perform every few months as the old one fills up.

Back when Bowen and Lyra were about 5 and 3, I was a frustrated songwriter. I had several under my belt from years past, but not as many recent ones as I would have liked. There were two or three half-finished songs I was trying to pull together, and somehow I thought it was a failure on my part that I couldn’t find the time with two little kids to finish them. When I did take time from everything else to work on my songs I found I had nothing to say, or rather was too full of things I didn’t know how to say. Not understanding the cause or the cure, I called it writer’s block.

At last, tonight, our months of suffering as a nation will be over. I refer not to a Democratic takeover of Congress but to the cessation, at least for now, of election year campaigning. Tonight I am at home, alternately watching TV news, checking the blogs and websites, and catching up on some magazine reading. I am steeped in the media culture of our nation, and it feels very uncomfortable.

Yesterday I went to collect my mail at the post office, and one envelope stood out from the stack. It was a plain business envelope with a slight bluish tint to the paper and clear cellophane windows. On it was written in bold letters: Please tell us what to do about Deborah Cooper I looked [...]

(in which I come alarmingly close to sounding like Andy Rooney) Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. I am a big fan of living in the industrialized world in the early 21st century. I like gadgets, I like whiz-bang graphics, I like spending endless hours sitting in front of a computer being productive while [...]

It happened again recently, that most rarefied of dreams: I am performing a beautiful new song spontaneously as I compose it. The dream wakes me up, and on waking I remember part of the haunting melody and lyrics, and am able to transcribe them.

Serpentine Music Productions is now entering its fifteenth year. I have outlived many of the stores and music distributors who used to be my customers, and even my one competitor (who was also ultimately a customer, too).

Let us all bow down to Black Oak Books in Berkeley, where on a chance foray this afternoon I came up for air clutching gold in my stubborn hand. And the gold reads like this: O wild angels of the open hills Before all legends and before all tears: O voyagers of where the evening [...]