Monday, May 04, 2009

What you hear . . .

when you are listening for something else can be exactly what you needed to hear all along.

On Saturday I went to Ramshead to hear Will Hoge perform. However, the warm up performer, Katie Herzig, played music that tugged at my heart and filled my mind with thought. To quote her web site's description of her music, it is "a spellbinding, uniquely immersive listening experience that deftly manages to be at once playful and impassioned - challenging and comfortable - intimate and epic." The cellist that plays with her is part of the magic of this group.

"Hologram" speaks to my psyche and "I hurt too" to my love (for want of the accurate word) life. But it's "Forevermore" and "Wish you well" that makes it all come undone with memories of my childhood and missing people who are irrecoverably lost to us. Forevermore sent me searching for Peggy Bittner but she is not to be found on Twitter or Facebook but as girls we performed the Playmate song with a painted cardboard box as our set. Our houses were caty-corner in St. Petersburg, Florida, and we walked to Blanton Elementary School together most days.

I've moved too many times, shedding best friends all along the map. It's not so much that I want them back, but I want them happy and I wish there was a directory where we could find one another without intruding. Mine would read, "Healthy, thriving, still writing and dancing, still pensive, still has a troubled heart." I think Peggy's would read, "Still laughing everyday, mother to three towhead girls, running a bird sanctuary in Southern Florida, happily married."

Friday, May 01, 2009

On Understanding

The further I travel, the more lost I become. The more I learn, the less I understand. So most of the time, I just trust the process and the random energy of the universe to deliver what I need to know when I need to know it. Sometimes that can be quite uncomfortable.

It is a little like living the life of Alice in Wonderland. On reading Jabberwocky, she responds:

"It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate---"