Bowing

I bought another new bow . . . Yes, I did . . . A carbon-fiber one. Very pretty. Snakewood frog, sterling silver hardware, very pretty white abalone. It's a beautiful thing.

And it got me thinking about the right hand again. And I certainly don't mean to be biased against any lefties out there - so let me just say by "right hand" I mean the hand that generates the sound by plucking or bowing. I guess I will always be obsessed with the right-hand part of playing, the textural side of technique. The right hand is responsible for more than half the tone. You can have an incredible violin, but if you have a bad bow, you're going to sound bad. You can have a so-so violin, but if you play it with a fantastic bow, you'll sound great.

Same with the guitar - you can know all the chords in the world, but if you can't keep time, or if you play the wrong strings when you strum, you'll sound awful. Likewise, if you approach a so-so guitar with command and confidence, it'll sound like a good guitar, but if you play timidly, even a super nice guitar will sound thin and hollow.

The left hand is the intellectual, mathematical part of playing, the knowing of the scales and chords, which are like equations and formulas. The right hand is the emotional part of playing, the painter daubing notes of color. We say great players draw or pull or coax notes from their instruments, which are emotional, tactile, verbal things, and have everything to do with the way great players use their right hands.

In some traditional kinds of Witchcraft, the left hand is the receptive or invoking hand, while the right hand is the sending or evoking hand, the hand that throws the fireball, so to speak. The left hand reaches out into the Universe for the knowledge, energy, or power needed, and the right hand puts that energy into action once it has been imbued with the Witch's will. The musician uses the left hand to make the intellectual decision about which notes to play, and uses the right hand to send those notes out into the world.

May your right hand know what your left hand is doing . . .

Music and therapy

Sometimes I think of what I do as a healing practice rather than a creative one. Especially teaching lessons. Lessons are by their very nature therapeutic. When you play a musical instrument, you engage both sides of the brain, release endorphins, stimulate deep learning centers, awaken sleeping senses . . . And you can learn so much about who you and how you learn. Helping people navigate those processes can be beautiful or terrifying, brilliant or frustrating, rewarding or exhausting. Depends on the student.

I almost never get frustrated with students unless they don't want to learn. I have every kind of student from whizz-bangs to those who struggle mightily. And it seems that the ones who really struggle, who are really fighting hard to do this, are the ones who are the most engaged--because they are fighting for what they truly love and desire to do. I would rather teach 100 students with Down Syndrome, or senior citizens who have never even picked up an instrument, or autistic students who don't talk to me and never look me in the eye but play with such feeling, than five students who have the capacity to learn it easily but don't care whether they learn it or not.

Desire is the key. Desire to do it, willingness to try, and commitment to practice. My challenged students will probably never play Carnegie Hall, but for me, every baby step they take feels exhilarating. I don't care how long it takes to learn one thing--I don't care if they never memorize a single song--because the most important thing to them is the joy they feel making music, and that's what music is all about.

Furious Activity

This winter sucked. And it sent me so far down a black hole I didn't even know where out was . . . I am not somebody that gets dysfunctionally depressed, but holy crap. I was in trouble.

Fortunately, I'm not someone who lets dysfunction stand in the way of a good time, so . . . I'm back. With a lot of help from my partner and a few kindly but no-nonsense spirit guides, I have recovered. Whew.

"What's happening?" you may well ask. Lots . . . First of all, stay tuned for the launch of gayladrake.com - coming soon to a browser near you! The Aunt G and the Stone City Nephews record is back on track, Pete is mixing like a madman, and we're going to aim for late-spring/early-summer release. Look for the fundraising campaign to begin very soon. The amazing John Rathje has some outstanding t-shirt designs, and a beautiful RECORD cover - YES! VINYL!!! - to entice you to help an auntie out. Can't wait.

I've taken the winter off from gigging, so I'm ramping that back up as well. Natalie Brown and I played at Uptown Bill's Coffeehouse in Iowa City last weekend, and WOW what a fabulous gig that was! Packed house, wonderfully attentive audience, dancing in chairs . . . It was incredible. Next I'm with my old friend Dan Johnson at the NewBo City Market in Cedar Rapids, March 20, 5 to 7:45PM - which is, appropriately enough, the first day of spring, and certainly there needs to be music! Then March 28 I'll be at Mendoza Wine and Music in downtown Coralville from 8-10, and on April 3 at the ass-crack of dawn I am getting in my car and heading for Fort Collins, CO, to play some music to support my dear friend Kevin Houchin's gallery opening on April 4, and to do a riotously fun house concert on April 5. Then back home April 6 to celebrate my son's 22nd birthday. April 19 Johnson and I are at Cafe Paradiso in Fairfield.

So hang tight, stick around, kick back . . . I'll keep you posted on everything. Life is good!

Here goes...

So... I received some guidance this weekend that I need to just shatter the Broom Closet once and for all. For those who know me well, this will come as no surprise. For those who know me a little, it won't exactly be a shocker. And for those who don't know me at all, I look forward to meeting you...

     Bogeyman: "You a witch or something?" .
     Susan: "I'm just... Something."
                                  Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

That's exactly it, I think. I'm... Something. Parts of what I do and what I am may fall under the umbrella of "witch," or even "Witch," and maybe that's the word I'll end up with, but at the moment, "Voracious Student" and "Relentless Seeker" seem to be more appropriate. "Druid" is good, too, as I am a songwriter and wordsmith, and Druiding is all about that. But neither one seems perfectly right. I am, as usual, neither fish nor foul. That's okay. These things happen.

Many people question the relevance of witches in our oh-so modern era. We don't need the batty old lady in the cottage just outside the village who we despise unless we need her to help heal the sick, birth a baby, terminate an unwanted pregnancy (or better yet, explain how not to get pregnant in the first place), tell us how to solve disputes, tell us when to plant and when to wait, whether or not to build a giant building there or there, sit up all night with the dead to ensure safe passage to the Other Realms... No, we have doctors and architects and lawyers and midwives and agricultural software and undertakers and... consultants... We don't need her services anymore.

Yeah, we do. Witches have the knowin' o' the hidden things (or "hiddlins' ", to quote Pratchett again), like how to walk between the physical and spiritual worlds and connect dots between them that bring clearness to confusion. Like how to see where the spirit is broken and is causing physical illness to manifest. Witches, for want of a better word, see how the macrocosm and the microcosm fit together like a hologram, and how each part contains the whole. When a person suffers spirit loss or a soul injury, there is no doctor who has the training to cross into the spirit realms and find what was lost and call it back, or fix what got broken so the love of the Divine Mind can once again flow unimpeded through the heart. But a Witch does, and he or she will do it, and that will open the paths of potentiality so that healing can happen.

Druids also have some hiddlins', including word magic, music magic and ceremonial magic. Being a songwriter, I have long been fascinated by the interplay between words, melody and presentation. Words have power, and music has power. Put them together with intention, and there's a lot can happen.

Reiki is an energy that has the power to heal spirits as well as physical bodies. It has an intelligence and a will of its own, and those who choose to practice quickly become adept at putting their own egos aside and allowing Reiki to use them as an instrument. I am working hard to refine myself as an instrument of Reiki, and hope to make many strides forward in that area over the next several months.

And that's what I'm voraciously studying and relentlessly seeking, to "ha' the knowin' o' the hiddlins'," to walk between worlds, to use all my talents to help increase the levels of joy and light and love in this world. So consider the Broom Closet door smashed permanently open. Call me what you will, Witch, Druid, Priestess, Student, Seeker... Crazy... Yes, that's a possibility. But I think a very very remote one.

Love and Light, Love and Light, Love and Light...

A Long Journey Began, and Begins Again

In January, I started a journey, and it's been amazing, brilliant, magical, beautiful and more life-affirming than anything I have ever done. I began doing an intensive spiritual training, part of which is studying and beginning to practice Reiki. I look back at my journals, even from two weeks ago, and I cannot believe how much I have learned, how much I have progressed, how much I have grown, changed, bloomed, become in four short months.

It started with a Reiki treatment from my dear friend and cousin Mumsy, because I was feelin' a little off energetically, mentally and physically. Once she had done a full treatment, I knew I needed to do whatever it took to bring the energy of Reiki into my life on a daily basis. And I have a feeling that Reiki may have picked me, too. There was a powerful rightness about it all. So Mumsy and I began working together, me studying meditation, energy, chakras, auras, magic (the real stuff, which is neither Harry Potter nor David Copperfield, but more like Granny Weatherwax), and finally, yes, Reiki, and today, April 14, is the day of my initiation into Reiki, my first attunement.

I've been using some books by Christopher Penczak, The Inner Temple of Witchcraft and The Magick of Reiki, to learn the meditative, energetic and magical skills, and a book by Caroline Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit to study the chakras and a system of symbolic, poetic diagnosis of dis-ease in mind, body and spirit. These are astoundingly challenging, complete, complex and masterful books to work through, and I am grateful to have them in my life.

I feel like I have reached a major threshold, and after crossing it I cannot remain the same. Reiki is always a part of one who is attuned, it can't be shut off. It makes wonderful changes, some subtle, some tremendous. Even now, before my initiation, I feel the transformation beginning, and I am ready. I have surrendered utterly to the will of Divine Mind. I am ready for whatever lessons are next.

Bright blessings, and blessed be.

There is a storm

There is a storm within me... I'm not sure where it came from or when it first appeared, but it's raging now. And I don't know why, I don't know what it means or what it wants. All I feel is a great unsettledness, but not in a bad "oh, shit, what have I gotten myself into" way. More like I imagine a caterpillar feels inside the chrysalis. I feel sort of compressed and cocooned, like something major is happening on the inside that is going to emerge into the light of day. Somehow, and hopefully soon. It itches.

And here ya go

It's December 31, 2012. So the Julian calendar, a totally arbitrary way of measuring the passage of time and organizing days into neatly manageable chunks (and oh, those Romans were fond of neatly organized chunks of nearly anything), is rolling over again, meaning we all have to go out and buy new calendars...

Maybe I'm just getting crusty and old, but for the love of Mike, Pete, Jove, Larry, Mo and Curly, can we please stop obsessing over keeping track of the flow of days? The Earth spins, so we have nights and we have days. The Earth is tilted on it's axis, so we have seasons. The Earth is circling the Sun, so we have years. And we mark the days in little boxes because we think what we do with time is going to matter. A thousand years from now, the great majority of us will not even be footnotes. The human race shot itself in the foot a long time ago, and now we're living on borrowed time.

Time is precious. Time is fleeting. Time is relative. Time is too big to contain in any ledger or chart. Time is too sacred a thing. We expect it to conform because we say so. But Time is bigger, and older, and smarter than we are. It flows on whether we want it to or not. We are linear. Time is... Not... Pure Time cannot be contained, measured, or even described. It sure as hell doesn't obey any rules. Time is as big as the Universe. Don't fuck with Time. Show it some respect.

So as you mark the throwing out of one Julian calendar and replace it with another, perhaps one with pictures of cute kittens or lush countryside, take a moment and try to suspend yourself in non-linear Time. Ignore your breathing and your heartbeat. Be timeless, in order to better appreciate Time.

May your next journey around the Sun be a pleasant one.