Reach, Grasp, Happiness Project and My Labyrinth

I want to build a labyrinth.

This is possibly the weirdest result of reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, a book which (in case you’ve been living on Mars for the past four years) champions happiness as a goal and exhorts its readers to make their own Happiness Projects by thinking about their lives in terms of what feels good, what feels bad and what feels right.

Like the author, who was a classmate of mine, I don’t want to change much about my life. I’m pretty happy. I don’t want to move to a new city, I don’t want to switch careers, I love my husband and children. I just want to be more present to it all, to appreciate my life more fully, to be honest about who I really am and what I really like. One of Ms. Rubin’s Personal Commandments is to “Be Gretchen,” and she argues that the road to happiness is in finding what’s truly happy-making for yourself, and not worry whether or not it might impress others. Though I'd like to think of myself as "Easy People," the truth is I'm a major striver. I know for myself that what makes me happy is to feel that I am reaching a little beyond my grasp, and maybe possibly getting close.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?-Robert Browning

And so I particularly love Gretchen’s nod to Ben Franklin, he of the famous Virtue Charts. Setting about to perfect himself, he drew these up and gave himself check marks at the end of every day. He never achieved perfection, but he said by reaching, he became a better and happier man from the attempt.

My problem is, my reach exceeds my grasp in every aspect of my life, and instead of smiling and enjoying the Grasp, I frown and squint and focus on what’s just out of reach. Here’s what’s just out of reach:
My idea of where I should be in my career.
My idea of what my waistline should look like (“A waist is a terrible thing to mind.”)
My idea of how uncluttered my house should be
My idea of how all my friendships should be (much more correspondence, much more time for hanging out)
My idea of how happy I should be making everyone
My idea of how big my royalty check should be
My idea of how often I should be blogging
My idea of how beautiful and well-kept my gardens should be
My idea of how rigorous my yoga practice should be
And on and on and on.

But back to the labyrinth.

We have a generous lot for our small city—a little over half an acre. There’s a corner in the back that our catty-corner neighbor wants to buy, and in truth, we ought to sell it to him. We’ve let it go to brambles, whereas he would adopt it gratefully into his yard, a yard that seems to have a bite taken out of it—that bite being our unruly corner. But we said no because...our reach exceeds our grasp. And we can’t stand the idea of letting part of our plot go. (This attitude contributes to the stacks on stacks of unread books in our attic, the piles of paper, the storage boxes of unused clothes, the crates of LPs in our attic, basement and barn. But that’s for another post.)

Anyway, this corner of our lot, brambly though it is, has a certain charm. It’s wedged at the nexus of our two neighbors’ properties (perfect for spying), it’s a bit sunny, and there are two gorgeous cherry trees breaking into the clouds. Last year, we had some tree work done, and the fellers left the remains of the trees as neatly stacked logs, stumps cut down to stool size, and a giant pile of wood chips. I saw these raw materials and got an idea. I’d build a labyrinth with them. My writers could come to this back corner, walk the labyrinth with their muses, and end up in an Adirondack chair under one of the cherry trees where they could sit and write.

Then I realized how much hauling of wood was involved and I decided to farm out the project. I priced it with a couple of landscapers. One suggested pea gravel. One suggested a backhoe. One suggested I plant wild mountain thyme, which of course I thought was a great idea, until she priced it. Plus there’d be weeding. It was all too much. I turned my back on that untamed corner of the lot and went inside to do my inside things: write songs, play guitar, write my books and blog posts, tend to my family.

I’m working, as you know, on doing less, on striving to be that Easy Person (or Easier, anyway). It’s killing me, but I really am doing less. To wit: Jay and I rode bikes to Elle’s pick up, and instead of spending the rest of the afternoon at the Y, we hung out at the playground where I made a new friend. Then we bike-ambled home through the park, doing an extra loop or two, breathing in the flowering trees. Ah, but a woman should bike with her kids and smell the flowers, or what’s a May for? We got home, and for once I didn’t have everything written out in a little chart to follow. So I took my bike back to the barn and ventured around the corner to appraise the dreaded brambles. I noticed a stack of old pallets that had once served as a makeshift wall for our gigantic compost heap. I was seized with a desire to build, the way my kids descend on a pile of Legos. I dragged them one at a time over to the brambles and lay them down, making a rough bridge. But there were rusty nails in the crates, and so I pulled them up, using them as a fence to give the area some definition. I propped them up with the logs and the tree stumps.


Then I attacked the woodchips with a kid-sized snow shovel. Shovelful by shovelful, I shook them out, lining the path with a seemingly never-ending supply of bricks I found scattered around the property, and the limbs of the felled trees. I varied the path with some leftover slate from our new mudroom floor, and some leftover tiles from our kitchen walls, and soon there was a walkway around the Adirondack chair, a rough circular pattern, hardly a labyrinth at all; more like a moat around the island of chair.


“Process not product” is my motto of late, and the labyrinth is hardly a thing of beauty (not to mention, as I did mention, not a labyrinth). What interested me was the feeling in me the hauling aroused. I felt like a kid, breathlessly pacing our property for bricks and sticks and logs and stumps, for rocks and slate and woodchips. I felt overtaken with a frenzy of creation, the desire—who knew it could be so strong?—of making order out of chaos. And when I took a break to sit in that chair in the center and admire my handiwork, I felt like Alexander the Great surveying my vast empire. And just for a second or two, I was there in full appreciation of my grasp.
This is the sweet spot, isn’t it? This is why I run writing workshops where writers work on first draft material. I am obsessed with that creative spark, as I am obsessed with the raw materials that go into those first drafts. The irony is not lost on me that my great creation (labyrinth) would not have been possible had we not been such pathetic cluttery slobs who had left all sorts of debris around the property. In a way, my fervor contributed to a great clutter clearing: there is nary an extra brick or stone anywhere save in the northeast corner of our lot now. But had there been no mess, there would be no work of art. As artists, of course, we need both the mess AND the inclination to order it.

Light in the Darkness

Our enormously productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption… We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.
- Victor Lebow, 1955

Today is Earth Day, and when I woke up this morning, my back spoke to me. "Nerissa," it intoned." Get thee to a yoga class. You cannot spend another day hunched over your MacBook. I refuse." So my poor, chronically rounded and abused back and I went to Yoga Sanctuary where my favorite yoga teacher in the world, Sara Rose, was teaching us balancing poses so that we could better deal with all the crap life throws at us in mid April. On the way up the stairs, I noticed a flyer that said Annie Leonard was speaking at UMass tonight. I'd loved her video Story of Stuff (which my friend Sarah Getz sent me back in 2007) so much, I'd referenced it and her in my first edition of How to Be an Adult. Maybe Elle and Jay would be old enough now to get something out of it.

In class, Sara said, "Aren't you glad you have a yoga practice? When the world goes crazy, you have something to come back to, to lean into, to sustain you."

I immediately thought, yes, and that is why I am a musician. Music does that for me. It's the ground of my being. It's what I come back to over and over again.

I am seeing another kind of light at the end of the tunnel. For the past year and a half, I have been working on a second edition to my 2008 book How to Be an Adult, which came out on Mercy House Books and Collective Copies (our local, independent print shop-turned-book-publisher.) Almost right way I'd wanted to make the book an ebook to cut costs to consumers. But I got sidetracked by having a second child and that music career thing. Some other stuff happened (another book, another couple of CDs and a DVD, kindergarten, Suzuki violin) and so it's taken me till now to finish my last edits. On Wednesday the book went to my editor, who says she can have it back to me by mid-May. I am hoping for an early June release. There will be an ebook version and also a new hard copy (paperback) version. I also plan to post excerpts weekly right here, so stay tuned.

It's been hard to be quiet, to be away from this blog while I hustled to get my book done. So much has happened this spring, this week, this month. It feels wrong not to write about Boston, about the bruises we all feel. As with Sandy Hook, the bombing felt too close, almost, to even talk about. It shakes us, leaves us unmoored to see how very close the gap is between self and other, when something like this happens so close to home. Some of can and do, like the wonderful Anne Lamott); some of us would rather deflect our grief elsewhere. I've felt myself welling up over my kids' rapid growth spurts, probably to not have to think about the sweet 8-year-old whose front teeth were just growing in, whose face smiled out at me in digital images wherever I turned last week. Every April, I gird myself mid-month for something like this to happen (why? I wrote about that here in 2011.) Life is expensive, and April is all about the big gamble that is birth. Birth comes at a cost. Life is risky. Easter and Passover both remind us of this paradox, as does Stravinsky's "Rites of Spring."

One of the sobering things about revising my book is to see how far I've strayed from those ideals of my early 20s which somehow lasted through my early forties. Maybe it was because I was in a rock band, and then a touring folkie, and a denizen of Northampton and a latecomer to motherhood, but I hung on to my vision of being a downwardly mobile artist who lived outside the system for a good long time. Re-reading my own book has made me wistful for that lifestyle where I could spend 80% of my income on Whole Foods and not worry about saving for my kids' college education, let alone buying them a new plastic gizmo every time they filled a marble jar for good behavior. As I look around my crowded and cluttered house, full of no=longer-used toys, I wonder, how did I get here? As I set up my laptop on the dining room table so the whole family could gather round to see Annie's Story of Stuff, I was horrified by how many of her wonderful examples applied to me, how fully I have become the consumer at the center of her linear march of doom. She parses the journey from Extraction to Production to Distribution to Consumption to Disposal. There's a Golden Arrow between the train cars of Distribution and Consumption, (which is the nexus Victor Lebow talks about in the quotation above.) That Golden Arrow is increasingly where I find myself these days. I buy a new iPhone every time my contract is up. I have twenty-five shoulder bags up in the attic. Every couple of years I “need” a new bag. Most ironically, I lust for a new Prius. My eyes follow my neighbors' curvy little cars all over town. My kids, whom I've roped into my campaign, can spot them by ear, now and squeal every time they see OR hear one. I say it's because of the gas mileage, and I reason that to get one would be good for the environment. But the truth is, even though Tom's truck gets about 8 miles to the gallon, he bikes to work every day and drives the truck at most couple times a week, and just for short distances. Which would use more resources? To keep on as we are, or to buy a whole new vehicle?

The day after the bombing, we had been scheduled to go to Cambridge with our kids. We were going to ride the T and see the ducks and the swan boat in the public garden. Instead, we went to the dinosaur museum in Amherst and rode our bikes on the bike path and had our cousins over for a campfire complete with marshmallows and singing and the spring's first case of poison ivy. As the moon rose and the sun set, I pulled out my guitar and we all sang "Hey Jude," the older kids huddled together in my soft guitar case, and four-year-old Jay playing along on his collection of tambourines and wooden blocks. We sang a few songs, but the kids wanted "Hey Jude" again. Paul McCartney's song of comfort to his young friend Julian Lennon on the occasion of his parents' divorcing reached easily through the decades and comforted us, as we channeled it through guitar and voices (and tambourines. And really loud screeches).

Our happiness as a nation has diminished since 1955, says Annie somewhere in the middle of the Story of Stuff, because even though we now have way more stuff than we used to have, we don't have the time to use it. We don't sit around and talk to our neighbors, laugh around the kitchen table, jam around the campfire. But last Tuesday, we did. The smoke rose and so did our voices, filling the space between birth and death, between you and me, between known and unknown. In the face of Boston, in the aftermath of Earth Day and my own and our collective shame at the state of the world, it can be hard to keep on hoping for a better world. In my own little microcosm, it can be hard to believe that my poor old body can ever get straightened out again; it's been hunched over keyboards, guitars and babies for way too long. But what is the alternative? William Sloane Coffin says hope is "a matter of the soul, not about the circumstances of one's life." It's all about that light in the darkness. The darkness is so much more vast than that wee little light. But all one needs to see a little is a wee little light. So I will go back to my yoga, my boring daily stretches. I will go back to circling the house before bed to make sure all electrical appliances are unplugged and taking their own rest. I will restrain my consumer impulses. And I won't forget to pick up my guitar when I start to lose hope. Better yet, I'll find some under-20s and sing with them.

What Do You Remember About Music?

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of holding a baby just 10 days old. It was mid afternoon, and I was guessing her poor mama hadn't really slept since the birth. Elle and I took turns cuddling the baby, while my friend crept upstairs for a much needed nap. After a few minutes, the baby began fussing. I picked her up, walked around the room, sang our version of "Hush Little Baby." Still gritchy. I switched to "All the Pretty Horsies" and did a gentle canter-y gait. More fussing. Then I started in on Ledbelly's "Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie." The baby pulled her head off my shoulder (strong baby!) and stared at me as if in disbelief. She stopped crying and listened as I sang. When her mother came downstairs fifteen minutes later, I told her what had happened.

"No wonder," said her mother. "We played that song and sang that song many times while she was in the womb, and since birth."

I'd certainly heard of this happening--baby recognizing pre-womb music post-womb--and in fact, we wrote about this phenomenon in our book All Together Singing in the Kitchen: Creative Ways to Make and Listen to Music as a Family. But I'd never witnessed it so directly. (Well, maybe I did. Maybe it happened with my own kids, but I was so sleep deprived then, I have no recollection.)

Today in Jay's Suzuki class the teacher had the four-year-old pre-twinklers form a circle. She played "pass the Twinkle," playing the first line of "Mississippi Stop Stop" to the child on her left, who in turn, wordlessly passed it on to the child on his left, and so on, around the circle. "Isn't it amazing," she said. "How you all knew what to do, and could do it without even saying any words. Music is a language we can all understand."

Plans for SOS-SOA are looking up. Emails are circulating. I am making phone calls, juggling schedules, refining our focus. Meanwhile, doing a lot of thinking about the role of music in our children's lives. Why fight to keep music in the schools?
-it's a language we all share.
-it cuts through reason and goes right to the heart.
-when I look back on my own school memories, so many of them have to do with music class, performing, practicing an instrument. Maybe that's just because I am a musician, but I can't imagine growing up without all the music I had.
-it unites a group of disperate kids
-it's the only academic discipline that is equally left-brained and right-brained

What about you? What do you remember about music education growing up?

For more about music education, visit the National Association for Music Education.

SOS-SOA-Save Our Schools-Save Our Arts

photo c/o Sarah Buttenweiser. Read her always wonderful, insightful and inspiring blog, "Standing in the Shadows."

Time for Spring, time for budget cuts. Time for Big Ideas.

As I posted earlier, we're facing a huge budget deficit in the school system here in Northampton (endemic in Massachusetts because of a combination of Prop 2 1/2 and some crazy formula they made 30 years ago). The proposed cuts are heartbreaking: $1.2 million all together, including bussing, many classroom teachers including our dear almost-family member Ms. Mc, many teachers in the high school and middle school, and of course, arts and music teachers at the middle school and high school. Katryna and I want to fight it. Of all the issues near and dear to our hearts, this is number one. We are who we are as artists, musicians and people because of the music teachers we had in our own school systems.

Tuesday I attended a meeting at the middle school (JFK in Florence). They were expecting 30 people on a snowy night after a snow day. Instead they got over 175. Peter Kocut, our state rep, laid out clearly for all of us the need to increase our state taxes. (No hard sell with me. I think it's ridiculous how little we pay and how much we get, but that's another story. And I do know that not everyone can afford higher taxes. But a lot of people can, and I am all for a progressive tax code. If everyone in Northampton paid $320, we'd cover the budget deficit.)

Peter Kocut spoke at great length about how we got here, why we have the deficit, how he is working hard to get legislative change, but it'll be two years if he's successful before we have the money to restore the cuts. And if we don't take action now, there will be more cuts.

Since 2000 we've had to cut and cut and cut. There is not too much more to cut.

A 13-year-old girl stood up and said, "I hear what you're saying. But the thing is, I want to know how to save our band teacher's job. She's the best teacher we've ever had. And I want my little brother to get to have her when he's at JFK middle school. What can we do? How can we help?"

Right. Blah blah blah. How do we get our teachers to stay?

If anyone with a heart could see these kids imploring us adults to let them keep their band teacher, they'd find it impossible to refuse them. I'd personally give all my savings to keep our teachers at Jackson Street whose jobs are on the cutting board. But it doesn't work that way. If we do private fund raising, the taxpayers will think the problem is solved. And I don't believe our public schools should be funded by private fundraising. What about schools in poorer communities that can't fundraise as effectively?

It was strongly suggested at the meeting that an override would be necessary again.
A JFK teacher stood up. "In 2009 we were in a similar place. And we were in a recession. Everyone said the override couldn't pass. We got 60% of the vote, and we saved our teachers from being cut. We can do it again."

"And your job," said our city councilwoman Pamela Schwartz to the 13-year-olds. "Is to spread the word. Tell your neighbors. Tell all the adults you see. Get out there and lobby!"

Who could I lobby? I thought as I sat there feeling helpless. Who cares the most about arts and music in the schools? Besides the students? HooteNanny moms and dads and grandparents! I whispered as much to my friend Liz. "We should do a benefit to raise awareness." She pointed over to the middle schoolers. "Well, be sure to include those kids!"

So as soon as the meeting was adjourned, I made my way over to the group of middle schoolers. I explained who I was and how I had access to about 300 local moms and dads. "Let's put on a show!" I said (basically). My friend Lucien, a high school freshman at NHS overheard. "I can get a group from the high school," he offered. Our longtime publicist, Michaela O'Brien is a parent of two boys in the school system. She immediately offered to help, too.

So here's the vision: Katryna and I do a benefit--proceeds go towards helping publicize the override. Also onstage with us are the JFK Jazz Band and groups TBD from Northampton High School. I'd also love to have the Jackson Street Faculty Ukulele group and maybe one other performance by JSS or another school. All the schools. Let's celebrate our young musicians in this town that's so well-known for music and arts.
We need:
-a location (NHS? First Churches? Helen Hills Hills? Center for the Arts?)
-a date (late April, early May--we're having a hard time finding a date due to so many moving pieces)
-a sound system and someone to run it
-some volunteers to collect money, help set up and clean up
-the teachers of the school groups on board
-to reach out to the Gazette, RSI, FCR, other media

Will you help us? Do you want to join a discussion to make SOS-SOA happen? Please email me at Nerissand@gmail.com or respond to this blog with your contact information.

Speak Up for the Arts and Music in our Schools, part 1

[From the Jackson Street School Music Assembly 2012]
A friend just sent me a copy of the proposed budget cuts for the Northampton school districts. I went through them all, and I am heartbroken. I feel so strongly that we need to speak up and raise awareness about these cuts. If our wonderful schools lose all these teachers and programs and services, they will not be as strong. I think we should talk about how weakening our schools affects real estate, an issue that even folks who are out of the school-age era care about. If our schools cease to be a draw, the values of our homes will fall. Educating our young people is a direct investment in the future of Northampton. Of course, as a parent, I feel there's no better use for our tax dollars. I am sure many feel the same, whether or not they have children in the public school system. But we have to talk to our friends and neighbors about this. I am hoping for another override.

I had the pleasure of attending Jackson Street School's annual music assembly. I was moved to tears by the efforts of the music teacher, the passion of the teachers who supported their students and the whole event, the strength of the principal, Gwen Agna and the gorgeousness of the student body who sang a song written for the United Nations called "United," bespeaking a multinational, multiethnic world. The kids sang music from Ireland, India, Mexico and Ghana. At times, they were accompanied by a faculty ukulele band. Music is such a powerful force that unites a community like no other, and it breaks my heart to see potential cuts in music, arts and drama (to name a tiny few of these cuts) on the table at the Middle School and High School level.

Please, if there is anything you can do to raise awareness about these cuts, speak up. This is our community; these are our kids. They will grow up, go out in the world and eventually run it themselves. We all want maximum love and nurturing for them during these crucial years. May they not be shoved into overcrowded classrooms. May we not take away their arts and music and theatre and PE. My hope is our town is better than that.

To see the proposed cuts, go here.

Apple Products Anonymous

I've figured out one sure sweet pleasure. On occasional Mondays, I unplug my new Hofner bass, pack it up and drive into town with my Beatles scores and head down to a basement cubicle at Downtown Sounds, our town's remarkable little music store. Here I find my teacher, Doug, a 60 something lap steel genius. The two of us choose a Beatles song; he plays guitar and I, with my now mandatory reading glasses, stick my face deep into the Beatles tome and pick out the tablature for the bass line. We started with "Help!" and stalled at "With a Little Help from my Friends"--too hard. We backtracked to "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which has a juicy little chromatic bass riff (after "I think you'll understand...nier nier nier nier neet..."), "Hey Bulldog," "Lady Madonna," "Eight Days a Week." And today I learned that totally wild "Come Together" part, complete with bass slide at the 12th fret. I figured I was ready to try again on "With a Little Help." I stuck my nose back in the book, but quickly found I didn't need to. I found the melodic line sitting neatly in my memory, and I was, with all those other songs behind me, able to find the notes myself on the bass. Progress!

It's March 4 today--my mother-in-law would have had her 83rd birthday. She's been gone now almost 3 years, and today is one of those heavy days where my internal organs all feel constricted and hard as iron. The wind blew with surprising ferocity as I left Downtown Sounds, and the elation from the bass playing blew away down the street. Perhaps to counter this, I bought a new iPhone 5 and gave my 4 to Tom, which necessitated a lot of stupid wasted minutes reprogramming, trying to remember passwords, and surrendering to our daughter who begged to play on the AT&T store's iPad.

I've been in a funk about technology, noticing how addicted we all are to our various devices. I want to throw them all away, even my brand new iPhone, which already strikes me as a disappointment, and go back to communicating through smoke signals and tin cans with string.

It's probably good that I am already done with my new iPhone. As addictions go, this one must be pretty weak if it's already lost all its pull. But still, I need it, just as I need the morning's coffee or risk a killer headache. Gone is that sharp awake feeling I had when I was a caffeine virgin. Now I just drink to maintain the dull high. The tremendous thrill from opening that crisp rectangular box and tremblingly raising the tiny piece of technological perfection to my eyes was obscured by the annoying reality of having to buy all new cables for the damn thing. But then I thought, "Ooooo! A trip to the Apple Store! Maybe I should get the new iPad mini!"

Tom says I need to join APA: Apple Products Anonymous.

February Album Writing Month was a half success. Meaning for the first half of the month I worked on my songwriting, and for the second half I completely abandoned it. I did accumulate what Katryna has termed song "starts"--the way one "starts" plants in March--tiny green dots in a black soil landscape nestled in trays on your window seat. That's what I have, and I don't even have the requisite 14. But mid-month I was seized with a desire to bring to completion a project I've wanted to do since 2010: a revision/new edition and ebook version of How to Be an Adult (2008, Mercy House). I went to Kripalu for President's weekend and spent an entire 48 hours with my face bent over my computer and print-outs. So much for a relaxing yoga retreat. But work--when it's cranking, when I'm really writing, when it's all flow--is actually relaxing for me in the same way that playing Paul McCartney bass lines is relaxing for me (or so I believe, anyway). I left Kripalu invigorated, and moved immediately into a solo parent stint with both kids (and Katryna and her kids) in Florida. This I had no illusions about: I knew a trip to Florida without my husband would be more like boot camp than a proverbial day at the beach, and as I've shared here before, I am not really much of a beach gal. I don't like to swim, am cold unless the water is warmer than my body temp, and I don't know how to just sit back and chill. Like many of my artist friends, I don't really know how to play. I can be playful; I can laugh; I can make others laugh. But sometimes I have to work at it. Forgetting how to play is not conducive to songwriting.

I decided I would treat this trip as the meditation retreat I should have had at Kripalu (the kind of meditation retreat where they don't let you read or write. NOT the kind of meditation retreat where you sit for 15 minutes and then they have some wise American Buddhist, who has written several best sellers that teeter somewhere between spirituality and self-help, talk at length about her funny adventures in India as a 20 something.) No, my meditation retreat would be the kind where I had to be present and awake and iPhone-free for as much as possible.

I did pretty well, actually. It helped that Katryna was with me and that she has given up her iPhone for Lent. We supported each other in our efforts to put down the drug. And our kids got into the act too. "No cell phones!" They'd moan if they caught us reaching for the cigarette-pack-sized thing. And cigarettes are a good metaphor. At the airport on our way home, our flights were delayed. The entire airport was full of people bent in that tell-tale position over their devices, lit weirdly by tiny screens. It was all very 1960s Mad Men where everyone in any context is lighting up. Only we light up with fluorescence, not fire.

I have no idea what kinds of songs I should be writing. I'm at a complete loss. Partly this is because sometime in early February Jay (who is now four and a half) discovered the Nields' back catalogue and has been spinning the disks 24/7. He became obsessed with my ex-husband David and pelted Tom and me with questions about him (he still doesn't know that David was my husband once, or what it means that David's last name is Nields--a name Jay shares with him. He is more interested in the fact that we had 3 Daves in our band.) But hearing our old music ad nauseum (and I really mean ad nauseum) has made it hard to write. Mostly because I think the old stuff is pretty good, and I'm reminded that I've said a lot already. Is there anything more to say? Right now, what seems to need saying is that 20 somethings should know how to cook brussel sprouts, and that it's harder than it used to be to qualify for a mortgage; and that they should know that if they have a dream for their future, they should go for it, but to be prepared for the eventuality that it might end up looking very different from what they imagine.

In my little ministers' Bible study last week, we looked at Luke 13:1-9, which talks about how bad things happen to good people, and how it has nothing to do with God's love for them. God isn't punishing the wicked and rewarding the good. We all know this at some level, even as we worry about our karma. The passage underlined for me the importance of being useful. Jesus is saying no way does God doesn't cause bad things to happen. But Bad Things are our wake up call to realize that life isn't about what we can get out of it (which is my orientation, by the way. Part of me always believed that bumper sticker from the 80s that says "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." Hence the iPhone obsession.)

Life is sucky when we orient that way, though. It tastes like yesterday's coffee after awhile. Life is much sweeter when we see what we can put into it, what we have to give. The CD that I most like hearing (and the one Jay has most recently discovered) is our 2007 release Sister Holler. Those songs were written to order for my sister and my parents and the new church Tom and I had joined. Those songs have always struck me as useful. I'm not saying there's no use in our older songs (and I'm not even saying art has to be useful! On the contrary! Is there any use in "With a Little Help From My Friends?" "Come Together?" well, actually, yes, a ton of use. Was it useful that today I played?) But there's a part of me that just wishes I had that album still to write. Or that I could write a neat sequel.

I completely forgot to register Jay for kindergarten. As I was putting dinner on the table and about to sit down with Tom, he reminded me about it. I threw down my napkin, dashed out of the house and jumped in the car, and as I drove to the school as the sun was setting, I thought, "I'm afraid I'll never write another good song again. I'm afraid I'll never do anything useful ever again. I'll probably spend the rest of my life never doing anything of note, just being me." Once again, the sky, all mottled and purple and blue, glowing with the backlit sun, seemed to say, "So? Do you think I love you because you're a songwriter? Don't you think I've loved you ever since you were a tiny baby, just like you loved your own little babies? If you never did anything, I'd still love you just as much as I do now. I've always been in your thrall. Do you think you have to accomplish anything more to be loved? Do you think you have to accomplish anything ever to be loved?"

Grace, I thought. Amazing grace. Right. And I breathed a few breaths and made it to registration on time. And then, as soon as I was back in my car: Yeah, yeah. But what am I going to write next?

Sanity comes in tiny postage-stamp-sized windows: God doesn't care what we accomplish. God just cares about how we treat other people. And, I suspect, the way we communicate all this to God is through play. I have been here many times before, this place of creative despair. I always get my answer. "Let your children teach you how to play," my friend Jane said. So I came home to dinner. My son was standing on the small playtable by the window, DJing at our Bose as usual, air-guitaring to "Jack the Giant Killer." So I grabbed a spoon and sang along.

Price of Admission

"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."-Khalil Gibran

Last week, the phrase "crawling out of one's skin" came to mind a lot. I found myself short-tempered with the kids, constantly on the verge of tears, and generally feeling as though I were separated from the rest of the world by bandages of gauze. My kids were up to their usual combination of cuteness and exasperating behavior, and I had that same sense I had during their babyhood and my sleep deprivation: knowing that they were amazing, but not feeling it, as I usually do. I'd try to connect with nature and it would all seem theoretical, not transporting. The old thoughts came: "It's always like this. It's never going to change. It's all downhill from here. You are doomed. And also it's all your fault."

I called my therapist who suggested I listen to a relaxation CD and possibly take Ativan. The relaxation CD sounded about as helpful as summoning fairies to sprinkle confetti on my head; the Ativan was much more promising, but there's the minor issue that it might be addictive to some, and I knew full well that if it did work, I'd want to be on that magic carpet for the rest of my life.

I didn't want to tell anyone I was feeling so blue, because if I did then the jig would be up, and everyone would finally know that I don't actually have all the answers. So I suffered for a few more hours, and then I told a friend. We were sitting at the Y waiting for our kids to finish their gymnastics class and as I told her how I felt, the tears came. And with the tears, everything I have been tamping down since Christmas. Newtown. Mothers with kids who might be homicidal. The huge tear in the veneer of our small town existence, exposing the violence that so many others live with on a daily basis. The unfairness of it all. The shame of privilege; the searing cold of poverty. All kinds of poverty.

"It sounds like you are going through some grief," said my friend. I nodded. I cried some more. I went home and made some more calls. "Talk about it," said another friend. "That's what we do. We talk our way through this stuff."

Shared sorrow is half a sorrow, goes the saying. So I trod forward a bit, letting my husband know how sad I was, telling some more friends. I felt their concern like warm hands on my shoulders even when I was alone. And I downloaded the stupid relaxation CD and listened to it every day twice a day. On another friend's suggestion, I also downloaded Bach's Unaccompanied Suites in C minor for cello by Yo Yo Ma. And on Thursday night I started to write a song. On Saturday, I drove by myself up to West Cummington for our show. The sunset was my accompaniment, and as I followed the pinks, greys, far-off fires in the sky, I felt in wordless dialogue with those heavy hands on my shoulders. I felt profound joy and gratitude. I felt the gauze unwrap, and when we stepped on stage (metaphorically speaking--there actually is no stage) in front of our audience, I was myself again.

Stephen preached that Sunday about Martin Luther King Jr, and used the story in Exodus about Moses getting his call. The burning bush tells Moses to go way down to Egypt land to "let my people go." But, Moses protests, "Why me? I am a guy with a stutter! Who is going to listen to me? They have no idea who I am! I'm this adopted kid from the aristocracy. And anyway, who should I tell them sent me?"

And God, in the form of the burning bush, says, "Tell them 'I will be what I will be' has sent you."

Telling my therapist about how I recovered myself (and grudgingly thanking him for the relaxation CD), I said, "But this might not work every time. I mean it's not like every day I get a great idea for a song. It's not every day that we get to play an amazing show."

He smirked at me. He raised an eyebrow. (This is how we speak to each other.)

"Right,"I nodded. "Manna from heaven." Those who had been slaves coming out of bondage followed Moses through the desert for forty years. Every day they were given exactly what they needed: no more, no less. If they tried to hoard extra manna it turned to mold and rot. "I am a songwriter. I have that inside me. I am a performer. That's me. It's always there."

The other half of that aphorism is "Shared joy is doubled joy." I've been following author and researcher Brené Brown since 2009, and in a recent interview for Spirituality & Health Magazine, she writes:

"...Joy is probably the most difficult emotion to feel. It's hard to feel joy because we are so keenly aware that it's fleeing. When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, we lose the courage to be joyful. Joy is a daring emotion! We are going to let ourselves stop in a moment that won't last forever, that can be taken away. we fell almost that 'you are a schmuck if you let yourself feel too deeply because the bad stuff is going to happen.'...'If I let myself feel this joy, pain will be all that much harder. If I let myself just really sink into the joy of my child, something is going to happen to him or her, and I will be devastated.' It comes back to the idea that it's easier to live disappointed than feel disappointed. And yet we are starving for joy. I have never met anyone who doesn't want more joy in their life."

The burning bush was a miracle: a burning bush that did not consume itself. But as Stephen pointed out, it was also a miracle that Moses even noticed it. Lots of people--I for example--would have been moving so fast that we would not have stopped to notice that the fire never won.

On Monday, I sat my kids and visiting nephew down in front of the TV and together we watched Barack Obama speak to the nation in bold terms, sketching out a future that involved the efforts of all of us. "We the people," he invoked. Not far from the spot where Dr. King had famously unveiled his own dream fifty years ago. The coupling of Dr. King's celebration and the inauguration of our first black president is so shimmering with joy that it dazzles me at times, and I can hardly take it in. But following the sunset on Saturday evening had given me some practice, so I just let myself feel the amazement, the sweetness of witnessing this historic event with my kids cuddled next to me on the couch. They have never known anything but an African American president.

As Obama left the scene on Monday, he stopped to turn around and look at the crowd. “I want to take a look one more time,” he was heard to say. “I’m not going to see this again.”

We more than talk about our grief. We use it. It's our raw clay. And we couldn't feel compassion for others let alone serve others if we didn't touch it now and then. For an artist, we couldn't do our work without all those technicolor feelings. It's a high price. And I'll pay it. Getting to commune with that sunset the other night was worth the cost of any ticket.