Signs and wonders…
First up, we are getting closer to the release of the next song, Progress, which will be at the end of May. So as a lead-up to that, here is a kitchen-party version of the song from just after it had been written (and when I still had hair).
In other news, saw this today and I literally lol’d. I mean actually.
There’s a huge disparity between the number of times I type “lol” versus the number of times I do indeed laugh out loud. If I was aiming to be more precise in my messaging about the memes that ignite a response in me I would write LSIMH (Laughed Silently In My Head), but this one was the real deal, there was actual sound.
Because it rings true. When I have looked for signs and answers from the great beyond, the above message is pretty close to what I have gotten back. Seems like it is mostly interpretation. And then the application of the interpretation without meditation and introspection leads to… tribulation?
Yes it does. Why is this on my mind this week? Because it was a remarkable week – the kind that makes you feel like decades of work and wonder may just have reached a turning point.
And maybe it’s too early to be going into detail, so I will keep it a bit vague, but let me just say that if there is one thing that I always thought my life would be about, it was the place where the arts/music intersect with what now often gets called social justice. At the time I would have said “music and the poor.” Where the people who are most often pushed to the edges of society would get to access creativity, beauty, and all the good stuff that comes with it.
That was the impulse that initially got me writing and singing songs. It was the same impulse that dragged us into the inner city to get involved in community development.
And when the collapse of our 20-year marriage made it seem as though that dream was all just an illusion, the loss of it made for a particularly intense bewilderment. I no longer knew who I was or what I was supposed to be aiming for.
However, it was the boys who breathed life back into that dream when it looked to be all but over. Mick was only four when he first said we were going to have a band. Then at thirteen Simon demanded that we start busking. Eventually it was me who was being dragged along by them, but I have been loving the ride.
We still live in the inner city, working away at community development, and we still do plenty of music, but the two have never been integrated in the way I had once hoped. But that is what might be changing.
As I mentioned, I’ll provide more details as they get clearer, but it seems as though we may be able to make that dream more of a central focus, the thing that gets all our energy and attention. A dream come true? Hopefully my interpretation and application will this time avoid tribulation on the way to implementation. I wonder…
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I had planned to write about the fact that we are going to lose Simon’s upright bass, and start strategizing about how we can raise some funds for a new one.
See, we had heard that now they are making upright basses out of carbon fiber, which solves the very Winnipeg-esque problem of cracking. It gets pretty dry here, and our acoustic instruments – especially the larger ones – are vulnerable to cracks . But then we saw that carbon fibre basses run in the $10,000 range, so we realized we might have to give this some more thought. Regardless, if you have any leads on upright basses (of any kind!), we would love to hear about it!
