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Days 17 & 18: The only life you have to live is your own

My mind couldn’t get out of obsessive circles these two days. I’ve never thought of myself as an obsessive-minded person – mostly because I associate obsession with artists talking about how obsessed they are with an idea, and I wish to have that problem. But a wise friend pointed out to me, when I was explaining a head-cycle I’m used to, that what I was describing was a classic example of obsessive thinking.

Merriam-Webster’s definition of obsession : a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling

*Neon blinking sign to my head*

When this obsessive thinking is occurring, it feels impossible to pinprick a light-hole through to awareness. Thankfully, I was able to achieve a pinhole at one point, and I realized that I was constantly detaching from my life in order to maintain the possibility of living someone else’s life, or future me’s life. It is this inane distrust in being accepting of the present me because I’m convinced there’s a future, better me and I need to take action now to actualize her. This means, I disassociate and I do not take in the details or the significance of every piece of life that is always surrounding me, wonderfully and overwhelmingly surrounding me.

This pinhole gave me enough intuition to follow an instinct and open a book I’d picked up at a thrift store months ago called The Awakened Eye by Frederick Franck. This is a follow-up book to his The Zen of Seeing, Seeing/Drawing as Meditation which is mentioned as a resource book in The Artist’s Way (serendipity at work). The book is meant to imitate one of Franck’s in-person drawing and meditation workshops. He explains how he began understanding seeing/drawing (his own phrasing) as a Zen practice.

This book really got to me. Franck describes an early childhood experience he had with his grandfather’s stereopticon, a hand-held pair of lenses with two images at the end of it that, when you look through the lenses, become transposed on top of each other creating a 3D image. Franck would look through the stereopticon at the 3D images for hours. He explains how he eventually found that he could choose to have stereopticon vision without the device when he looked at objects or people. “People, when looked at through my mental stereoscope, underwent an extraordinary metamorphosis: each one became the impressively unique, mysterious being he never expected himself to be.” This is the approach Franck uses in his day-long drawing workshops – to treat whatever you are drawing as the most important, all-encompassing thing in the world and draw it exactly as it appears to you. Trust your eyes. He describes imagining the pencil as a seismographic needle, feeling the contours of the leaf or flower you are imitating. When I was drawing, I kept thinking how no one likes when someone else transposes them incorrectly or hurriedly makes a copy of them. And no one likes art of that nature – dishonesty doesn’t work.

This way of thinking and seeing Franck gave to me felt like the first warm day of spring. I had been so exhausted by my obsessive thinking detaching from everything so that future me could have a chance. Even though my drawings did not look as I wanted them to (which wasn’t the point), I have been amazed by the plant-life patterns I have been staring at. Every plant in my vicinity has become important to me when thinking in this way.

There were multiple moments in this “write a song every day��� dedication that I wanted to just vomit and say, “You’re hopeless.” But, the idea of the stereopticon really kept me with myself.

But I continued falling back into the emptying, detaching cycle. The degree of absurdity in my thought-line disturbs me. How is it possible to live with such an emptying perspective? It seems like it shouldn’t be allowed humans to be able to be so distant from themeslves. But, if we didn’t have that degree of self-will, the victory would not be so great.

I also read some of Jung’s Red Book and a few lines that stuck with me are as follows:

“Turn your anger against yourself, since only you stop yourself from looking and from living.”

“‘It seems as if I were more real here. And yet I do not like being here.’”

X

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Day 16: What color is your energy?

Beginning today, I am dedicating myself to writing a song every day until the end of the month. I hadn’t initiated any goal as far as number of songs written when I began this music month. But a friend of mine who is a dedicated jazz pianist and songwriter/producer recommended I give writing one song a day a whirl. He said his experience was whacky and he wrote a lot of shitty songs, but that it forces you to know what you are capable of. So, I’m going the Woody Allen route – make as much shit as possible and some of it will suck but some of it will be gemmy.

Meeting with my therapist today, we talked about a difficult truth-telling that I am facing in my life. I was asking her how I could prepare for this, and she led me through a meditation where she began saying I should feel my feet on the ground and imagine the sun and the moon supporting me daily, the ground supporting me, the trees and insects and birds supporting me. She kept repeating, “Nature is supporting you all of the time.” This made me cry to consider that, no matter what I’m doing, nature is supporting me. Then, she had me imagine a cord of light coming from outer space, going through the top of my head, down my spine, and grounding into the earth’s core. This was my energy core, and she asked me to see what color it was. My immediate vision of it was that it was a neon fuchsia – which seemed significant as I always felt insecure that my favorite color was pink all growing up. {I was wearing my Lady Gaga shirt from the Joanne tour which is bordered in neon hot pink.) My therapist recommended I do this meditation and see what color my core energy changes into daily.

This focusing on my center really led me in writing my song today. I spent a lot of time with that meditation, and by the time I got to the keyboard to write, I felt like I was floating. The chord progressions as well as the melody did not feel stuck or knotted or refusing to come out of their hidey holes. And I was not disassociated from myself while writing the lyrics. So often, I write lyrics from the intellect, not the heart. And I could tell that I liked the song once it was done, it rang true.

Listening to Carole King tonight while cooking, I am struck by how simple and to the point her lyrics are. They have so much heart that the words themselves need only the simplest phrasings. That is a goal.

X

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Day 15: Rain and wind all day in my apartment

In order to make anything, you have to live your life. It’s always been hard for me to live my life and not be dwelling in the fantasy of a future self, a future life. Today was a day of being consistently present, something I hardly ever am. I did yoga on my roof for 45 minutes and didn’t think about when it was going to be over or what if my neighbor sees me or whether I was holding a position poorly. I breathed and noticed the pollen cast out of their bud’s pods on the outdoor carpet I was lying on. There was a phone conversation with a friend who has had more experience in navigating family relationships. She told me that coming home to the self is the greatest journey, and coming home again to the family is the next big adventure. I felt old and weighted down and peaceful all day, like life was finally getting real – that maybe I’d spout out a solid, true line like elder matriarchs in novels. It felt like I was filling my well as The Artist’s Way recommends – giving my artist something to work with. And I didn’t feel guilt or stress about what I should be doing. All afternoon, it rained, lightly at first and then a continuous, steady pour in the evening. The temperatures were cool after days of extreme heat and all my windows were open in my living-room to the bedrooms, so a crosswind was playing all day between my walls. At one point, closed my eyes, heard the rain, felt the wind, and was happy that this was the moment that it was. It felt like a moment had been freed – a moment previously I would have known in my head I should be enjoying, but could not be present for. I didn’t really give a shit about making anything good today. It felt relieving.

X.

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Day 14: Playfulness

Serendipity happened to me today (which is something Julia Cameron says to look out for due to decreasing skepticism in Week 2). Today felt very meandering and confusing – confusing in that I kept getting off my schedule but, when I expected to feel guilty for that, I didn’t. And I kept on wondering why I felt the need to be guilty/why I didn’t feel guilty.

Today, there was a letter that had to be written of a very personal nature, a phone conversation with my best friend about the letter, coffee and conversation with Terri, meeting with my therapist. All elements of health and wellness and moving forward positively in my life, and yet my learned brain was going, “Uh, wait a minute, but what about your schedule?” It felt like learned brain was projecting onto present me the avoidances and bad habits of past me. It’s been very typical for me to avoid observation, self-expression, creation. And I have imprinted this belief that I am always going to choose what’s bad for me and will never want to do what I enjoy – lol, how fucked up is that?

I was thinking a lot about how I hadn’t made any time for just sitting in my schedule. Every moment of time, I meted out with an activity, aside from meditation (which I would not call an activity). Sitting up on my roof in the mattress-heavy heat and sun, with my journal and dulcimer near me, ready to write whenever I felt like it and not feeling like it, I remembered a line of David Lynch’s. It was about how you have to make time in your artistic practice to sit and just think. He said people will think you’re being lazy or self-indulgent, but that doesn’t matter. Without time to think, you won’t catch the ideas.

Then I started thinking about playfulness, and how making art is playing with the universe. Like my friend’s dalmatian and her new golden retriever puppy – the way they tussle around and bite each other’s ears. That’s a nice image. Often, making something feels like I’m a lone baby goat, trying to stand up on its wobbly legs for the first time, all the while doubting I can do it. I am just beginning to understand that I need an open communication with the universe, a play date. Then, serendipity hit. I opened The Artist’s Way and read these two quotes, first thing.

“Creative work is play. It is free speculation using the materials of one’s chosen form.” – Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Creativity is . . . seeing something that doesn’t exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.”

Playfulness. That is what I will be creating in work tomorrow.

I made a weak, unfocused attempt at playfulness or just “going with the flow” during my writing time. I’ve been really discouraged about a melody for this one song I can’t figure out. Out of everything I’ve written over this month, this one feels like it could be the really good one, but the melodies are all wrong. Sitting at the keyboard, I kept trying to feel the song, to understand the mood I wanted for it, and what melody could reflect that. This did lead me to making the difficult decision that half the song’s lyrics had to go. I liked them as a poem a lot, but for a song, the first half just didn’t work – out it went. That felt good. It reminded me of Annie Dillard saying the writing life is about writing, deciding it’s not right, cutting, and writing again.

My feelings are all over the place regarding what I need to focus on. I want training like a motherfucker – guitar, piano, music theory training, vocal training, songwriting training. But I don’t want to use this as an excuse to avoid getting the ideas or playing around. Sometimes, I fear that I haven’t written enough and that I’m wasting time. But it has been important to remind myself that before this month, I cringed at the very thought of writing something or being creative in any way. And three weeks in, I want to write and experiment and play. And realizing that I don’t know enough doesn’t send me into a cry-hole or make me feel like an absolute piece of shit. Now, I’m like, “OK, I don’t know about that, but if I did, it would help me write better songs. So how can I learn it?”

That is progress. At one point I was counting the days I’d taken off in the month and how many days I’d actually worked – and then I reminded myself that that is not the point at all.

I am happy. And this post is rambly. Apropos.

X

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Day 13

Speaking not just to be heard, but because you are saying what you feel is really difficult.

Saying exactly what you want to say is even more difficult.

Stop comparing yourself to others – comparison is an illusion because there is only you in yourself.

Write so many songs, you can’t share them all.

Do not be stingy with sharing songs because you want to appear frigid.

Live a lot and grandly.

Any action is full of observational magic – do not discount actions or tasks.

Remember that you learn necessarily by someone else knowing more than you, and that’s OK.

Time is an illusion. Keep that in the mind’s forefront.

It takes copious energy to resist all quarters of the world’s opinions so you can have your own thoughts – do not deplete the energy stores by worrying over what other people think.

Never let someone else’s bad opinion stop you from doing something you want to.

Never let someone else’s good opinion make you do something you do not want to.

Remember that rules are meant to be broken.

You guarantee stativity by self-flagellating for not being better.

Focus on your work – go to any lengths necessary – use horse-blinders.

Do not dissipate curiosity by envying others’ lives.

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Spotify pulled this up on my radio today. I had never heard it, and suddenly I was crying over my dinner. A tremendous reminder to me of how important a song is.

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#maryoliver #wildgeese #flyawayhome

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Day 12: Just be yourself

I had a really good day. Getting back into my routine felt stabilizing, and the balance I got of chores/caring for plants/home improvements with keeping on with singing lessons and writing while figuring out Pro Tools felt like a reflection of the feeling of today – that great songs come from really looking at, and being with, your own life. Great songs don’t come from having egotistically “interesting” days. My thoughts circulated a lot around social media and wondering why I feel it’s so important to my personal life when it causes me debilitating envy daily. Not being on social media has made it so that I look at my hands and my bedroom side table and my plants rather than other people’s pixelated hands and bedrooms and plants. Looking at everything from a distance has really worn me out.

The one episode of Sex and the City I deigned myself to watch has Charlotte going to acupuncture because she’s heard it can help fertility issues. When protestors outside a window disturb Charlotte from finding her “center” and she goes to complain to the doctor, the doctor marches her back to the acupuncture room, lays her on the table, and says, “Charlotte, the city will never quiet down. You’re going to have to learn to block out that New York noise and listen only to yourself.” Damn, that was a line directly to me. This city is challenging me brutally to know how to quietly and firmly access my center. All day, I was getting caught up in voices in my head, reasons why I can’t be more self-expressive, why I CAN’T just be myself. A good portion of today was me having thoughts, then realizing I was victimizing myself, and trying to remind myself that I choose what I do and what I don’t do. No one else. After having a pretty emotionally volatile dream last night about a family member where I was shouting obscenities about them while they were in the room, the difficult fact presented itself that I’m becoming bitter. Now that I’ve identified bitterness as a side-effect of positive self-work, it’s becoming clearer to me how hard I’m going to have to practice listening to my inner voice because it’s super quiet still.

Over lunch, I read from a new Mary Oliver collection a friend got me as a birthday gift. The first poem is her “Wild Geese” which I will post directly after this. The lines that particularly got me were “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.” The cosmic sign of geese didn’t escape me, as I was just reminiscing in an Artist’s Way exercise that my childhood favorite movie was Fly Away Home (still is). The poem made me think about how much freedom we actually have. Society wants us to believe we aren’t free, that we have to follow codes and ways of doing things. But the truth is, that we are totally free to think and to do whatever we want. Then I thought how often I just totally shut my mind off. It’s like, when I stop doing something, I shut off my brain, almost like a TV break, like a “I’ve worked hard at this other thing, now I can stop thinking.” Like I can’t wait to not have anything to DO. But what if I never got tired of being intrigued, I thought? Tonight when watering my plants, I looked up at the sky and saw a plane’s fuselage trail faithfully trailing it, and it occurred to me how incredible it is that I’m a person on a planet in a universe. Heretofore, I would have perceived that statement as an overly sappy sentiment of “Life is just so amazing” that someone was using as an attempt to make them feel better about a life they secretly thought was shitty. But, actually, it fucking is unbelievable. Life.

These thoughts – the realization that no one else sees what I see or experiences it the way I do –made me feel that what I had to say was important and that I should enjoy saying it. This sentiment guided me to hairspray the shit out of my shaggy mullet, pop on some heels with a Led Zeppelin tee and booty shorts, and sing some Gaga. Then I got to work.

I finished my Udemy Pro Tools First course this morning and was messing around with recording and editing a guitar track this afternoon. This led me into pondering instrumental and tone for a song I’ve had the lyrics to since last week – the one that utilizes Danny Boy as a line and a melodic inspiration. For the first time since receiving it as a gift, I pulled down my mountain dulcimer and began picking out the melody to Danny Boy. That came naturally to me  (trust that, I kept thinking!) Thoughts were percolating and I got a vision for what the song should sound like. This is a first because I never have a sense of what the song should sound like until it sounds like it. I have been thinking about the importance of continuously singing melodies to myself and thinking about music during all of the moments when I technically don’t have to “do anything.”

It is alarming to realize how empty my brain and life have often been out of fear – fear of feeling, fear of rejection, fear of hating myself for a thought that I had. My mother’s way of filling her mind with treasure has been to routinely memorize scripture verses. I think I will direct myself to filling my brain with the treasures and troves of daily visions, poetry, and music. There is so much.

X

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The video that made everything CLICK

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Days 10 & 11: Coming out from under the covers

I began today like a comic-book character – throwing up the covers around my head and saying out loud, “I’m hiding.” It was 11 am and I had been snoozing my alarm in 15-minute increments for over an hour. My schedule-keeping has been very intermittent the past five days, and I had slept in after going out last night to see my friend perform in a drag show and going out with friends afterwards (hence, my forgetting to write about yesterday and needing to piggyback onto today). The hit-and-miss schedule observance was making me dislike myself. But after I’d risen, had coffee, did yoga, and ate something, I was “back on track” when it occurred to me that, rather than maintain the schedule, I needed to break it. It became clear to me that I had somehow been avoiding myself through the very schedule I’d made to ensure I be creative and self-expressive.

It is easier than anyone could imagine to avoid the self through the very activities that are made and meant to investigate the self. I am the queen at utilizing self-help in order to “get closer,” all the while closing my eyes and holding my nose at my internal divine spark. This hit me like the methodical buildup of dropping brick after brick into a pit. It occurred to me that just making the time and doing the action does not grant that the spirit and the heart will accompany.

I happened to watch an interview with Jim Carrey – the of-late open-heart-surgery Jim who speaks about the universe and faith and being yourself instead of characters. A line that that made me think, “There’s no escaping or faking now, that chased me straight home” was this: “When you create yourself to make it, you’re going to have to either let that creation go and take a chance on being loved or hated for who you really are, or you’re going to have to kill who you really are and fall into your grave grasping onto a character that you never were.”

It is terrifying to be yourself and be vocal and audacious – because, for me, all I can think about are all of the people who are going to say I’m a poser or I’m crazy or I’m an idiot or I’m an embarrassment to myself or I’m wrong. Nobody wants to be wrong. I guess I’d be willing to say that most of our unhappiness comes from being afraid to do anything because we’re afraid it will be wrong. Each time I go out and interact with people, I’m newly aware of how terrified I am to be myself. And I am not practiced in being me. My entire life has been built around creating characters and personas that I think will make people like me because it will make them comfortable. Today, it really occurred to me that if I create from that perspective, nothing is going to be compelling.

So, I stepped away from my straight road and walked off into the brush. I asked myself a question my dear friend Joel suggested for the process of re-parenting and discovering who you are. The simple question to speak to your inner child, “What would be fun to do next?” A bath was what sounded nice. I sat in the bath and looked at parts of my body and how they interacted with the skin of the tub. Sleep kept coming for me, but I kept shaking myself back because a) I’m terrified of falling asleep in the bath and b) I knew that this was not the time for my subconscious to take over – I wanted to spend time with my conscious self, the me that I always am hiding from.

Jim said ego is writing a screenplay and the working title is “I’m not good enough.” When I was sitting in the bath, I thought about how, when I pull away from myself because of that fear that I’m actually worthless, not only my brain goes hazed but also my vision. I only see the outlines of things, not their filling, which is a reason for my poor memory of events or surroundings. I was trying to see the filling of both my brain and my eyes in the bath. At one point, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that one of my hairs was experiencing a phenomena of a water droplet gathering at the top of the hair, then traveling down the hair, slowly. Right at the tipping point, when the hair could no longer support the drop, the hair bent suddenly and deposited the drop onto my shoulder.

I kept thinking, “I don’t want my thoughts to be taken up with anybody else but me.” This sounds selfish, but it’s not. My attention has been divided and scattered all over by trying to dictate myself to please other people’s whims. This is not efficient and it serves nobody because it is not actually me. It’s like offering a rag doll to people in place of myself. I said to the universe today, “I want to act, I want to sing, I want my thoughts to be mine, I do not want to give up my brain to anyone else’s world.”

Today’s reality kept sinking in that it is simply a fact that some people will love you and some people will hate you. I have lived under a delusion these 29 years that I can make everybody like me – that if someone doesn’t like me, I’m either doing something wrong or they are. I think it comes from the Christian conception I was raised with that there are those outside of the fold and those inside the fold. You’re either in or out, good or bad, saved or unsaved. This black-and-white philosophy had split my world to a degree where I thought I was either wrong or someone else was. There had been no both/and. And when there’s no both/and, it’s not OK to live in a world where it’s just a fact that people will hate you.

These were my thoughts. Which merged sort of unexpectedly and sweetly with thoughts about singing that have been coursing through my mind the past two days. The concept of singing from the diaphragm has always confused me and has come and gone in my habit of singing. When I watched people explain that you should sing from your gut and that, when you sing, your throat should be totally relaxed, I thought, “HOW. Is that what they actually mean?” Because, to me, technique meant that you constricted or manipulated your throat. Even when I feel like I am singing capably and well, there always is a part of me that feels like I’m missing something.

For me, being able to have a higher registered chest voice and figure out how to smooth the break between head and chest has been a long-standing desire. It definitely has improved over this year of intent practice and Stevie Mackey’s singing course. But right when I thought I’d figured out that issue and gained enough technique to be somewhat happy about my voice, I discovered Cheryl Porter – trained opera singer, YouTube sensation, and regarded as one of the world’s number one vocal coaches. The way she approaches singing with her Cheryl Porter Method is to outright say that it is a physical workout – she does all of her vocal exercise videos and lessons with specialty Cheryl Porter boxing gloves. All throughout the warmups, she says, “All of the burn should be in your abs, never in your throat.” And because she said that, my throat would immediately constrict. It was like the more she talked about how your throat shouldn’t be tight, the only way I knew how to sing suddenly was by straining my voice.

Today, after watching numerous vocal coaches on YouTube explaining how to sing from the diaphragm and implement the abdominal muscles, and finding a Cheryl Porter exercise particularly for diaphragm support, it clicked. When I was doing the exercises and focusing entirely on my diaphragm, I felt the burn. Never before had I understood the burn fully and I never was practicing consistently where I felt the burn. But today I understood that the entirety of singing comes from the abdomen. The technique and the vocal fry and the runs – that all comes from the abdominal muscles. I always thought that I had to implement a grating of the vocal chords by constricting my throat and that the only way I would be able to hit a high note was to focus on my throat handling it. Wrong. Visualization and putting your attention on the correct part of the body is everything – and I’d been putting it elsewhere for a long time. When I tried singing Carole King’s “Natural Woman” focusing solely on my abdomen, I sounded totally different AND I was able to do runs and riffs I wouldn’t have even thought of or been able to just swing into before. Relaxing and letting go while paying attention made so much difference. So, I immediately went and bought Cheryl Porter’s class.

The lesson of singing is similar to the lesson of self-love – to be aware of where you are putting your attention and energy. My goal now is to be aware of how often I speak and act out of fear and compromise, and to STOP. My life will be nothing if I do not make a tireless practice of relaxing, letting go, and following myself and my capabilities.

Stop hiding under the covers.

X

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Day 9: Misery

^ [I still haven’t read this Stephen King even though the premise sounds exactly like something I would be mightily into.] Today was not one for the books . . . or maybe it was, depending on how you view things. It felt like shit – but I guess that means I have a healthy sense of “I don’t like this” or “I love this,” and also that I’m doing something I care about. How fucked up it is to be a human – the very feelings that we avoid and that our learned brain tries to protect us from mean that we are healing. The victory of today was that I did not give up, even though I was feeling Sartre’s nausea hard-core all through my writing process. I felt like a boulder was sitting on top of my stomach, squishing all the juices out into my bloodstream and making me crazy. Today, I worked on a song for 4.5 hours and by the end, I wanted to actually vomit from the melody and how many iterations I had attempted. It was a very difficult day – a day of simultaneously accepting every feeling (one of my Artist’s Way exercises was writing certain affirmations five times over in my morning pages – one I chose was “I am willing to experience very feeling that I have”) and also not accepting the feeling and thought of “YOU SUCK, STOP WRITING NOW.” It was certainly a mental halt I had to exercise to quit myself from writing another shitty melody and thinking, “I want to just go drink a cocktail and go to bed at 7 pm.” I did agree to go out to dinner with friends even though I questioned my intention. But I did feel like I was going crazy and needed to get out of the house. They are all creatives that I trust. Sometimes, I think my desire to talk to fellow makers is avoidance when really it is solidarity and a critical reminder of “You are not the only person who feels this way.” My one friend said, “You know, as a creative, it’s like you cry and hit things and then you’re happy, and then you cry and hit things again. It’s a never-ending cycle.” That made me relax and accept my day.

But I still felt sick by the end of today. I’m so desperate to write a great melody and every melody I sing sounds like a repeat track I’ve had in my brain since I was 10. It’s embarrassing and really hard to persist in writing when the melodies feel like childhood-factory-churned bullshit. I’m considering spending the rest of my 2nd into third week studying music theory and trying to get an elementary grasp of how to put a song together because I feel like I’m writing blind. And I’m really sick of writing that way. I’ve been debating if doing something like this is avoiding writing – but I also feel like that’s a learned expectation. I feel good about the decision because it feels like if I just keep persisting in writing, I’m making writing music a matter of principle rather than of practicality and actuality. I do think that I will keep writing lyrics through this intensified study time because that is something I feel competent and actualized in right now, and it also will serve as my means of expression regardless of whether I’m putting music to it yet.

Does anyone have any writing woes they want to share? I know you do. Please share them with me because I feel pretty lonely and pathetic in my songwriting attempts right now.

Much love x

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Day 8: Please, how do I write melodies that make humans feel?

Here are thoughts of today, in no special or edited order.

Melodies are one of the hardest things to come by. I spent most of my writing time today trying to write a really good melody – one that grips you by the heart, one that reminds you of something, one that settles you into memories, sitting down on the back-porch with someone with whom you’ve been at war, but you are calling truce for a night because it’s Christmas. I wrote a melody and chord progression that were cool, a very creepy sound with a Joan Baez-esque vocal. But I knew it was not right for this song. That alone is big progress for me – to have something that’s cool and to admit that it’s not right, and to leave it alone. So much of the time, I am trying to write something that will catch attention, not paying attention to what sounds the song is asking me to find in order for it to express. The more I’m writing, the more I am realizing this process is relational. I can’t coerce the song into being, I can’t trick it and give it a face it doesn’t recognize itself in. The amount of specificity required, the degree of honesty with yourself and with the song and with the Out There, the amount of attention required – all of these were matters I didn’t even take into hand at all when I was writing before. That, most likely, is why I did not enjoy the writing process very much.

A leading direction for this particular piece is the song “Danny Boy” as the opening phrase “Oh Danny boy” came to mind, out of the blue and suddenly, when I was writing the lyrics. It seemed significant, so I included the first line of the “Irish” standard (which I learned through research is a collab – the tune is set to an Irish standard but the original lyrics were written by a British lawyer and songwriter). The melody of “Danny Boy” was something I was listening to a lot when trying to write a melody today. I was primarily listening to Johnny Cash’s version of the song and was plunking out the melody on the keyboard to see what key it was in and to see what the intervals and shapes of the melody were. My question was, “How in heck do you write a melody that makes you cry?” As I was singing, I was crying – there was no other music or accompaniment other than my plunking out the notes. Even when I wasn’t singing words, just singing the melody, I was crying. How to get there? I want to understand the rhythms, repetitions, patterns of a melody that really make a human feel.

I am seeking. I feel so far from the Hall of Gifted – so far from those who have written the myriads of incredible melodies and memorable songs over the years. But I am learning how to feel humble excitement rather than shitty jealousy at their successes. I am learning how to be ecstatic that I get to sit at their feet and study.

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Day 7: Alicia Keys and Melodies

I felt different today. Last night, the fingernails of self-doubt and self-hate were creeping toward my jugular, trying to get full fingers gripping. To head that off, I decided my schedule needed a shift. The Artist’s Way came first thing in the morning for two hours. I’m on Week 2 which is about recovering a sense of identity. One of the weekly exercises is to read the Basic Principles of creativity that Julia Cameron shares at the start of the book. I’ll copy some of the most pertinent ones for my mental state today:

-Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is pure energy: pure creative energy

-Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.

-It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity

That last one seemed written for me. It often feels dangerous and unnatural for me to create because my mind immediately goes to my own imagined lacks – lack of knowledge, lack of ability, lack of experience, lack of interesting brain function.

Today I had to practice keeping my brain focused on what is already there rather than what is missing. My friend Joel has a line that I utilize as a mantra often: You already have everything that you need. I’ve missed out on so many hours of songwriting and singing over my life because of the mindset of lack – “I need to have a vocal coach before I can sing.” “I need to learn music theory before I can write anything.” “I need to have more life experiences before I can write.” Even though I know that there is a lot I need to learn in order to write more advanced music, I really am trying to not allow those thoughts to enter and distract me when writing this month.

Thinking of myself as a part of nature, and inherently connected to creativity as a creation myself, helped me. I spent a lot of time on the roof with my plants – scanning their dirty beds to check for newcomers from the ether regions. Watering them and paying attention to them made my life important to me today.

It’s been a sort of pleasant byproduct that as I get on YouTube to find different vocal exercise videos, I catch suggested videos in my peripheral and, sometimes, meander over there. Today, I watched one of Alicia Keys reading a passage from her book More Myself. She was talking about the difference between a mindset of lack versus a mindset of abundance. It was a very similar concept to Dr. Joe Dispenza’s about thinking and feeling abundance in order to bring it to yourself. That was another time-marker today that assisted me to stop going to a mindset of lack.

Last night, I was writing down memories to fill my “Hall of Champions” – another exercise in The Artist’s Way where you keep detailed accounts you remember of people who supported you creatively and affirmations you have received. One of the people I wrote about was my guitar teacher when I used to live in Lancaster, Don Peris. [He and his wife have a band called “The Innocence Mission” – they make beautiful work.] And I recalled how I used to write when I was taking lessons with Don and showing him my work weekly. I typically would write the lyrics out, like a free-standing poem, write the guitar part separately to focus solely on instrumental embellishments, then stitch them together with the melody. I’d eventually abandoned this method after an old bandmate told me it was evident my songs were written separately, and I should write lyrics/music simultaneously.

Upon reflection last night, after emotionally recalling my times with Don, I decided to try writing in that old way again. I had been trying to write simultaneously this past week, and all I was getting were mediocre lyrics and shoddy melodies. Up until today, I had been content thinking, “Well, at least I’m trying.” But after listening to Louise Goffin and Paul Zollo’s “The Great Song Adventure” podcast episode interviewing Sonny West, I was caught by Sonny saying you should write every song as if it was your best. He said:

What I want and what I get is two different things. But what I want is a song that people will know all over the country, all over the world. That’s what I’m looking for. Now, I don’t find it. But it’s there. I don’t want to just say, ‘I wrote 10 songs today’ . . . I don’t care to do that.”

That translated to me as self-belief. If you approach a songwriting session thinking, “Uuuuggghh, OK, I guess I’ll try to eke something out,” that’s an energy you’re putting forth into the quantum field that will yield the same apathy. But if you come to the session thinking, “OK, this is my next hit,” that’s a different energy entirely.

Another realization today was that in my writing times, I had completely been forgetting about/ignoring the Higher Power. Julia Cameron calls it “the Great Creator.” Whatever force and entity that is, I had been not treating it as a factor at all. The responsibility and stress and need were all on my shoulders. I realized how arrogant I had been acting in the writing process. So, I did as Julia Cameron had suggested, and put a sign on my keyboard that says: “Great Creator, I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality.” That idea of a conduit came again.

So, before beginning to write lyrics today, I prayed, asking for humility and courage and endurance. I prayed the Great Creator would speak through me to say whatever needed to be said. And the entire process felt different. It felt like staring something dead in the eye rather than passing by it swiftly, catching bare glimpses with peripheral vision. It felt like purpose and possibility. It felt like I was digging around, not skimming the surface. And it didn’t feel frightening, but rather, calming. Often when I’m writing, I feel like a failed version of that one writer who said he tries to scare himself into writing, rushing around his day, running his errands, and bashing into his study to get something down. I understand how that could work, but my method of that was resulting in laziness rather than heightened blood pressure and creative sparks.

I was really happy with the lyrics, although, immediately after writing them, I wondered, “What effect is this going to have on the world? Am I wasting my time?” But I reminded myself, “Self-healing is the best way to help others.” And as Sonny West put it, songwriting is a form of therapy.

When I began writing the instrumental, I didn’t throw myself blindly and sweatily into it. I picked a key that felt good for my range; I looked up a list of the most popular pop keys; I read an article about most typical chord progressions. My ego was screaming, “NO! You need to be ORIGINAL! Don’t do what everyone else does!” But I recalled Don saying, “Simplicity is best.” And instead of merely meandering around desperately for a melody, I plunked out Adele’s melody from “Someone Like You” in the key I was writing in, trying to feel the repetitions and the attractive intervals, trying to comprehend what a good melody is.

Today didn’t just feel vague and formless. It had elements of formlessness with clear-cut decisions, creating my form for the process for creation.

I need to take a shower and shave. That will feel good. Melody will be a focus for me tomorrow.

Night xxx

[iwillnotburnmyjournals]

They’re so fucking cool. My brain exploded.