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.

More than words can say

Musicians bond with each other deeply, sometimes instantly. It happens because our neural networks synchronize when we play together. No really, it's a science thing, they've documented it, look it up. So because our brains start grooving together when we play together, we get deeply lodged in each other's heads and hearts.

And sometimes a musician, say a mandolin player just for example, happens to also be a fantastically good person who practices deep compassion and kindness, who inspires everyone around him to be kinder to each other, to play more and better music, and to live gently and love everybody. A family starts to grow up around such a person, based on that whole synchronized neural network and heart combo platter thing. Everybody adores everybody, because the dominant vibe is love--love of music, love for each other, love for the audience, for the place, for the time. Life gets so good. It's beautiful and magical and precious.

Then that mandolin player finds out that he's got cancer, so his musical family, which by now is HUGE, gathers around him and says "We're gonna do whatever it takes to keep you around because the music and the love and the vibe are too good to let go, and we love you like lightning loves thunder, do you understand?" So everybody gets together and raises a bunch of money, treatment is given, and the mandolin player gets better and all is well.

Until the leukemia happens. And then it just hurts and hurts and hurts. The family gathers around the mandolin player again, but this time everybody feels helpless and scared and utterly bereft. But they hold him tight, and they check on each other, and they say "I love you" to everybody so many times it seems unreal, but because of him every time they say it, it means more than it did the last time. And they wait.

And then the messages go out, he's gone. It's over. And it feels like the heart has been ripped out of the whole community, and yet the relief that his pain is at an end is equally great, and the two feelings whiplash back and forth and through the family for days. But the beautiful thing is, everybody talks to everybody, bonds are renewed, hugs are exchanged, and one person helps another heal, and that person helps another, and so on, like great ripples in the shared neural network.

I was at folk club when it happened. It was my friend Kimberli's turn to share a song, and something inspired her to sing "Death Come a Knockin'," and just after that the message came through. Bobby has gone home. And we knew, we all knew. She had the profound honor of singing him home. And her eyes shone from the tears of deep sadness, and from the fire of knowing she helped him find his way.

There's a hole in the world where Bobby used to be, and no one yet knows how deep it really is, or how far it goes, or whether anything will ever heal it. Nothing and no one will ever replace him, but hopefully that hole will slowly fill up with the kind of love we found playing music together. Blessed be, safe journeys, and hurry back. We got tunes to play, my friend.

Oh, the Dreadful Wind and Rain

Well, wind anyway. I played Saturday night outside in gale force wind. It wasn't that cold, but wind that strong sucks the heat right out of you. I had to play like a maniac just to stay warm, and as soon as I got into my car, I was drenched in sweat. What an odd combination of discomforts. All in a day's work.

But it got me thinking about all the elements, and how much I love to play music out in the world, walking through a field of wild grasses and flowers with my fiddle, sitting on a fallen tree with my guitar, or just singing softly in the center of a forest. All of these situations are usually totally spontaneous and uncontrolled, and most of the time they have been flat-out magical. But try to control an outdoor situation and often it becomes unmanageable instantly. Blazing, burning sun, high winds, storms blowing up out of nowhere . . . And that's just spring.

We are, believe it or not, wild animals, too, just like the wolf and the bobcat and the falcon; we have just excused ourselves from being part of nature, like petulant children confronted with a healthy, organic dinner: Scoffs, rolls eyes. "May I be excused, pul-lease?"

Um, no. We're part of it. We are, somehow, a vital part of this ecosystem, though I can't imagine what good we are possibly doing any other living thing. We can shut ourselves in our houses and complain endlessly to our friends about how stupid our weather is, but that doesn't change anything.

Matter is energy, and energy can become matter. If I put some energy into making amends for the extreme abuses humanity has inflicted on the planet, for example, by going out into the woods and singing to the trees, good things happen in my life. If ten of my friends will go into a forest and sing to the trees, good things will happen to them. If ten of their friends do the same, good things will start to happen all over the planet. We may not be able to redeem ourselves, and we may not have much time left, honestly. But music is power. And power can be used for good. And there is no better audience than trees and birds and bugs and flowers.