Gratitudes Thanksgiving 2015

I made it a practice to write Gratitudes instead of New Year's resolutions beginning several years ago. I find this practice very challenging this year, after a year in which I pretty much lost everything. Literally. I won't bore you with a list; the highlights include losing my home and most of what I used to own; leave it at that for now. Suffice to say, I feel challenged this year to be grateful. Writing Gratitudes cannot be easy: while it's easy to be grateful when you're at a feast, it's far more difficult to find gratitude when you have nothing. But that's when it really counts.

So.

The list of my circle of close friends who have helped me immensely in this past year—in multiple ways on multiple fronts, some big, some small, every little piece adding up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts—is a long list full of wonderful people. I'm challenged to make a full list, because I don't want to leave any names off accidentally. So please, all of you, accept my profound and eternal thanks. Thank you. THANK YOU.

I'm grateful to have what I have left, for what I have now, every little piece of it. I have a vardo, a nomad's wagon to live in, and destinations to go and visit, and a road to travel. If the folk in one town start to be a problem, there's always another town own the road.

I had a really good Thanksgiving here in CA with best friend and best friend's family and circle of friends. Not merely a great food feast, but good conviviality and lots of excellent moments of laughter and music. Thank you.

There are people I think of as family. My family-of-choice. Most of them know who they are. I'm grateful you're in my life. Thank you.

I'm grateful simply to be alive. There have been several occasions in recent years when that was no sure thing. There have been a few times in this past, difficult year, when I've come close to that edge. My mental and physical health have been fragile, or, to be blunt, on some occasions this past summer, outright broken. I've spent time these past few weeks on the road rebuilding the equilibrium and stamina lost to several months of trauma that, to be blunt, not everyone I know could have survived. Nor could I have, without immense support from my closest friends. Thank you.

I'm still here. I want to be here. The future is no more certain now that it has been. I have no answers. Life is lived very much day to day. Don't ask for more than that. And thank you.

Nothing is resolved. The road is not closed. I will have no truck with false or toxic hope. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, and I've become a hardcore realist. I wait and see what develops. I will not pretend to embrace optimistic resolutions I do not feel, or believe, or have any faith in. Neither will I close myself to grace. I am always open to grace, and I have received many, many gifts. I am still here.

Thank you.

Songwriting: American Roads

Lost Roads (detail), 2011 ongoing

In the past few weeks I've written three new songs, each in a completely different style. Two of them are fully notated for voice and piano, the third is a folk/country song, a kind of shuffle, called "American Roads." I wrote the basic idea for the lyrics a year ago, and set it aside for awhile.

I have three or four additional lyrics in my notebook that are finished and ready to be set to music; plus many more still being worked on. I decided to keep a lyric-writing notebook a year or so ago, after completing Heartlands and continuing to write new songs. With "American Roads," I now have five or six new songs completed and ready to record. That's starting to feel like an album, or at least an EP. I gather them together as they gradually finish themselves, and perhaps will eventually publish a songbook and an album.

Of the three recent songs, one gave me a very difficult time. It took a great deal of work to hammer it into shape, and I felt despair at the writing more than once. In a bit of unintended irony, when it was finished, I gave it the name "Endless." I started out with an idea, and went with it, got a ways into it, then felt stuck. Then there was a breakthrough, a eureka! moment when I figured out what was needed to finish the song. I then had to go back and rewrite the beginning, and still the ending took a long time to get just right. I can look back on it now, and say, this song is actually pretty good. Perhaps only I will ever see the seams where I made changes and fixes.

Meanwhile, in the middle of that difficult process, I suddenly broke away for an afternoon and a completely different song emerged, in a completely different style. "Still/Here" took less than two hours to write down, start to finish, the words and the music emerging at the same time. I only had to change one or two details, in the end, to finish it up and get it done. The results are good, and I've already heard several people say they like this song a lot. It will get performed soon, one way or another. I look forward to that.

During the process of writing these songs, looking at my own creative process, I noted that this writing took so much effort that I was on;y able to sit down and write every other day. One day on, one day of rest, one day on, one day of rest, and so forth. I don't know if that pattern will continue, whether or not it's part of the new normal.

Then I sat down to write "American Roads." As I said, I completely rewrote the lyrics, then sketched out the basic chord changes, melodies, and harmonic ideas. That was all I could get done in one day. I've written this piece as a lead sheet, just melody, chords, and words. The typical song lead sheet, what you find in The Real Book or on a chart for a studio recording session. It's all you get for a lot of folk music, after all, and this song is definitely within my folksong writing zone. With a nod to light country shuffle in it as well.

Here are the first verse and refrain. (Actually, the song structure is two verses and a refrain every time. Technically speaking, then, that's one verse repeated since the pattern is the same.)

•

Put the kettle on the Coleman
and fire up the truck
load up the blankets and the tent
and turn the radio on

I got this urge for going
right off the deep blue end
a corner of a long sky road
going round a bend

Refrain:
American Roads
winding through the heart
some place I’ve never been
American Roads
open wide for me
and take me home again

•

When I was rewriting the lyrics, I noticed that my original idea had two kinds of lyrical elements: first, specific moments, with specific references to places and activities I've experienced on various roadtrips; and second, a more familiar trope found in many folk, bluegrass and country songs, all derived from old-timey roots-music threads, which were thoughts about home and rootlessness, roaming and yearning for home. So when I was rewriting, for each set of two verses before the refrain, the first verse is specific, the second verse more philosophic and universal.

There's also a twist at the end, with a repeated refrain with new words that take the song off in another direction. Common practice in folk covers.

So, there you have. Three new songs in a couple of weeks. Very satisfying.

I have a lot of other tasks to deal with for the next few weeks, and I wrote these to meet an audition and performance deadline. I always write well on deadline. Having a fixed target often gets my creative juices flowing. But at the moment I'm in the mood to keep going, keep writing, see what happens. Perhaps I'll work some more on more songs this coming week, in between other creative projects and Things To Do that I must get done.

Oh, by the way, I do take requests.

Not Feeling Like It, But Doing It Anyway

Whatever "it" may be.

There's a lot of sentiment and tribal-level excuses of mediocrity that float around as "memes," you know, those viral posters and quote sayings you find everywhere on the internet, especially on social media like FaceBook. Mostly they go about as deep as they go wide.

In an interview with poet William Bronk, the question is inevitably asked, "How do you work?" It's a question everyone always wants to know the answer to, although the answer almost always remains mysterious. The creative process is more like green growing things than engineering, after all: there are always elements of unpredictability and unknowing.

Interviewer: How much do you revise?

William Bronk: I revise very little. And the revisions are not really re-writings at all. In most workshops and creative writing classes you’re advised to re-write and re-write. If the poem isn’t there there’s no point in trying to write it. And if the poem is there, leave it alone. Very frequently I think that I’m improving something. I make the improvements and then the next day realize that it was right the first time. Leave it alone.

Awhile ago, I objected to a poet telling a classroom workshop that it takes maybe sixty drafts to complete a poem. I still think that's the most wrongheaded, stupidest piece of writing advice ever given to a classroom of poets. William Bronk would very likely agree with me. Based on what he says here, that is, which closely echoes my own experience and practice.

I just returned home from a three-week roadtrip, and, following the usual couple of days of resting after the last push of driving, find myself ready to re-engage and re-assess. This roadtrip I didn't write as much as I usually do. I barely wrote at all in the journal. I wrote a few song lyrics, one finished one plus several fragments. I wrote bits and pieces of reflective writing and posted them on FaceBook.

(Yes, I've finally joined FaceBook. I resisted for years, but then joined a couple of months ago. My rationale is that I am basically using it as a tool of self-marketing for the music composition and photography businesses. It's actually part of my business plan. Nonetheless, you won't catch me posting what I'm having for dinner, or with who, unless it's related to arts business. I do find FB convenient for short-form blogging, quick and easy and usually only a couple of paragraphs. And yes, I do admit its usefulness for connecting with people I'm working with on various current projects.)

The first part of the trip was all about going to the quadrennial GALA Festival, and both listening to lots of choral music and featuring the premiere at GALA of my own piece Heartlands. I'm pleased to say that all went very well. There were a few minor logistical problems involving my personal post-surgery disabilities, but overall it was a fantastic, positive experience. One or two concerts blew me away. And my own concert was all I'd hoped for, and more. (More on all that as I have time to integrate and write about it.)

The latter part of the roadtrip, I mostly focused on making video and photographs. Frankly. after the run-up to the concert premieres of Heartlands, and GALA, I was mentally drained, emotionally burned out, physically exhausted, spiritually tired, I was coming down from months of stress, and pretty blank some days. There was also grieving involved, as one of my best friends, Erick Jonasson, died very suddenly, at too young an age, and for no really good reason. We, his friends, are all reeling from that. All of this colored the last part of the roadtrip, and even though I captured some very good video and photography (I believe) during the rest of the roadtrip, I was often either blank or overly-emotional, and just wanted to get home. I even cut short some of my planned stops in National Parks, as they were just too much to take on, and I needed to get home. The last two full days of long drives were no more than a blur, to be endured, and I wrote very little. Erick was the person who once pointed out to me that I do some of my best thinking, and writing, on these roadtrips out into the West; and that remains true. Yet the end of this trip consisted of coming down from the incredible stresses and joys and excitements and terrors of preceding months, and also reeling from Erick's passing over. So I wasn't as fruitful as usual while on the road. I was ready to be home, this time.

It doesn't matter. Here I am, getting back on that horse, doing things this week because they must be done, not because I want to do them. Actually, I do want to do things. I do want to stay busy. I know that keeping busy making art is one of my best ways to cope, as well as to process and integrate events. Things are changing in my life, and I have a business plan, and I still have a lot of Things To Do. (Patience, patience.)

But it also doesn't matter that this roadtrip wasn't a "vacation." It was never intended to be one. Yes, I did seek out and find some recharging solitary time out in the desert silence. Yes, I did have a successful concert at GALA. Yes, I did bring home new video footage and many new photographs. All of these are on the level of a "working vacation." Part of the overall business plan. So I wasn't just taking a vacation, and I had never planned to.

What this was, and this was only intensified after GALA, was pilgrimage. My roadtrips tend to be pilgrimages much more than vacations. I'm not even sure that I can take a vacation, except in small moments here and there. I recall that John D. McDonald had his character Travis McGee state that he intended to retire as frequently as possible. I get my vacations on those moments when I stop and do nothing. They last minutes or hours, and like the Zen masters encourage us to do, that's all that I am doing in those moments. It's active, not passive. I am for those moments actively doing nothing. And that is my vacation recharge. Then I get back in the saddle and ride on, metaphorically and often literally.

I have more to integrate, and write about, regarding this most recent roadtrip. And about GALA. And about Erick—who I hear laughing at me, somewhere there from the Summerlands. I hear him laughing at me because of some of the work he has now left me to do. (Gee, thanks.) I am not grudging, I am willing. It's all part of the new fabric.

And I realize: some fundamental things in my life are in the process of changing, or already have. My second night home I dreamed of the desert, of lightning and rain, and of the gods and heroes that ride the rainbow. Whatever journey begins now, here and now, for once I feel little fear but mostly anticipation.

Driving

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.

Lost Roads

(Click on image for larger version.)

This is an initial sketch for a larger piece that I will be working on over the next few months. It is intended to be a large collage of individual images presented in high-contrast B&W. Each frame is a 4x6 image in its own right, which could stand on its own.

I began making the individual photos for this series when on my last roadtrip out West. I have always taken photos of the surrounding lands while driving the highways, but this trip I began to consciously take images out the windshield of the road ahead. That is becoming its own series, but it also gave me the idea, crystallized on the long drive home, of this new multi-image single piece, to be titled Lost Roads. This initial sketch is just some of the images that I've chosen to use for the final, large piece.

The Road to the Western Lands 2

Songwriting: New Songs

When I was traveling on my most recent roadtrip out West, I decided to continue to write song lyrics. Some of the places I visited inspired me, but just as important was the integrative thinking and meditating I was doing while driving. I do some of my best personal sorting, my work on myself, when I'm on a roadtrip. I think best when I'm in motion, whether it's walking or driving. The physical movement connects my head and my heart, and often things come clear in that mode that would never do so if I was just sitting there at my writing table cogitating. That's because thought isn't just intellectual, for me, it's physical. Memory and psychology are in the body, not floating above it.

While I was on the road, I wrote lyrics for about 6 songs. Two of them are basically done, another two I finished after returning home, and two others are still percolating.

I am developing the work habit of keeping a songwriting journal, which is a separate notebook that I copy lyrics into. Some I rewrite as I copy them from my pocket notebook. Others I am just putting in there as fragments, assuming that I will later sit down and rewrite them into something more coherent. That's how "The Power of Love" ended up being written, and rewritten. The songs I already completed I just copied in as finished lyrics, so they are in there. The next step will be to set them to music.

I find myself hearing the melody as I read the words. That's the same way I've been writing songs all along. Some melodic line always seems to emerge from the words, or alongside the words, when they emerge simultaneously. I have another little pocket notebook with music staff lines in it, to write down musical fragments when I hear them with my inner ear. (In various spiritual traditions, they talk about the Third Eye, which is the sixth chakra, on the forehead between the brows, the seat of intuition, and of the reasoning, enlightened mind. I think that there is also a Third Ear, for musical intuition, and all that implies.)

I am beginning to envision writing an entire album's worth of new songs. Then in a few months perhaps I can take them into the studio and record them. (Playing most of the instruments myself, certainly lots of Stick, bass, and keyboards, which I can play myself. One song would love to have some Hammond B3 organ on it, too.) I don't know when or how this will come to fruition, but it is starting to feel like a good next project to work on. Just keep writing songs. Gather them together in sheaves and throw them to the winds. Share them with the world.

These plans could take awhile to come to fruition. Meanwhile, just keep writing. Always keep writing.

The Road to the Western Lands 1

During this just-completed roadtrip I made a lot of grab-shots out the windows of the truck, and of the road ahead of the windshield. Each roadtrip is a bit different, and different in what calls to me imagistically as well. This trip, I found myself interested in photographing the road: the journey itself. The icon of the classic two-lane blacktop highway passing across the middle of desolate nowheres. I made this kind of photo again and again throughout my month-long travels, on all kinds of roads, under many kinds of conditions.

Consider this the beginning of a series.

Ocotillo Flowers

Ocotillo Flowers

At Joshua Tree National Park, where I camped for two nights, there had been a relatively wet fall, so many of the cacti were blooming this mild winter. The ocotillo grove, which is one my favorite spots in the Park, had several stands that were flowering. Long conical red flowers at the ends of the long cactus stalks, some of the stands covered in small green leaves. Ocotillo are dramatic, standing up to 20 feet high, stalks growing from a central taproot point. They bend to the prevailing wind over time, giving them a windswept look even when the day is calm.

I made this drawing on my iPad, with the ArtRage app, using one of the photos I made that afternoon as a reference image. Still, I like the more impressionistic result. I didn't try to be too realistic about the background, or the area around the ocotillo, suggesting more than depicting the surrounding dirt and stands of sage. Still, anyone who's been to the Southwest will recognize the colors, the sky, the desert scene, and the ocotillo.

I did this drawing in several layers, exploring the app's Layers feature for the first time. The cactus and its sun-shadow are foregrounded, while other layers were built up for the sky, the distant line of mountains, and the foreground dirt with its loose jumble of rocks. I used several different tools this time, two different kinds of brushes, pastels, a little airbrush, and the paint roller. I like broad strokes for this kind of drawing, and I think the paint roller made an interesting sky gradient, built up in several thicknesses on different layers. more subtle to create than the end result appears. This kind of drawing/painting painting is about underpainting, building up color in layers, so that subtle effects show through. It took me awhile, but I like the finished result.

Glass Walls

Formless, incoherent, like seeing at a distance
through a glass wall the world ticks on, tides in, tides out,
flowing between ocean and lens, never at rest,
never tranquil, never ceasing. So go the waves.

A month of driving, travel, seeing new places,
seeing old faces, seeing the dead walking through
the living, all of it seen through a glass wall.
You hoped for enlightenment, that fizzy detachment
in which the opened heart engages with suffering
by neither causing nor rejecting. Instead, so obvious,
it's depression, the remembered glass wall of uncaring,
not unknowing. Neither an embrace of mystery nor
a carapace of dejected self-analysis, it's just blah.
Where's the fizz of life? That snowstorm seems to have it,
gathering and drifting in high riverine canyon winds,
till they bite the road and block it, but you don't care.
Is a depression a distraction from worry? Is it a gift?
I don't know. I embrace the few moments where
the world embraced me. And they were few. Only now
realizing how distanced from the foam I've been,
another bleak morning, snowless, cold, bitter winded,
only now knowing what you hoped was satori was only sorrow.

There's a small buoy inside my inner sea, holding on
to anchorage while storm waves surge around.
There's a small boy inside whose horror resurges
unabating, groundswelled by the belly scar he doesn't
understand. A repeating chorus of what the hell happened
to me. A line of scar on his perfect belly, glowing white
where the angel slit him open with the burning fiery sword.
All these sensations surrounding surgical terror, shunted aside
for later; now later has become now. Horror, terror, grief, death,
loss, confusion, a welter of wounds flying thick into memory,
feelings you didn't have time for when all your effort went into
just daily survival, bubble around your feet, stinking of sea-wrack.
Perhaps these glass walls help you from feeling too much, too fast.

So the world howls when I cannot. Winds blow across
the headlands; one night in Nevada they howled like the dead
around the edges of my hotel room door, alkali, dessicant.
The dry bones of the tormented dead sifted ash
dry lake dust seeping in. That night sleep was on vacation.
Another hellride down the Sierras, road twisting away
from the headlights, you'd stop and sleep if it wasn't so cold,
but the two-lane winds away till late, leaving you vibrating
once again on valley floor. In the Basin and Range
there are no oases, just desert sojourns. Normally
that's welcome, a place to stop and listen to silence.
The glass wall between me and world, that I took for transparent,
was a parfait of silence, screams, and silence, layered between
my eyes and desert silence. Now I've nothing to show for it.

What a waste. Did I return refreshed, vacationed, relaxed,
recharged? I feel hollowed, edged far too close to the wind howl,
well aware that if I could only summon the caring I'd dissolve
into puddles of grief. But the glass wall. No shouting
in either cathedral or cemetery gloom, it's unseemly.
In Taos and Albuquerque we wandered through cathedral
gift shops, feeling for once at home. I bought some portable
saints to travel with, alongside the Ganesha statue with his club,
the bronze Buddha found at a new Mexico thrift store.
I'm not particular about my saints. I'll call eclectically on every
source of solace and protection, the thousand little gods,
those interfacial masks between us and silent godhead.
I'm a pragmatic witch, going with whatever works. No loyalty
to any path but the one I find my feet on. Glass walls keep me
from knowing what I was feeling till, spelunking, I write it all down.
Now shudders ripple through me, I cough for the first time all winter.

Lucite, perspex, indifferent vitrine, inches of plexiglass
holding out the sea from waterclap. This was no vacation,
despite desire, or desert silence, despite the wind at ocean's boom.
Instead, archaeology. The recovery of artifacts of dying,
implements of torture, a grid of bones amidst fossilized grain.
If I plant those archaic seeds, I'll fly apart. Is depression so bad,
if it keeps you from incessant weeping? If I had the will I'd break
these walls apart. Perhaps you excavate these petroglyphic bones
by starting with the sills, chipping away till the glass loosens.
Tilts out of its frame the way a painting falls at any museum,
shocked silence after whisper of archaic canvas reaches floor tiles.

Whatever. I need to come back to life. There were moments.
Afternoon light on canyon walls at Zion, dappled by clouds.
The hour around sunset at Pescadero, where waves swirled
around pelagic outcrops ancient in ancient light and incoming tide.
There was a lot of wind. End of the snowbound road at jackson Lake,
whitewalled by the plows, white snow mists cloaking the mountains,
lake frozen and drifted, white on white, every white, even these pines.
Tea and snacks by the adobe fireplace and heavy beams at the Taos Inn,
an hour after brushing by bighorn sheep running across the canyon rim.
Somewhere on a snowbound Wyoming fenceline, bald eagles and ravens
perched side by side, getting along. Sunlight converted into wine.
Frozen wild berries under naked aspen boughs. Scent of juniper and pine.
After all, despite dense inner weeds, I have come through, I have survived.

Mornings Are For Writing

As usual, on this roadtrip that I am on this winter—traveling to the Southwest, then California, then back through the northern Rocky Mountains—when I feel like writing, I do so in my handwritten journal. It's more portable than any technological aid, in that I can just open it up and write. I do now have iPad and iPhone, but these do not have keyboards that allow me to type as fast as the words come; one must be more deliberate, more thoughtful, less spontaneous. So as usual I am writing in my journal, when I feel like writing. Usually a journal entry or poem—or, these days, a song lyric—every few days. I have never been a daily diarist; I usually only write when I have something I want to say, or transcribe, or just get down in words.

One of the facets of my creative process that has become clear to me on this roadtrip is less a revelation than a crystallization of tendencies already known, just not codified or stated clearly, before.

Mornings are for writing. The rest of the day is for more non-verbal art-making.

On a roadtrip, that usually means photography, video, maybe a little music-making. But mornings are for writing.

•

I have now been on the road a full month, with another week to go. I've had extended visits with friends, long stays where I could relax and just be on vacation. This is the first major roadtrip since my surgery last summer. It was a bit of a risk, as I didn't really know if I was up to the challenge. Dealing with the ostomy bag while traveling has often been easy and unproblematic; a few times it's been irritating, once or twice it's been downright annoying. I change the appliance every three or four days, as usual, no matter where I am; staying for a week with a friend means changing it twice. When I am irritated with the bag, it's usually because I'm out trying to hike or work on my photography, and it gets in the way.

There have been a few days of complete meltdown, emotionally. One important goal of this trip has been to have a real vacation—to return refreshed, relaxed, and recharged—and that has sometimes been a challenge. Some days I have questioned why I ever left home. But mostly I am indeed getting refreshed, mentally and spiritually, after the long painful time preceding, when I was sick unto death, had a few near-death moments, the first surgery, and recovery. What I've come to realize is that the emotional meltdowns are mostly, not entirely but mostly, the resurgence of emotions I didn't have time for, earlier, when mere survival was more urgent.

It's a sign that in fact I am relaxing, that these feelings should be safe to re-emerge. No few of them have been of the category of Oh my god they cut me open and took out my colon! That sort of thing. There is grief tangled up in there, and lots of upset coming from the basic-self level: the youngest inner self who has been unable to understand such violation. So I have spent a lot of time with basic self, reassuring, doing Reiki, etc. So far, so good.

I am getting a lot more physical exercise than I have in years—and I'm able to do so, which please me enormously. I can hike with cameras all day long, and just be "normal tired" at the end of the day, not "illness tired," which often left me so exhausted it took four days to recover. On this roadtrip I have done a lot of hiking, with no ill effect. One day I spent wandering all over San Francisco, carrying a backpack full of camera gear, and was tired, but not desperately so; and I was fine the following morning. So physical changes are continuing, and many of these are good changes.

•

Throughout this roadtrip, I have often felt on the edge of a creative surge: something lingering just around the corner, just out of sight, wanting to emerge. In fact, it hasn't emerged, and has probably been wiped out a few times by social occasions and by general travel tiredness. Or in fact it has already emerged, but not in an anticipated form, but some other form. I have written a couple of poems, a couple of song lyrics, a fragment or two of music. I have practiced my own songs, written prior to the roadtrip, which I need to perform when I get back home. I have struggled a great deal on this trip with impatience and expectations. I genuinely don't have the same kind of toxic expectations I used to have; nonetheless, I have been short-tempered with delays, or when presented with abject stupidity from those around me. A little short-tempered about thoughtless or inattentive behavior from other drivers, other people. That was really starting to build up towards the end of my California stay. Now that I've been back in the empty desert for a couple of days, much of it has again fallen away.

Yet I realize now that what I am really impatient with is complacency, with inattention, with those who choose to march along with the status quo, rather than work to make the world a finer place. Starting with themselves, by enacting right action, by embodying right livelihood. I have found myself being very much more judgmental than I usually am, than I like to be. It's rooted in my knowledge of my own mortality: We're only here for a short while, folks, so quit wasting time and get busy. If I have become a kind of activist again, it's because I've been reminded, through my own brushes with death, just how urgent and necessary taking action is. It always has been. Most people have the luxury of being able to ignore their own mortality, to be complacent with their status quo lives—till confronted with change, death, and necessary wisdom. How often I have become impatient simply with willful ignorance, with the desire to deny what's right in front of us! I admit it. I own it. It doesn't have to be a problem. It just is. I feel sad at how many people choose never to awaken. I suppose this is one of the emotions I have been releasing, on those darker days emotionally that I've been experiencing: this nearly-judgmental desire to get people to just Wake Up. It causes me more suffering than I'd like. I'm working on it.

•

I have been full of doubts. The illness and surgery gave big hits to my certainties, to my sense of self, to my self-confidence, even to my self-esteem. I still feel like I am having to rediscover everything I once thought I knew, to examine it all over again, and see if any of it still works for me. Much of it doesn't.

I wrote the following some weeks ago, when I was still in New Mexico, revisiting places that had once meant a lot to me, when I lived near Taos, when I spent time around the region:

I don't know how I feel about my photo/video work this trip. I feel detached and disconnected sometimes. I feel more connected when I'm by myself, in the middle of nowhere, working alone, in the silence. That's how I'm going to try to spend the day today. I will wanter the land a couple of times today, revisiting and making images. It's necessary for me to be alone in the desert silence, to make good images—maybe that's not strictly true, but it's what I feel today.

I am uncertain if any of my art is any good. That's been a growing feeling lately. Life is very uncertain lately, and so is art.

Nonetheless it seems that other people like my art, sometimes a lot. So for now I can't be objective and assess my art for myself. Which I guess is some kind of normal. The problem is, what to trust.

The only thing I can think of to do is: just keep doing it. Keep making images. Keep making video, keep making art. Just keep producing art, keep going. Figure the rest of it out later.

Keep going on this roadtrip, keep scattering images as I go. Keep stopping for beauty, keep capturing beauty. I think of Ansel Adams on his various roadtrips, and I feel a kinship there. We continue to have a lot in common: music, photography, prolific art-making, forward momentum.

I never want to stop. Retirement is a stupid idea. I might slow down at times, but never stop. I want to be making art the day I die.

•

A few days later, when I was doing photography in Zion National Park in UT, after having spent the night in Page, AZ, then driving across the desert, I wrote:

Today a creative gear-shift day. Started out with poems, then when I began taking photos, the words slowed and dried up. Spent most of the day driving and making images.

And I got out and listened to the desert silence a few times, which was very fulfilling.

•

Then it all crystallized, a day or two later, when I was camping for two nights at Joshua Tree National park in California. I wrote in the morning, after camping the first night:

I'm a poet getting old:
I only just now figured out
that mornings are for writing,
the rest of the day for
more non-verbal arts.

An ars poetica of sorts.

•

And that's the way it's been going, on the rest of this roadtrip. If a poem comes to me, it comes first thing in the morning. (Usually. The creative imp is perverse enough that on the very day that I wrote in my journal that I didn't feel like writing poems any more, I got two poems and a song lyric, an hour later. Go figure.)

So, mornings are for writing. The rest of the day is for other arts.

And so we go on, and keep going, keep making. And see where the road will lead us next.

Circle of Elders

I camped for two nights at Joshua Tree National Park. I spent the days roaming the Park, making photographs and video, and just stopping in isolated areas to listen to the desert silence. It was recharging. Sleeping was difficult, because the campgrounds are basically dirt over granite, so any padding you need has to come from your bedding. But the night skies were beautiful.

One evening I set up the camera on its tripod at my campfire, and made a series of self-portraits. I assembled these later into a Photoshopped collage, using myself as a model for a Circle of Elders.



The wool poncho I bought in Albuquerque kept the night chill off. Although it wasn't that cold at night. The fire didn't last long, because the wood was very dry, but it was merry.

The History of Wind Power in America

What could be a more iconic representation of life on the Great Prairie, life in the open-skied Midwest, life in the American Heartlands, than images of red barns, farm combines out in the fields, and the silhouette of a windmill? Nothing.



American Wind Power Center and Museum, Lubbock, TX

On the Road at Dusk

sudden small towns rear up
explode across the windshield
as dusk softens to vigilance



rural towns, grey days, blue dusk
long quiet highway lined with dead hulks
abandoned farms, lost dreams of survival and refuge



empty buildings full of blue light and ghosts
roofs open to chill bullet rains
on wind dry prairies with no names



silent but for hiss and hum of tires
on tarmac passing, then back to silence
a single croak of phantom grackle

settling in for long winter's night

Route 66 Collage

Snapshots from the road, driving the first couple of days of roadtrip/vacation. These scenes mostly from Illinois and Missouri.

I've driven all of old Route 66 now at least twice, sections of it considerably more than that. It's still a fascinating bit of Americana, both kitsch and brilliant. "Get your kicks on Route 66" still rings true, if not always for the original reasons given in the song. It's still "America's Highway," and will be for a long time, in popular myth and folklore, if not in actual fact.

The ride's only begun. No doubt more collages will follow. After all, I have new tools for making art, on this new roadtrip. So I'm trying new things as I go.

Saguaro Moon

A classic image from the Southwest of my imagination. A place I will be in reality, just a few days from now.

This is a drawing, rather, a digital painting, I made on my iPad this afternoon, using a sophisticated painting app called ArtRage. I made this painting in about ten or twelve minutes, as I was waiting while the shop installed new tires on my truck, prior to my upcoming roadtrip.

I really like the ArtRage app, which is the most intuitive and flexible painting software I've encountered in years. It provides a wide range of adjustable drawing and painting tools, all customizable and adaptable, along with a range of paper textures, effects, and other illustrative processes. There is even the ability to use a reference photo as tracing paper, or a guide. One can work on several layers, too, so that transparencies can be built up non-destructively. i find myself able to paint and draw things easily and quickly, using a stylus, in this digital domain, that frankly I would not be able to do in the real world. (That's partly because I'm chemically sensitive, or rather allergic, to many traditional artistic materials, including aromatics like turpentine and other agents.)

For this digital painting, I mostly used a flat watercolor brush, paint tube and roller, and a sable brush, changing the color and settings for saturation, etc., several times during the painting. I found the tools easy to figure out, and using the stylus came naturally. I guess teaching myself to draw over the past years has had some benefits, after all.

Songwriting: Making a Demo

Recently I finished composing/writing a new song, for myself to sing at a fundraising event in March, called "The Power of Love." I auditioned the song for two of three artistic staff for the event, but the third person couldn't be at that audition, so I was asked to make a demo version of the song. That's mostly so they know how to program my song within the larger context of the fundraiser concert: where to put it, what it's mood and tone are like, etc.

Well, naturally I said, sure, I'll make a demo. Not having made a studio demo for some few years, nonetheless I was willing. For two reasons: first, to complete the audition process and assure my performance slot for the concert, and also to give myself the pleasure of a new creative challenge in my recording studio.

Now that I seem to be a songwriter as well as a composer, I suppose making demos will become more common for me. And I believe I will keep writing more new songs, now, both to keep up the compositional momentum, and to continue to grow as a writer. Words and music: that's going to be phrase on my new business cards.

I'm about to leave for a month-long roadtrip. It's time for my annual trip to the Southwest and to California, cameras in hand, writing journal nearby. I've been packing for this years' trip, organizing objects in a new system. Since the video camera I will be taking this trip is smaller and lighter than previously, I will be able to walk farther, and take longer hikes, with just a shoulder bag or smaller backpack. My strength during my post-surgery recovery has reached levels unseen for a decade, and I feel up to hiking a mile or two to get a good image. There are trails I know about that I haven't been able to attempt, which I feel able to do now, this year.

One of the bags I packed is my creative arts bag. It has pens and colored pencils, a couple of back-up notebooks for writing in, some drawing and watercolor paper, a few ideas sketched out to work on more later, and a few other things.

I have every intention of writing more song lyrics, or maybe a new art-song for voice and piano, while I'm on the road. As I've written before, it's become obvious to me that I do best when I am always making art, always writing. So the creative arts bag also contains some song lyrics that I wrote last year that I have yet to set to music, and a spiral music composition notebook, for writing music of whatever kind comes forward to be written.

I will probably take along a couple of my more portable musical instruments. Maybe my Stick.

Most definitely my newest musical instrument: my iPad, which is turning out to be a source of great creative possibilities for me. I have lots of photography and video apps on there, but the most useful apps so far have been musical tools. I have already used the iPad as an important computer-music source for an album I recently composed of music for meditation and healing.

All hail Rockmate! All hail GarageBand!

With these two iPad apps, I spent a few hours over the last couple of nights laying down basic tracks for a demo version of "The Power of Love." I have yet to record the vocals; which I'll do tomorrow, as it's late at night as I write now, and I'm too tired to do a good job singing. I will also probably lay down piano and/or classic Hammond B3 organ tracks, just a few bits here and there to give the demo some life and depth. Those also will likely by done with the soft-synths (software-based synthesizers) that I have in my recording studio.

Making a demo is about making a rough recording of a song to give a sense of what the song is about. It's not meant to be a final recorded version, it's not perfected or produced to the same level as an album track. Demos are meant to get people to listen to the song, and see what it's about. When you play a demo for a record label or a producer, it's always at least partly about auditioning your work for them, to entice them to work with you, and release your music as a produced album. Lots of demos never get any further than that, and that's fine. Lots of songwriters produce demos that get their toe in the door, which are then re-recorded.

I am making this demo to present the piece for concert performance later. But it can also serve as an introduction to my new activity as a songwriter. Being a songwriter these days usually means being a singer-songwriter. I don't have a lot of self-confidence as a solo singer. Maybe that will develop over time.

For this demo, I laid down some rhythm guitar tracks first, following the song's chord structure. Then a few fills of guitar lines in places where a short solo might fit. I don't play guitar, and have no real experience on or feel for the instrument. Rockmate was extremely useful for laying down the guitar tracks.

Next I laid down some bass lines, using an upright bass softsynth. I basically played a jazz bass line by hand. I'm a bass player, my first instrument after piano was upright bass, which I began playing in orchestra at age 13. (I was small for my age when I began playing bass, and the instrument dwarfed me for a couple of years.) I chose a jazz bass line, albeit a groove-based rather than freeform line, in part because in my mind "The Power of Love" is not a pop song, but a jazz-inflected folk-rock song. That's how I hear it in my head.

The drum tracks were actually the easiest to do. I basically used the SmartDrums feature in GarageBand, synchronized to the metronome click track I was using for the demo. I used a classic studio drum kit, useful for both jazz and pop music. Again, I programmed the drums to be more of a jazz than rock style, but with a strong backbeat. Once I synced up with the metronome click track, tracking the drums was the easiest of all, for this demo. All I had to do was make little variations in the rhythms, and fills, to keep it sounding organic and live. the software already does this well, but you can also tweak it on the fly, while it's playing, to make the sorts of stylistic and volume changes typical when shifting from the verse to the refrain.

This demo song, which I expect to be able to complete tomorrow, isn't going to be a perfect performance, just a heartfelt one. Demos aren't about perfection, they're about presentation. Of course you do the best that you can, given the time constraints, and in this case given all the other things I need to do before I leave on my upcoming roadtrip. I have no doubt that when I perform the song live in concert, a month or so from now, I will not only perform it better than on this demo, I will know the song better. Self-confidence in performance involves knowing your material really well, everything memorized and internalized. So I plan to take my Stick along in part so I can keep practicing and learning this new song that I've written. First you write it, then you have to learn it well enough to perform it.

And after that, who knows? Maybe more songs. Maybe a whole new writing project. Something to keep me creatively busy for awhile longer.

The Road Is a Tunnel of Light

Time exposures taken in infrared from the vantage of a slow-moving vehicle driving down a forested road in a state park in northern Wisconsin on a warm autumn day.






images from Interstate Park, Wisconsin Unit, St. Croix Falls, WI

Really Not Interested

I was just away for five days. Five days away from home, right now, is still a lot. It still takes careful planning and adjustment and preparation, because five days away means dealing with changing the ostomy bag at least once. I thought I had everything accounted for, but in my travel pack of supplies I somehow overlooked a critically essential ostomy supply, and had to run out to the truck where I had my back supplies; or I would have been in serious trouble. It all worked out okay, but it was a bad start to the day. That supply-chain oversight will be corrected in future equipment and travel plans, making this into a shakedown cruise for how the system will work for future roadtrips.

But that's only a symptom. The disease is overwhelm: Too many things to remember, to do, to have to deal with, to make the right preparations for.

My personal dietary needs during the process of post-surgery recovery have changed yet again. I was getting frustrated for awhile because it felt like every time I got a system organized and ready to roll, some new wrinkle would make me have to start all over again.

While I was on the road, I thought about sitting down to write my thoughts out, to work through some feelings that had come up, some conversations during the trip that were beneficial and helpful to me. But I absolutely was not interested.

I'm still not interested. I'm only writing this down now as a way of observing my own creative process, and it's the middle of the night near a full moon and I'm having insomnia, and know from experience that it's better for me, when I'm having insomnia, to get up and do something, rather than lie in bed and let my thoughts churn. That only makes the insomnia worse. I haven't had much insomnia in the past few months. Yet during this full moon, this is the second event of restless sleeplessness.

So: I was on the road, lots was happening, there as a great deal wot think about and do, and I was absolutely not interested in writing about it.

First, there were a lot of new changes to write down, a bit of fresh healing brought to me, some of which I haven't integrated yet. I could write about that, but such writing would be flailing at the still-unknown, incoherent and tentative, and I don't want to commit anything to words. That's the sort of writing you do as venting into a private journal that no-one is ever going to see: just to get it out of your system. I've done enough of that lately to choke a vampiric equine. I'm sick of it. I've been dealing with PTSD, yes, and I've needed to vent a great deal, but at the moment that is not a productive means of venting. Might as well just break all your pencils into little pieces: it would feel about the same.

Second, I am not now and never have been keeping a daily diary or logbook. I don't do a daily diary. I never have. Not even when I began journaling. I've never kept any kind of daily diary and never want to. (The appeal of posting one's continuous activities several times a day on some social networking website strikes me as a cross between abject narcissism and a reflection of the empty hollowness of most peoples' lives: that they would need to go out of their way to make their lives appear to be interesting is a sad commentary on how dull they really are. Facebook is the dreariest imaginable form of autobiography.)

Correction: I am keeping a daily logbook of things I need to write down in order to track my medical and weight-loss progress; but that's incredibly dull stuff no one ever needs to see, not even the doctors who require me to do it. The entire purpose of tracking such details as what I eat and what exercise I do is purely to deepen my own conscious awareness to the purpose of managing my life with more awareness and purposeful choice. It's a good thing for me to do, in the sense that one is making conscious life-style changes for one's future benefit, but literally nobody ever wants to read it.

Third, and most importantly, I found myself absolutely not interested in writing anything down. Anything. I always have my written journal along with me on roadtrips. Lately I've been using large-size artist's sketchbooks with unlined pages. I write freehand on the blank page, and there's room on there for drawings or poems as sidebars should I wish to do so. Lots of poems have begun in the handwritten journal, and will continue to begin there. The past few poems I have completed have been written in this journal, rather than at the keyboard, breaking a pattern that had begun to ossify and instilling new life and new interest in the process of writing itself.

But I'm barely writing poems these days. All my energies are going into completing the new music commission, which I am at the moment days or weeks away from concluding. Even though I was busy with concerts, meetings, dinners with friends, hanging out, and having good talks with fellow artists and musicians about our lives and work, I managed to write two new pages of final score one morning while on the road. I also spent an extra day or two on the return trip to travel into the woods and make photographs and video. And I made a few other kinds of artistic stops as well. But that's all event-based material I could log and chose not to.

Fourth and finally, I realized I was resistant to writing things down because I was beginning to feel obliged to. What am I writing a journal for? Is it to record my own thoughts on the creative process, to watch my own mind (yes, for me a kind of Zen self-awareness practice not unlike watching one's thoughts during meditation, not to cling to or catalog them, but to let them rise and fall away without clinging to them, to regard them as substanceless as cloud-shadows moving across the ground on a blustery day), to keep a record for my own benefit of what I am thinking and doing? Mostly, that's what my journal is. It's not required that I write it. I write it for my own needs, not for an audience. If I don't feel like writing in it just now, what penalty is there? Where does this sense of obligation arise?

It arises I think in part from attachment. Attachment to writing essays here, even, that generate comments. Attachments to being a public intellectual, a poet who shares his poems on this and other venues rather than hoarding them all for some illusion of official print publication no-one cares about and no-one will ever read. Writing poems and essays is something I do, but it's not even my most important form of art. Writing this new music commission these past several months has underlined the truth that music is the central form of art in my life, and that when I am musically satisfied I don't feel any desire to write anything else anyway. Much less a poem. Not to say that poems don't happen; and there are always haiku falling off the back of the wagon as we ride forward down the rutted highway. But these are almost like accidents, little sports of nature, discovered like one suddenly sees a rare color of flower when passing by an overgrown hedge. They just sort of happen, without even thinking about it.

Bollocks to the idea that "art is self-expression." There are many occasions on which I don't feel like expressing any aspect of my self, and still make art. If anything, making art for me is overtly anti-self-expressive. It's often enough about anything but "expressing my self." It's often about transcendence, or overcoming the little self, that personality-ego self that likes to imagine it's in charge and much bigger than it really is, but is actually rather clueless, and often the last to learn anything really important. Letting go of the self is one of the projects of (my) art.

So here I am, writing about not wanting to write anything down. Note that I still haven't generated any interest in writing about the five-day roadtrip. Maybe later on some aspect of the trip will be worth mentioning. I did make some new experiments in infrared photography that were fun and interesting.

Truthfully, I wish I was still out on the road. Some of this insomnia is typical of first nights home after a roadtrip, when I want to still be traveling, not having yet arrived. Some of the discontent I felt during the middle of this short trip was about feeling stuck, mentally, rather than feeling the freedom of the open road. I guess I'm still a nomad at heart.

I stayed in a budget hotel in Wausau last night that was surprisingly sedate and comfortable, with a bed that was surprisingly easy to rest peacefully on. The first two nights of the trip, staying with friends in Minneapolis, when the weather was hot and pleasant, especially for October, I slept on the futon on their front porch, and slept deeply and peacefully. Indeed, it was like camping in a tent: just enough breeze and fresh air and sounds coming into the porch to be like tent-camping at a national park somewhere. I slept the best I had since the surgery, on some level. Freedom of open air spaces. Also freedom of not being stuck at home. Cabin fevre has been a major issue since the surgery. Feeling trapped and confined to home-based routines necessary but unloved. Having to take some of those routines along with me, on the road, is no doubt part of the discontent I felt at times. Love me, love my ostomy. Bollocks.

Tomorrow, I'll get back to intensive writing of words and music for the commission. This short roadtrip has not really been a departure, even though it was a mini-vacation. The roadtrip was all about creativity, and music, and art, and talking with artists, and making photographs and music. My musician friend and I jammed and recorded what we played for a few hours one afternoon. We then went to a terrific concert together. On the trip overall I did some music and art myself, I made some new images, I wrote some music, and I didn't write about "my feelings," not even once. Still not interested in doing that. Or in "self expression." Nothing's more boring right now than the self that no longer is, and will not be again. The self that is gone, and won't come back. The new self is as yet uncertain and unknown, but I'm tired of having to create it, to think about it all the time. People who think that making art is all about "self-expression" really know nothing about making art. That myth about art-making is one of the most toxic, pernicious, and flat out wrong ideas about making art ever perpetrated by any critic.

In just this moment I realize that one important reason I don't want to catalog the changing self right now, why I have no interest in journaling my thoughts and feelings, is that I've been doing too much of that since the surgery. I'm tired of it. The real vacation aspect of this short roadtrip has been a vacation from that relentless self-regard and self-cataloging that I've been forced to do in recent weeks, trying to get the all the systems in line for the next phase of recovery and preparation for the next surgery. I'm tired of thinking about all that all the time. I'm tired of being told what I must do. I'm tired of watching what I eat. I need a break from the endless self-examination and self-regard.

I took the opportunity of this short trip to take a break from myself.

Any moments of discontent while on the road were very much about those times when I was unable to get outside myself and those necessities I must undertake but am not in love with. Love me, love my ostomy. Its endless relentless demands on my attention. Its joyless repetitious needs. Medical necessity be damned, dealing with the ostomy bag is no fun, it's not creative, it's cheerless. There's a quality-of-life issue in operation here. I don't ever get bored with making art, but I'm really bored with the medical self-care tracking and necessities right now. If I need a continued vacation from anything, it's from that. Even the PTSD had become a chore and a bore. The happiest parts of this small road-trip were when I was out there making art, or talking to fellow artists, or engaged with music. When every other concern fell away into silence. When I was not thinking about what I was supposed to be doing, or otherwise scrutinizing my self so thoroughly.

This past morning, drenched in fog and mist in northern Wisconsin, I was at a beautiful country park, the Dells of the Eau Claire river, a rough exposure of blocky bedrock over which a fast stream pours, across rapids, and into narrow channels defined by tall standing stones. I was making video and stills, and just listening to the silence filled by the sound of the water, a bluejay nearby calling out periodically, crows in the distance, and a small blue-fletched bird skipping from pine branch to lichen-covered rock. The clouds parted to the north, showing some feathered blue sky. The pine tree smell was thick. Underneath was a thick orange carpet of fallen oak leaves wet with dew and rain. I was in heaven.

Most of the morning I had this natural wilderness park to myself. At one point, a man walked by, smiling, and we agreed that it was a glorious day, a beautiful day, and a spectacular place to be. He was an intimidating man to look at walking briskly towards you on the trial, looking like a rough biker or a tough dockworker, but he was lit up from within, soaked up in all the natural beauty around him, and I felt an instant connection with him during our very brief encounter. Certainly he could see what I was doing, draped with cameras and hauling a tripod and shoulder bag, but we just exchanged our appreciation for the day and parted ways, glowing a bit more in unspoken companionship.

An hour later, I was just finishing filming, was tired, was ready to finish up for now, hike back to the vehicle and drive on. An older man and woman were prowling the rocks now. The man had already, a little while ago, walked into one of my shots, completely oblivious, as he restlessly prowled over the rocks, not really stopping to look at anything, just skimming the view. The woman now came up to me on the trail and asked me what there was to see around here. Isn't there anything to see around here? Isn't there supposed to be a high bridge in this area? Completely flabbergasted, I nonetheless calmly replied that we're standing in one of the most beautiful places in this region, and there's plenty to look at right here. I waved my free hand at the lichen-covered boulders, the piles of green moss at the bases of the pines, the rushing river. But my reply went right past her and left no mark. She was fixated on man-made tourist attractions, apparently, wanting to make another notch in belt of collecting the sites and sounds of tourist attractions, and seemed unable to appreciate the beauty that she was standing in the midst of. Or so it seemed. She wanted to see something more, I don't know, dramatic. I told her I didn't think there was anything like that around here, but directed her towards the nearest large town, a good two hours drive away, feeling no guilt whatsoever about this blatant misdirection. If that's really what you're looking for, so be it. Rarely have I been so astounded by the human presumption that every human is as self-absorbed in the works and ways of man, as though nothing else was even worth looking at. People with blinkered attitudes like that about natural beauty could stand at a banquet and still starve. It makes me think, in this late night writing, that there is a strong parallel between the human need for self-congratulation regarding our material achievements as species, and this tracking of self-aware logbook diet and exercise details that I have been told I need to do to advance my personal health and recovery. Both seem to demand an equivalent self-regard, and not in a good way.

Self-regard of the constructions of civilization versus appreciation of the world's glorious depth and possibility, each moment the start of a new day full of ripe vision. I know which I'd prefer, given any choice on any given day. As for the other, I'm really not interested.

returning, past sojourn

no more red-yellow-gold-banded canyons
all flat grasslands now, till snow takes over again
no more long days wearing shorts in the southwestern sun
all colder, bleaker, shivering, till home is a blanket
no more dry vistas seen across 50 miles of clear air
all big sky filled in with houses, or trees between
no more long views across peak to peak rocks exposed
all filled in by haze, some of it man-made, some of it cloudfog
no more colors in the land itself, red soil, white sand
all barren dull late winter bleaknesses, ugliest time of year
no more spring early in the calendar
all true temperate spring, late as half the year
no more jagged mountains adrift above frozen tundra
all rolling hills worn down by long time, mountain runoff
no more cactus forests, cottonwood budding in the bosque
all dead bare blank deciduous, crowned clumps like giant tumbleweeds
no more tumbleweeds blowing across even suburban streets
all immaculate yards in which the foreign invader must be punished

I wish I was home already
I wish I never had to return

•

Thoughts: Very few poems this roadtrip. Most of them rather bleak. Bleak lands reflected in the poem, but also laments for lands emptied by decimating poverty and strife. And I have to say: if I could live full-time in Death Valley, or Zion, or the Tetons, or other favorite National Parks, I would. To wake up every day to dramatic vistas filled with ever-changing light, the air and sky vibrant with giant splendor. Some state parks just as inviting, just as dramatic. It puts your own life in perspective. You keep down the drama because it's nothing in comparison to what you wake up to every day, opening the curtains to let the view in.

Don't feel much need to write things out, just to write them out; the journal hasn't been more than a page a day, most mornings, and then just a record of happenings and locales. Unsure myself that any of these few poems I did manage to write were worth the bother; maybe one or two; maybe half. Genuine Writers will no doubt sneer. More and more, in the current phase of work, words are particles to be set to music, not stand alone entities. Only a few of those; call them poems, or jottings, or randomized memorizations of the day's mood and morals.

Other thoughts: This roadtrip, probably because I've already been weakened by chronic illness and its fallout effects, altitude sickness was the worst I can remember ever feeling. It kicked my ass, again and again, more than one location. Sinking back down the long alluvial fallout from western plains to eastern, from foot of mountains to the Great Lakes, sinking down gradually thousands of feet over hundreds of miles, I feel myself return to a masque of strength and endurance. Things have improved, but not when the stresses are piled up by location, experience, exertion. Still have a couple of more days full of nothing but driving, no particularly eventful or spectacular scenery, before I get home. Beauty is where you find it, certainly. Yet after weeks in the mountains, in the deserts, by the ocean, gathering days and vistas like fuel for an invisible inner bonfire, it's just an endurance test to get through these prairies; it takes all my energy to go on, to see any beauty at all, by contrast, in these winter flatlands full of winter-flat people and their tiny little lives.

People everywhere are incredibly provincial. They're all bound up with their local little lives. Few people travel, physically or mentally, very far outside their birthplaces. Few are born travelers, born uprooters and explorers. I align myself with the travelers, obviously. You overhear conversations in restaurants, truck stops, park stores, public places, everywhere you stop briefly from your solitary driving and beauty-seeking purposes. Most of what you overhear is so tied up with family dysfunction, little dramas writ large (yet so small in comparison to the land's vast scale, even smaller under the night sky), stories of how cousins or sisters have to go back into rehab, how the thug punks standing in the corner of the chain bookstore are talking about their truancy jail time as though it were a badge of honor, stories of how breaking up with a lover is the most tragic thing in the world. Flocks of teenagers.

The ladies of the canyon: I sit at a table at a general store in a beautiful desert canyon state park, surrounded by the chatter a group of wealthy women who have all driven their horse-trailers pulled by big SUVs into the park that day to spend a day bridle-trail-riding. I'm the only man on the scene, with nothing to do while waiting for my food but overhear their discussions of their childrens' college dilemmas, and other such domestic scenery. Then I mount up and leave, driving out past all their horses still in their trailers. Well, at least these ladies of the canyon get outside, in the good air, to do their gossip.

Most people really do need to get out more. Get away. Travel. Discover what a bigger world exists outside the inward circle of their own insular self-circling. Some of the best conversations I've had with strangers on this roadtrip have been about travel, moving house, finding new places to be, finding new selves to become. Changes in life that seem to give permission to do what you already wanted to do; freedoms found when old lives fall away and die; chances taken that lead to awakening and joy. So there's an up side to what you overhear on the road, as well the provincialism: some of us, out there, apparently lost, are not looking for joy, but have found it. An occasional bumper sticker on a baggage-overloaded van says it well: "Not all who wander are lost."