As I sit here and think about about transformation (and also about the cup of coffee I get to have when this is done), I’m thinking that transformation can be messy and that it doesn’t always come in a prettily wrapped package with a bow that Marty Stewart would envy…and that’s ok! For starters, I give a nod to a new month—August. Time continues to fly by, the to-do list continues to have more items than the calendar has days, and the nights are (gasp!) starting to creep in earlier. Speaking of time flying, can you believe that this past Sunday (July 31, 2022) was the alleged birthday of George Jetson? And can you believe how much of that cartoon-y vision has proven to be true? (How many of you call your Roomba “Rosie”? (We do.)) Anyway, it’s been a hot and dry summer thus far, the gardening CPR continues in the spirit of plant health and transformation…that’s been going semi-successfully:
Anyhow…
Ferris Bueller knew what he was doing. No two ways around it, that was one hell of a day of playing hooky. And he definitely knew what he was talking about when he said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Or maybe Allen Saunders is the one who really gets it right, in a quote often misattributed to John Lennon, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” Relative to what I’m thinking, who said it best matters little, who actually said it matters even less still…because the message in the words is what matters…you must pay close attention to your own life, or it will pass you right by.
Every second counts, so you gotta account for every second. That doesn’t mean no downtime or no wasted time—it means being mindful about how you’re spending your limited and finite, but of unknown quantity and duration, time.
You may have heard about Joni Mitchell’s performance at the Newport (RI) Folk Festival on July 24th (it was all over the news, and I posted a bit about it on Facebook at the time). It has stuck with me since, occupying a sizable lot of brain space, taking up a good deal of thinking time. I love Joni, have since I was a kid in elementary school when our acoustic-guitar-playing music teacher with the voice of an angel (Mrs. Hathon) taught us “The Circle Game” and “Both Sides Now”, the lot of us reading the purple-y blue mimeographed words off of the flimsy printed pages we kept in the music folders in our desks. It was 5th grade, I think, Mrs. Cronin’s class, ’77, ’78. Anyway, for me, when it comes to Joni Mitchell, it’s best summed up as “love you long time.” (And while I respect her power move, I do miss her on Spotify.)
Anyway, before I continue, if you’re so inclined here’s the opener of that set:
So yeah, even though I have a voice for the shower (so long as I am home alone), I loved those music classes and have loved acoustic music for as long as I can remember…the soothing melodies, the lilting voices, the cerebral lyrics…in fact this past Saturday Kerri and I had a bit of time before our dinner reservation so we ducked into a local beer garden where we were treated to…you guessed it…(outstanding) live acoustic music! (Accompanied by a delicious IPA for me, a tangy sour for Kerri.) Made my day. High point was the duo’s cover of Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody.” It was unexpectedly fantastic.
I also always have loved (been obsessed with?) the notion of the seeming but not actual arbitrariness of life…about chance and choice and change…about fate and destiny…about perspective…about the imperceptible movement of a barely visible pebble that can give birth to an avalanche. I feel like most of my free-thinking time always comes back to these concepts in some way, shape, or form, and almost-always wrapped up in some construct of time passing…the brain works how the brain works, and who am I to engage in hand-to-hand combat and try to fight off the thoughts firing across my synapses? I just roll with them…and so it goes…
Anyway, the “Brandi Carlile and Friends” set that morphed into “Joni Jam” was such a profound joy to witness from afar (I can’t even imagine what it was like for those who saw it in person…I can’t even…). I know some people think Brandi was a little over-the-top or melodramatic or whatever, but I stand firm that we were watching her having a complete out-of-body experience, that we witnessed two spirit animals performing an other-worldly, once-in-a-lifetime sensory extravaganza that—thanks, technology!—we all get to be a part of. And as a result of me being part of it, I’m left thinking deeply about both sides, now, and the circle game of life, and what it all means to me, in this moment, in this particular arc of the circle…in this now.
The circle of life, my least favorite shape. In my current headspace, I’m preferring to to think of it more as a bunch of spirals of life, always moving, growing, shrinking, re-growing, breaking, connecting, expanding, contracting, beginning, ending, disconnecting, reconnecting. I have mine, you have yours…they’re all spinning, and I like to think that whenever mine stops spinning it’ll spawn some other spinning spiral of a thing that interacts with the Universe in a different way than I did, but in the same way. I like thinking about it this way rather than thinking of it as a closed circle, like a handcuff. I like the fluidity and the continuity of this way of looking at it.
The many multi-dimensional sides of both sides, now. While there most certainly are (two) both sides now, there also are more sides in this same now, multiple sides to multiple other nows…it’s not an infinite number of nows but rather a finite strand of nows, a strand of an indeterminate length, of varying strength—that may or may not be woven together with other strands to make up the spirals that are the quasi-circles of life…independent and coexisting…overlapping and never touching. Life is complex and confusing and straightforward and simple, depending on the vantage point provided by your now, depending on how you look at it from that vantage point, depending on how your spiral is spinning, and influenced by whose spiral yours is touching, whose spiral it’s locked in with, whose spiral it’s annoyingly knotted with, whose spiral you wish yours were sharing space with. Long story short, there’s lots more going on than two (both) sides.
So Joni in the headlines and all that goes with that for me gave me motivation I didn’t need to ruminate on this very notion of life seeming but not being at all arbitrary (come on, it’s more likely some calculated machination of the Universe, some chess match between forces greater and stronger than we ever could dream of being), to think about these things called time and life and space, to think about where I am in my own spiral and to try to ascertain which side, now, I am on, and which side, now, I am looking from…and in which direction I am looking toward. I am processing all of the spinning spirals and all of the combinations of both (and more) sides that are part of every now, and it is much more complex and multidimensional than I am capable of describing in words or numbers or pictures. But that won’t stop me from trying…it is said that writing forces us to clarify and simplify our thoughts and thus our understanding, and that is likely why this topic tends to creep into my work more often than not. I’m forever struggling to understand life’s greatest mystery: life itself. And drawing, well, it’s another way I force myself to clarify my thinking…and it’s rudimentary on its best day. So here’s how it looks, when I try to show you what’s in my head in a picture:
In any case, with all that big-picture stuff out of the way there are some other things that stand out for me as a result of the experience of watching Joni and Brandi (and friends) perform, coupled with a week+ of extreme thinking, namely:
Resilience. Seriously, Joni had a brain aneurysm in 2015 that left her unable to walk or talk. What fierce determination to reclaim those abilities, what courage to perform a full set on a live stage. And she sounded amazing.
Friendship. Brandi and Joni on stage epitomize the value of cross-generational friendships. It shows how important it is to have people believe in us more than we believe in ourselves (though not always because that would get pretty f-cking tiresome for them; sometimes we have to be our own greatest champion). It demonstrates that with the right friends, what seems impossible is wholly possible, and in this case, history-making. (And come on, did you seriously think you were ever going to hear Joni give a live performance of A Case of You ever again?)
Not giving a shit. But completely caring. Joni obviously doesn’t care what people think but clearly she cares—the haters gonna hate but everyone else was treated to a gutsy and intimate and powerful performance from one of the all-time greats. Care about what’s worth caring about and don’t give a shit about the rest—and learn how to quickly size up the difference between the two.
Someone is Always Watching. (AKA The Wynona Files.) Poor Wynona Judd was in the unenviable position of being in the video frame the entire time, but without being part of the picture that’s in focus, as it were…that’s the worst possible seat in the house. But it also reminded me of the fact that in life, somebody is always watching, so you have to be mindful of what you do (unless you choose not to give a shit as noted above). Props to Wy for getting back out there in what has got to be a period of extreme grief precipitated by her mother’s recent and tragic death by suicide…so her emotion being on full display warmed my heart in a weird way…I felt her humanness, her pain, her strength. But the cautionary part of the tale comes at the 4:25 mark below, when Wy pulls a Houdini, reaches into her bra, and—abracadabra!—a compact appears. First time I saw it, I legit guffawed. Or was it a chortle? Either way I laughed to the point of almost needing my inhaler. (And what was in that insulated stainless steel drinking vessel she was frequently seen sipping (tippling?) from??? Ice cold “I Don’t Give a Shit” Juice???)
The full Joni Mitchell experience (full set list is here, and you can find the rest of the vids easy enough on YouTube) spurred a wild line of (almost-everyday) thinking for me, but that wasn’t all that was going on. I offer none of this up for pity and only for perspective. Reminder: YOLO so carpe the eff out of every diem! Two people whose life spirals touched mine tangentially, in different places at different times and from different distances (aka friends of friends, neither particularly close, but close enough, and close to people I care about…) died since I last wrote. In both of these cases the deaths were of young people (one under 50, one under 60), and it just so happens I learned about both of them in a single series of text messages that came in while I was visiting with my friend whose 56-year-old husband died unexpectedly last September (and then whose mom also died also unexpectedly a few months later). So on Friday night when I was already pondering these mysteries of the Universe, a whole other painful layer and a bunch of different and confusing (read: unfair) dimensions were added to the mix. I subsequently (yesterday) learned that someone whose life spiral spins close to and is irreversibly intertwined with mine (family) received some unfavorable news in the face of an already dire diagnosis. So I am quite sure that these events have heightened my already-acute awareness of the finality of things…and I feel the weight of tragedy pushing down hard on me, forcing me to attempt to squeeze out some logic or reason, when really there is none. I’m also not sure if it helped or hurt that over the weekend I floated in the pool for hours…reading, listening to music, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking…and watching the time pass by, in the form of billowy white clouds floating across a perfectly blue blue sky, never to be seen again.
And here we are…today…just another day, though it isn’t just any day. It’s a new day, with new shapes, new sides, new sizes. All of the moments the day presents are to be considered…to be explored…to be mindfully enjoyed or mindfully discarded. Every moment is to be respected and appreciated. Maybe it’s a circle game, maybe it’s a spiral game…and for sure there are many multiple sides that make up the both sides of now…but the bottom line is that it isn’t a zero-sum game. We’re in it together. Raise each other up. Teach each other. Learn from each other. Celebrate success together. Comfort each other in times of need and failure. It’s fleeting. Choose your perspective wisely. Be resilient. Be a good friend. And choose carefully when to give a shit.
Thanks for being a player in my circle game, for allowing your spiral to spin alongside, within, or entangled with mine. Have a great week. Love you too.