So how was your weekend? Mine was…I guess you’d say bitter-sweet. Just like life itself, there was some good stuff and some not so good stuff. Oh well, if we can come away a little wiser, eh?
There is something about a community of musicians that holds a certain comfort for me. I think it’s because they tend to lead with their hearts…Anyway, my friend Jim dedicates himself to creating an atmosphere of live performance EVERY Friday night here locally. And it is fast becoming a magnet for such souls and some damn fine music! As such, it is also attracting an interesting crowd of folk who find themselves drawn to such a spontaneous and creative atmosphere of people just being alive, laughing with and at themselves while striking mostly good chords!
I tend to be more of a closet Conservative when I’m out in this scene, mainly because we are a minority in this part of the country (certainly among most of my pickin’ and grinnin’ peers)…and here “vibe” is everything. So I had to chuckle when this one guy gets up to perform one of his originals in which he trashes everything right of center as if to assume that there is only a left of center…and everyone else is simply off the reservation. A few of us just looked at one another and smiled. You really get an interesting view of people being people here. It says something about a player who shows up early and stays well after his performance…just as it says something else about a player who shows up to bellow righteous sentiment and leave shortly thereafter.
Pete, Allen and myself delivered a heart-felt rendition of the Skip James tune, I’m So Glad…with Big Mike tappin’ faithfully from his weekly post! This is heaven to me because every Friday night for 5 minutes, I am not me…I am lost in the primordial soup of pure connection! This is also the first night that I have a new CD to hawk, “Wide Awake” (a narration of the personal experience of awakening spiritually and patriotically). This would be the sweet.
The bitter, is that part of our world that remains asleep; the friend whose judgment won’t let her past the off-key performer to experience the unexpected gift, or the many who are led from the magic of their own wells to some promised land of hope & change. Welcome to the Collective Desert! People die here…of thirst…very slowly. A friend opens up to me this weekend to share his personal pain. It makes me wonder how many of us smile on the outside and cry on the inside where no one can see. It made me think of the friend who took his own life back in 2008…right after we had all been together smiling. (It was from this place I wrote Please & Home).
We played music and we talked. The pain he described was an old friend I knew quite well (we’re in touch from time to time). When he told me that he expected to see him again tomorrow, it reminded me of a teaching from my Buddhist friend, Gen-La. The Kadampa Temple is built on a magnificent and spiritually significant piece of land high above the Delaware River in Glen Spey. In her teaching on old habits, Gen-La talked about the paths worn by the monks through the dense underbrush and thickets…which are the perfect metaphor for the mind. The only way out of suffering is to wear a new path. My friend, as we all tend to do, was looking for tomorrow from the old path…where he could not help but see the old friend.
Standupnsing 
Chip I replied to this post yesterday early in the morning but I lost it before it was posted. It really pissed me off to the point where as I could not reproduce the feeling and emotion that went into the post. I have been back several times to try to reproduce what I wrote it’s just not there anymore. the best I can do now is summarize.
During my life I had taken many paths to get here to even be able to write anything at all. For the last twenty years I had been slowly putting up road blocks on every single one of them. It reached a point where 6 or 7 years ago they were all closed and I started wasting slowly wasting away mentally and physically.
It was so bad that I knew I had to open some new paths or give up, so at the beginning of the year I forced myself to get up and get involved in an activity. The one chosen was the Tea Party which served to purposes, one to help me the other to try and help the country. It started off a little shaky then I received a call from a complete stranger say some of posts where extraordinary.
At that point I let a couple of new paths open one leads here I barely made it before those paths started to close rapidly and now are almost totally shut down. This could have sent me right back to the one way path I had come from but a strange thing had happened on my way here, I had had come across at least a dozen paths that I thought were closed but they were still slightly open. I took my first tentative steps to see if there was still a path there after thirty five years of neglect. To my surprise and relief as I turned onto to the first of these path, while need some maintenance the path was wide open.
While not being happy about how quickly the new paths have closed I am delighted at the old paths that have been reopened. As I am finding out at this later stage in life some path are short and some are long and the only path that is ever truly close is a path that is blocked by a closed heart, vanity, a lack humility and old habits…….MJ
I think you’re on to something my friend! Sorry but I had to laugh reading about losing what you had written…only because its happened to me more than once! Your writing is great! You can probably relate to this, but I would write if I was the only one reading because of its cathartic affect…it is my therapy I think. Keep on truckin’ MJ!
Your post made me laugh out loud. It made me think of my favorite Yogi-ism. When you come to a fork in the road….take it. I have come to many in my life, and I have taken the wrong path at times and the right path at times. But which ever ones I took lead me to the person I am today and the life I have now and I am greatful for that. In the last five years I have been disabled and it’s the first time I have ever put up a wall around myself. I had never done that, and I have been through some very trying times. Around three years ago, with support of my great husband, and my growing anger at our insane government, I started really getting involved in truly caring about the future of my country and what kind of Republic (if that’s what it was going to remain) we were leaving for our children and grandchildren. That was the beginning of an amazing awakening for me, especially when I realized how many people were out there who felt the same way. I heard it on talk radio, and television, and found it on-line, and then learned about this Senator Obama and eventually the Tea Party. The rest is history, or the start of a new beginning of a wonderful line in history. I am still disabled but I have so much more to do, to help, to volunteer, and to be part of a real change for the better. Trying to get others to change their old habits is going to take some work! But I’m the Tea Party Patriot to do it!
Amazing post D! I always loved Lennon’s quote…something like, “Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.” Who among us envisioned the life that has happened to us all just 10-15 years ago…forget 31 years! By the by D, I feel you as VERY able!
😉