Whole-hearted
Hello to one and all! I feel clear and clean and so loved and so ready to trot out this new work. My apologies for not writing sooner, but touring out there by myself takes all my concentrated efforts. So, today, I locked myself into focus; grabbed pen and paper, and pointed all my intentions your collective way.
Just back on the West Coast after ten days out on the East Coast, driving from Maine to Pennsylvania, engaging with you out there, seeing such loving faces, enjoying - truly enjoying - the loving response I am receiving. Every night from the stage I tell you how much I appreciate your loving kindness, the ways you hold me dear, the tender support you give as I make my way ... and every time I say it, I mean it wholeheartedly.
Whole-Hearted...that's how I feel now. I became acquainted with grief, and ground-familiar, all of which pulled me closer to becoming a human being. And now, I walk with a whole heart -nearly so, as far as I can tell. I feel clear and clean and so loved and so ready to trot out this new work, these spell for grief we all of us feel at some time in our vulnerable human lives.
I drove the whole journey by myself, with my Self, and I plotted my course, and managed to steer through rain and storm and construction and the endless frustration of no cross-street signs in New England! I always suspect some folks settled there because they could not find their way in or out! I got lost a couple of times - well, misplaced, really - but found my way out. Funny how such a simple thing as finding one's way lends to the larger picture, he?
The last two gigs were with Holly and John. I love working with them so much! It's just easy and splendid and big and so professional. She and I have done this for so long, and there is an ease about it that's undeniably cool...and undeniably hot.
The show at the Birchmere was hot and very sold out, filled with eager listeners, some of whom had been cocooned up for years. There were two young women who were our interpreters for the evening. They admitted shyly with downcast eyes that they knew not our music, but by the end of the night, they could not say that anymore. I closed my part of the show with "Cry, Cry, Cry", and decided from stage to call them both up there to sign the song together as the audience sang the chorus. I'm telling you, it was so beautiful to see, the two of them signing tear-tracks down their fresh faces in perfect synchronicity! ... As if they had always done this ...sigh. Oh, how I love when new hearts come into the fold.
Folding ...unfolding ...the new CD keeps unfolding its wings as it rises up out of the ashes, and I am telling you - it leaves me breathless. It continues to amaze me as it gets more and more beautiful in its unfolding revelations. I honestly love these new songs so much. Every night I sing them and wonder at the artistic process - how it is that one can spin gold from straw, beauty out of pain. Making art is a compassionate act, widening the embrace, and pulling us out of our blind staggers of self-indulgent pain into an upright, heroic attitude, lifting the weight from the shoulders of the world, and bearing up beneath it.
I do feel it is important to lift the weight I've been given in order to strengthen the weak places. I am courageous because I am so afraid. That's how it is. Lately, I've felt myself relinquishing some stiffness of attitude, resting more and more in the sense of some Divine Purpose. I think somehow both things are necessary for a whole-hearted manifestation of what it means to be a human being, walking this Earth, thin-skinned and bareheaded beneath the open sky, looking always for the Path, looking for the Purpose...
I wish you all well on this day ...Love from here ...Cris