Meditation upon First Harvest

I went into meditate this morning with a feeling of calm and well-being. I just got some new incense blended and blessed by my friend Lucy O'Malley-local, and I was anxious to try it out. She made a batch for Lughnasadh, so it's very festive and fresh and lively! I set a charcoal to burn in my wee cauldron, slowly dropped a pinch of incense onto the coal and was rewarded with a sweet and wonderful scent.

I cast a protective circle around me, because I had a feeling that anything could happen today! And I was totally right, though not in the way I expected.

I began by simply breathing, feeling energy flowing up through deep roots and flowing down from high branches. I listened to the gentle rain, the babble of the swollen creek outside my door, the gossip of birds and the whisper of wet trees in the wind. A sense of peace and wholeness came upon me like nothing I've ever felt.

And then a wise voice began slowly speaking in my thoughts: Some days, it is enough to simply be present. The work that is to be done will be the better if times of rest are relished, and never rushed. Breathing is all you must do today. Breathe, and enjoy the fruits of first harvest.

A warm sense of knowing flowed into me; Many things are coming to a single point in my life. I am turning 50 just before Mid-winter. I am releasing my first record since my divorce, and it's the best thing I've ever done. I am nearing the end of peri-menopause and about to cross into whatever the next phase is. I'm not ready to be a Crone. I'm certainly not interested in becoming a Mother (again)! And Maiden was a long time ago.

And then I understood: I'm at the Lughnasadh point in my life. The first fruits are ripe and ready, the hardest work is over, and it's time to relax and steward my life for a while. I don't need to reinvent myself; I just need to keep doing what I'm doing, keep incorporating everything I learn into that, and work on mastering the skills I've been honing for so many years. Take care of myself. Enjoy life with my wonderful partner.

Stop trying to be Superwoman, that job is highly over-rated.

Simple simple simple, so why does it feel like a revelation? We push ourselves so hard, always striving to do more, be better, do nine impossible things before breakfast every morning, and there are times when that is the only way to get through and survive! Those are hard habits to break. When that kind of drive and activity are unnecessary, we still drive ourselves to accomplish ridiculously.

So today, let us enjoy the Solar stroll toward Lughnasadh. Let breathing in and out be enough. Relish some rest. Have a glass of wine. Blessed harvest, one and all.

Equal?

I spent some time this weekend with a lot of lesbians. I love lesbians, I may even be one. I've been in love with women before, even had a girlfriend or two. The fact that the love of my life and life-partner is male is kind of irrelevant. I love his heart and his brain, not his maleness. If he was a woman, I'd still be in love with that heart and brain.

Many of the women at the National Women's Music Festival were completely accepting of his presence this weekend, even though it seemed at times he was the only man there. But over and over I was questioned about him. It seemed really strange to me to have to explain his presence. I don't define myself in terms of my sexual orientation, probably because it's totally unreliable. So it was strange to even have it come up. I'm a MUSICIAN. And a woman. And I'm in a long-term monogamous relationship with a man. So he was there with me because he's my life-partner, and my best friend, and a musical collaborator/co-writer, and willing to carry heavy stuff . . . But I do want to clarify, we did not feel unwelcome and there was no animosity toward him or toward me. What I am saying is, this experience of reversal opened my eyes to a new way of looking at the inequality that women experience, and the extreme inequalities that the LBGT community lives with on a daily basis. And that makes women's events, including music festivals, exceedingly important. I wish they weren't. But clearly they are. I am a white woman who is viewed by society as straight. I am so privileged that I didn't notice what was going on all around me.

My entire motivation here is the idea of equality. I live in a country where people are singled out for the damndest things - the color of their skin, the shape of their eyes, the people they love. And it's total bullshit. We have to understand that first we are human. First we are human. We are leaves on a branch of a tree that has more rings than we can count. We are all made of the same stuff, which all comes from stars exploding out in the galaxy somewhere. We're bits and pieces of who knows how many different planets and stars and asteroids and meteors . . . And we're babies. The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. We've been around less than 1 million of those years, and we've been truly creative, curious, innovative, sentient humans for maybe 50,000 of those years. The dinosaurs fucking ruled this planet for 260 million years, and we've been here less than a million and are about to self-destruct because we have a giant hard-on for fossil fuels. We need to get OVER our tiny selves.

The more diverse we are, the stronger we are. The more room there is for people to express their humanity, the better we are. The more accepting we are of what makes others strong, the stronger we all are. We are one. We are one. We are one. All these little things that divide us are the same things that could enrich us. Who cares who loves who? What does it matter? Good old what'isname . . . you know, the beard, the robe, sandals, got nailed to a tree for saying we should be nice to each other . . .? Yeah, that dude. He said "Love one another." I don't think he put any qualifiers on that. Love one another. No matter what. That's all.

Orenda rocking the National Women's Music Festival in Wisconsin, June 28, 2014

All the news that's fit to print . . .

I have been so busy I have not had time to think! So . . . here are my thoughts about that.

Last week I had a mess of gigs, from hot-and-sticky but oddly rewarding, to wild and sweaty and totally rewarding, to cool and peaceful and so quiet you could have heard a pin drop because nobody showed up . . . We ran the gamut, and it was all good. And hopefully I made some new friends, too.

And it's a huge blessing to be able to do what I do best and make enough money to get by, and to not have to get up everyday, put on some "game face" and go pretend I give a shit. I actually do give a shit. I give a shit whether my students are learning anything. I give a shit whether the audience shows up or not. I give a shit about every note I play, every word I sing (whether I remember the words or not) and every moment I'm on stage. Because if I didn't, I'd just be another hack trying to make some easy money. 

Sad thing is, it's far from easy, and it's not really all that much money. I work HARD. And everybody I choose to play with works equally hard. Music is important. It's worth busting your ass to do it as right as you possibly can. When people ask me, "How did you get that good?" I tell 'em, "I practice my ass off." I might have a certain something in my DNA that gave me an edge for music that some folks don't have. But don't for a minute think that means I can coast through it without breaking a sweat. No no no. I practice my ass off. 

Friday, I'm heading to Wisconsin to the National Women's Music Festival to teach a guitar workshop and perform with Orenda. Then I am taking a much needed breather. The season is still young, many gigs left to go, much heat and humidity to endure. I hope to see you out there somewhere.

(PS: The Indiegogo campaign for Aunt G & the Stone City Nephews is still up, so please check it out and help us with a contribution at www.igg.me/at/auntgrecord - thanks!) 

All I do is learn

Boy, this Indiegogo campaign of mine has been an education. All I do is learn. And then DO. And it all seems to involve writing and linking and joining and opening myself up for thousands of poorly-written pitches from people wanting to boost my campaign for me by doing everything I've already done, and charge me anywhere from $30 to $100 for it.

It is all consuming. And it's been amazing, because learning is good. But . . . We all need a break from me! I need a break most of all!

So what I am thinking about today is Summer. Summer and how I desperately need to make peace with it. I don't do well with heat and humidity, I don't like most bugs, and I'm not a fan of tornadoes and hail. Funnily enough, I'm also not a huge fan of snow and bitter cold and dangerously frigid wind. But this is where I live, with two brutal extremes sandwiched between two wonderful transitions, one of which appears to be completely over now. So much for the gloriously temperate, excitingly verdant, flower-bedecked Spring. Now it's on to the deadly hot, unrelentingly humid, drought-tortured/flood-prone days of Ugh.

According to our brilliant Julian calendar, the first day of Summer is this coming Saturday. But according to my eyes and my ears and my skin and my internal clock, Summer has been ramping up since about May Day. I prefer the old "Mid-Summer Solstice" designation. It really is the height, the apex of the season, where there is no going back, no more unseasonable cold. It's just hot now. And once in a great while it rains. A lot. And then it doesn't for ages.

The acclimation period used to be a little gentler, and it made all this seasonal back-and-forthery more bearable. But there is no acclimating to temperatures that actually kill people on a regular basis, especially when a week before the actual onset of actual summer, we were tempted to turn the furnace on at night. It's like, "beautiful-perfect-beautiful-perfect-beautiful-perfect-beautiful-perfect-DOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!" And then just when you think to yourself, "Iowa sucks, this is stupid, I'm outa here, I'm so hot, I'm just done, I can't take any more," Autumn happens, and once again you're simply swept away by the sheer beauty of the place. And you think, "How could I ever leave this paradise? Look at that blue sky, those red and orange and gold leaves, smell that brilliant, crisp air!" And then just when you think maybe Old Man Winter is gonna bugger off this time, "DOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!" And it's bone-crushingly, tear-freezingly, snopocalyptically cold before you can do anything about it.

For months.

And then Spring happens . . .

Marketing me . . .

Spending a great deal of time focused on marketing yourself--setting up a website, building a crowdfunding campaign--sucks life. Don't get me wrong, I'm really good at it. As long as I pretend to be doing it for somebody else.

I think it's a combination of Artist + Iowa for me. Many artists could care less about what people think of what they do. I'm right there with 'em. I do what I do because that's what I do, and if you don't like it, go listen to somebody else because there are a zillion options out there. No hard feelings. But no, I'm not going to reinvent myself to make you happy. And Iowans are notoriously shy about calling attention to themselves. We think it's sort of scandalous and unseemly if we wear too loud a shirt. 

But to try to explain to people why they need to support what I do, why it matters not just to me but to them that they support what I do . . . I can't just say, "Because what I do is important and powerful; because my music has healed people in crisis and someday you may need that kind of healing; because I am hopeless at making money any other way." I can't say that. Well, I could, but I very much doubt anybody would care to fund me if I did.

Music is not just important, it's essential. I'm not talking about the current crop of 3-chord pop songs that all sound the same, or the bullshit bro-country garbage songs that all sound the same, or any of the corporate created formulated to be totally homogeneous and guaranteed not to make anyone think crap the corporate-owned radio stations spew at you countless times per day to the exclusion of anything else. That stuff is disposable. I'm talking about music played by actual people on real instruments. People who have made it their life's work to become the best musicians they can be. People who are passionately committed to creating new, unique, interesting, different music that has the capacity to reach into the heart and the soul and the brain and move anyone listening. That stuff is important, but the people who own the corporations that produce the other stuff are doing their damndest to make sure YOU don't get to hear it. That's the stuff that heals people, that creates a deep sense of well-being and wholeness and clarity, that gives people a sense of mystery and wonder. You know the powers that be in this country don't want people thinking, or wondering, or feeling empowered and (gods forbid) healthy. 

That's basically what I ended up saying, perhaps slightly more diplomatically. Not much. But slightly. And it's what I'm saying now. We are the 99%, the other part of the country that doesn't own major corporations or the politicians that regulate them. But here's the biggest thing they don't want us to understand: We don't need them. We only need each other. 

In a couple days I'll be posting a link to my Indiegogo campaign. I need you. I hope you feel the same about me and what I do. I'd profoundly appreciate your support. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: The campaign has launched at Indiegogo - check us out here: http://www.igg.me/at/auntgrecord - and help us out if you can! Thank you already! 

Space

A lot of people feel dwarfed and terrified at the vastness of space. The immensity, the mind-blowing ancientness, the scale . . . like we're microscopic specs of dust on a grain of sand in an ocean bigger than anything we can imagine. The fact that, on a cosmic timeline, we humans occupy only a small portion of the last hour of the last day, makes some folks feel insignificant and worthless.

And I guess I understand that, but I have never, ever felt that way.

We are made of stardust; the carbon in our bones, the iron in our blood, everything that makes us was once part of a living star, or many stars. We are the way the stars have learned to express themselves.

If the Universe is a great mind, then we are thoughts in that mind made flesh; we are a way for the Universal Mind to experience and express emotions, ideas, and creativity. And if indeed our own Universe is a bubble in a much larger ocean of universes, the Multiverse, then we are part of something so vast and grand that we may never know the whole of it. This is a Mystery we can sink our teeth into! This is the definition of "awesome."

But awe and fear are incompatible. Why fear something of which we are small but intensely magical parts? That would be like my fingers fearing my hand, or my eyes fearing my head. We are creatures who have evolved as life-forms on the surface of a planet orbiting a star in the Milky Way, which is part of a larger group of galaxies that forms part of the great network of stars, planets, dark matter, dust, asteroids, ice, gasses, and things we can't possibly imagine, in our home Universe, which is a bubble in the great ocean of the Multiverse. We're all connected to each other, and to everything else--physically, spiritually, energetically and emotionally. What is there to fear when everything, everywhere and every time is home?

The Gods in Your Backyard

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, and we all know where that leads . . . Oh yes, to a lot of thinking. I'm still, after all these years, trying to figure out where I fit in the greater scheme of things. Am I Witch, Druid, Shaman, Something Else? Am I a musician first or Neo-Pagan first, or does that even matter?

I recently re-read Margot Adler's famous and revolutionary tome, Drawing Down the Moon, and found myself plagued by many familiar issues. Even that far-reaching survey of the very oddest Pagan corners of our big round world didn't seem to have a Gayla-shaped space in it.

It's at times like this when I remember things my dad and I used to talk about. He was the first person I ever heard use the word "Druid" to describe himself. And he was quite right, it fit him perfectly. We used to walk out in the forest together, often in silence, but sometimes deep in conversation. And I remember one time talking about religion and relevance. The Universe changes constantly, and humans change constantly. The forces that we actualize and anthropomorphize and call gods in order to explain what is going on with the world change constantly, too. Once, everything was a god, because we understood so little. As we began to understand more about our world and the Universe it lives in, we needed fewer and fewer gods. But our need to connect with our planet, our community, our tribe, our home, is now just as deep and strong as it was when we lived in caves as hunter-gatherers.

In my own mind, I fully understood, even as a teenager, that the Universe is a single Divine Mind, much bigger, grander and weirder than we can ever know. And intuitively, I understood the human need to personify forces to be the Divine Mind trying to communicate with us, trying to explain that we have always been part of itself; our consciousness is not only connected to it, not only part of it, but is in fact the whole of it. We are all made up of the same stuff the stars are made of, so why shouldn't our consciousness come from the Divine Mind as well? And wouldn't that Divine Mind make every effort to talk to each person in a way that they would embrace and understand, simply in the interest of efficiency?

As we have come to understand so much more about the world we live on, we need Divine Mind to talk to us in a different way. We don't need the reassurance that the Sun will return after the winter Solstice, because we know that the whole reason for the Sun appearing to move in the sky is that the Earth is tilted in relation to its orbit around the Sun. But the need to celebrate that fact, to connect with that fact, is no less powerful than it was when we thought the Sun might not come back if we didn't pretty the place up a bit and maybe sacrifice a critter or two. Many gods have been invented over the centuries to both explain and fulfill this human longing for connection to something mysterious and incomprehensible.

But, as my dad pointed out to me, he and I didn't live in pre-Christian Ireland, or ancient Egypt, or pagan Rome, or in Babylon, and we certainly weren't lost in a desert unless it was a metaphorical one. We were, and are, humans alive in the twenty-first century on a continent that none of those cultures even knew about, in a country that didn't even exist until a couple hundred years ago. History and mythology should enlighten, enrich and inform us, but we need to build relationships with the gods in our backyards, and worship where we are now. Divine Mind is still talking to us, still reminding us that we're part of all of it. Instead of trying to filter everything through ancient mythologies that we cannot possibly hope to truly internalize, we need to be meeting the Divine here and now.

Gods, goddesses, avatars, elementals, guardians and other spirits from our deep spiritual past are our greatest teachers and mentors, and their ways and wisdom are well heeded. They can instruct us and show us the way, but we are responsible for walking it. The ancestors created their cosmology and their rituals based on the world they knew, which was a vastly different world than the one we know. We are responsible for creating new cosmology and ritual in harmony with this world, here and now. Our children and their children, if the human race survives what it is doing to itself, will be responsible for using our knowledge and wisdom to create cosmology and ritual that serves the world they will create. And that is a mystery well worth celebrating.