Countdown to Jam for the Fans, T- minus 21

This was during our This Town Is Wrong tour in 2004. We are playing with the CrackerJack Band at this place in the suburbs of Philly that reminded Katryna and me of the set of the TV show Friends. What was the name of this place? Amelia might have been in the dressing room with a babysitter. Katryna was just barely pregnant with William.

I have lugged my amp up from the basement (full disclosure: Tom did the lugging) and have taken the Les Paul out of its gorgeous pink case to show my children. They were suitably impressed; more by the pink than the guitar. I use "showing you the guitar" as a bribe to get Elle to finish her violin practice.

Ten Words of Advice to Graduates

What I wish I'd known when I was 22:
1. All the terrible things that happen to you (and terrible things will happen to you) will turn out to be great stories, grist for the mill, food for your growth, opportunities for you to become bigger-hearted and stronger and more resilient, IF you can see them that way and not as pure tragedy.
2. Don't forget how to play.
3. Establish a spiritual practice, even if it as simple as taking time to connect with the natural world every day.
4. Drink 8 glasses of water per day
5. Move your body, be fully in your body, and don't think of your body as something you have. If you are "taking care of" your body, you're not really living in it. You're missing the point.
6. The more you give generously of yourself, your time, your resources, the more you get.
7. Everything you ingest becomes a part of you--so choose wisely, be it food, entertainment, friends, experiences.
8. Sleep a lot.
9. Compromise with your lovers and friends
10.Master the art of forgiveness.

Countdown to Jam for the Fans Day 2

So I finished the song for the finale, except now it's not for the finale. If we can arrange it in time, it will be somewhere else in the set. Katryna and Patty and I just met for lunch, looked at lots of old pictures, massaged the set list, planned the dinner menu for the folks who bought the entire weekend package. I think we are supposed to call them "package holders." So many people have requested songs on Facebook! I wish we could learn them all. I mean relearn them all.

As part of this blog-every-day project, I will also post an old photo a day. Here is today's: It's of me and Christine Lavin plotting to set Patty (our manager) up with Julie Gold. Don't we look like evil yentas? Sorry about the quality. (As far as I can tell, we weren't successful.)

Countdown to Jam for the Fans #1

I am supposed to be writing a song for the Nields 20th anniversary/reunion finale at the Iron Horse. No pressure. It's just supposed to sum up the last 20 years, be upbeat, have a great chorus that the fans can sing along to, and top everything else that we play. I started to write it Monday. Or rather, I started to write something; but what I wrote, while good, is not an end-of-the-show kind of song. It's the kind of song that, in the days of the band when we all lived together and breathed in unison, we would have placed about fourth or fifth in the set. It grooves. It would have gotten everyone on their feet. But it never would have ended a show.

Men came today in a big red dump truck and hacked away at our back porch until it was gone. I thought this would be terribly depressing; after all, I loved that back porch. I wrote chunks of my books sitting on an Adirondack chair on that porch, and I (and others) sat on the floor, guitar in lap, and wrote songs. In fact, the song I mention above was started there. I kept spacing out as I was writing it, gazing at the beautiful flowery backyard, moping about the fact that I would never sit here again, never gaze at that view again. Then I remembered the whole point of the renovation is to create a ROOM in that very spot so that I can sit and gaze and write songs--from my new kitchen.

Two great surprises came from the porch demolition. The best one was that the men located Jay's small Hess motorcycle guy (actually William's--Jay stole it.) Motorcycle guy has been AWOL for over a year. He had been buried under the porch. Jay is apoplectic.

The other is the light. The light! Our kitchen is light! The porch had been blocking the light! Now I have a tangible, experienced vision to meditate upon when I lose heart for this project, as I will sometime in June when I wish for more than a trickle of water to wash my greens, or when one of my kids reminds me why it's a really good thing to have a bathroom on the first floor (the bathroom is being gutted, too.)


Katryna said I could re-write an existing song for the finale. I actually had just done that.

For five generations now, our family has spent parts of our summers at a place in the high peaks region of the Adirondacks called Putnam Camp. This rustic place, nestled at the foot of Giant Mountain, hosted Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung along with William James while the two psychoanalysts made their first and only trip together to the United States. Cabins have names if not running water, and after each family style meal, guests climb the base of the mountain to have tea and dessert in a wall-less cabin affectionately known as The Stoop. This is also where folks pull out guitars, banjos, the occasional hand-made upright bass, and sing songs passed down from family to family for generations.

Putnam Camp has some traditions which require music, too; notoriously a song guests sing to latecomers to dinner called "Little Popsie Wopsie." (Our mother lived in fear of being "Popsie wopsied," and thus we girls were never once late.) But our favorite song is the one guests sing to the departing visitors. At the end of a stay (typically a week), remaining guests line up and hold hands and do a kind of modified can-can while singing this song to the car loaded with the departing guests as it drives down the mountain out to Route 73.

We’ll dance like a fairy
and sing like a bird
Sing like a bird, sing like a bird
We’ll dance like a fairy
and sing like a bird
And wile the hours away

In our family, we have taken this tradition and applied it at every possible opportunity to bid farewell to any guest at all. My kids would sing it to the postwoman if they could. My parents often sing it to us as we drive away from their house, the two of them holding hands and kicking their feet gamely back and forth, waving with their outside arms as our car follows the bend in the driveway.

Last Sunday, our friend Kris departed after spending a lovely day with us. "Dance wike a faiwy!" Jay shouted as she closed her car door, and so Elle and Jay and I sang and danced and waved as Kris made her way back home. As we turned to go back in the house, it occurred to me that the song needed some new verses. Probably this occurred to me because my son wouldn't let me stop singing the one existing verse, and I was getting bored. Boredom is the doorway to creativity, says our friend Holly Near.

We’ll dance like a fairy and sing like a bird
Sing like a bird, sing like a bird
We’ll dance like a fairy and sing like a bird
And wile the hours away

We hope that your travels bring you safely home
You safely home, you safely home
We hope that your travels bring you safely home
And show you some fun on the way

We’ll hold these good times we had close to our hearts
Close to our hearts, close to our hearts
We’ll hold these good times we had close to our hearts
Until we’re together to stay.

We’ll wile all our hours away while you’re gone
Away wile you’re gone, away while you’re gone
We’ll while all our hours away while you’re gone
And then we will go out and play.

Don't you think this would make an excellent finale to Jam for the Fans?

Your House Is Strong-Happy Mother's Day!

Here is the video we made in conjunction with MotherWoman. The shot of the woman holding the sign "..and wise" gets me every single time I watch it. And those kids...

More Easter Thoughts

The Master gives himself up
to whatever the moment brings.
He knows that he is going to die,
and her has nothing left to hold on to:
no illusions in his mind,
no resistances in his body.
He doesn't think about his actions;
they flow from the core of his being.
He holds nothing back from life;
therefore he is ready for death,
as a man is ready for sleep
after a good day's work.
-Tao Te Ching, verse 50

After I wrote this piece, it actually was Easter. I read Katryna my last post ("Follower of Jesus") and she quipped, "Maybe it's because I haven't slept in a few days, but I could hardly stay awake listening that."

Following through on my promise last year that Easter should be more about spring and bunnies and eggs and sugar and less about my existential angst, I joined forces with Katryna to create Easter baskets for the kids and spent the wee hours on Sunday planting Reese's peanut butter eggs and Jelly Bellies all over my mother's living room.



We hid the colored hard boiled eggs outside and marveled at the cuteness and generosity of our four kids, three of them making sure that the youngest got his fair share.

We then proceeded to church where the kids made God bells (don't ask) and we listened to such divine music (complete with tuba, trombone, marimba and gigantic organ) and a beautiful sermon by the wonderful, wise Aaron Fulp -Eickstaedt which reminded me that, no matter what one might ultimately believe, one strong message of Easter is that the story isn't over. It ain't what it seems to be.

Later that evening the grown ups sat around the dinner table talking about the Steven Mitchell book Tom and I had read. I was full of the day--letting go of all my wonderings about The Truth and Life and Death and Resurrection. And yet I found myself, as we talked about the ideas in the book, feeling disconnected again, lost in my head. It hurts in a way to be stuck in your head, thinking about ideas. In a way it's a kind of anesthetic. You forget you have a body when you are lost in ideas. But eventually your body reminds you, and you feel pinched and cramped and slightly sick to your stomach; at least I do.

We got to the part about Jesus parentage. I was putting forth Mitchell's idea that Jesus was shaped significantly by his illegitimacy, and explaining that historically being called "Son of Mary" (or of any woman as opposed to "Son of Jack" or "Son of Matthew" or Son of Any Man") was a slur. (Mark 6:3)

Elle raised her hand patiently until someone called on her. "Excuse me," she said, acting not at all as though she had consumed her weight in chocolate that day. "Was Jesus's mother Mother Earth?"



And we all said, together, Yes, she was.

Follower of Jesus

I didn't use to love Easter. Maybe it was the reoccurring failure to successfully give up anything for the whole of Lent, maybe it was the disappointment so often of the New England springtime weather, but more likely it was confusion I felt about the story of Jesus rising from the dead. Did he really? And even if he did, what did that mean for me and all my mortal friends? I could never accept the equation given to me in a shouting match my freshman year in college when I was collared by a member of Campus Crusade for Christ who with great frustration tried to get me to believe that Jesus was a kind of blood sacrifice in atonement for Adam's original sin. That God was somehow powerless to keep us from burning in hell, and that therefore He had to let His son die a miserable death in order to retract us all from the pawn shop. It seemed bizarre and completely unbelievable to me. And what about all those good people who believed in and loved God or Spirit or Allah or the Tao or Kindness and Goodness with all their hearts and souls and minds and strength? Or even the mean people who had bad lives and so were bad to others? They were doomed to hell because of some equation? No way.

And yet I have always loved Jesus. I felt his love as a little child, seeing myself in the scripture where he tells his disciples that one must enter the Kingdom of God as a little child, and then takes the children into his arms to bless them. I always loved the poetry of the Sermon on the Mount, the poetry in the story of the blind man whose sight Jesus restores (“I see men walking like trees!” he exclaims when he first gets his sight back.) I love the moment when Jesus pauses to stoop and write on the ground in the dust when asked if it is right to stone a woman for adultery. And most importantly, when I am most troubled, most challenged, the version of God I need always turns out to be Jesus.

This year, starting in early March, Tom and I joined a book group. The book group was led by our minister at the West Cummington Church, Steve Philbrick. Together we read The Gospel According to Jesus by Stephen Mitchell. This book takes as its premise that while there is much to love in the gospels, there is also much not to love, and much to be taken with several shakers worth of salt. It's Mitchell's version of what (with a nod to Thomas Jefferson, Leo Tolstoy and a group of scholars known as the Jesus Seminar) he believes to be the authentic sayings of Jesus minus what centuries of games of telephone, Roman Emperors, church councils and warring factions plugged into what we now read as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, littering them with polemic and attempts to prove Jesus's paternity and divinity (which, by the way, are already at odds with each other--how can Jesus be descended from the House of David via his earthly non-father Joseph AND be the son of God?) Indeed, in my own lifetime of reading the gospels I have always been troubled and confused by what appeared to be two Jesuses: the Jesus who says, "Why do you call me good? There is no one good except God," (Mark 10:18) and "No one gets to the Father but through me," (John 14:6).

Mitchell's book produces a streamlined Jesus, one who feels like a real person, more coherent, an enlightened human, completely lovable and charismatic, with a journey that makes sense to this reader. Born into bastardy at a time in history when this was akin to being a leper, he undoubtedly suffered unspeakable social torments as he grew into adulthood, watching his mother produce other brothers who were not afflicted similarly. He certainly must have wondered with frustration who his father was. Jesus's epiphany--his moment of awakening--comes at his baptism, where he hears the voice of his true Father, and realizes he is God's child in whom God is well-pleased. But, Mitchell argues, Jesus doesn't necessarily believe that this makes him any different from you or me. We too are children of God; we just have to realize it.

"But I tell you, love your enemies, do good to those that hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you, so that you may be sons of your father in in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the wicked and on the good, and sends his rain to the righteous and unrighteous. (Matthew 5:44)

As Jesus came to forgive his childhood tormentor, he demonstrates that we all have this capacity to forgive within our hearts. His forgiveness of that which is most challenging can be a more slow-going process. A reading of the text supports the argument that it takes Jesus until the end of this gospel to come to a forgiveness of his mother (in the story of the woman about to be stoned for adultery.) Remember that when Mary and his brothers bang on the door for an audience, Jesus says, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" and points to the crowd in the room listening to him. "These are my mother and my brothers" (Matthew 12:48-49)

Forgiveness is Jesus's great new teaching, the piece that Christianity brings to the world with more clarity than any other religion. God's forgiveness of us when we come to Him as supplicants is old hat at the time of Jesus. All religions posit a God who yearns for our repentance and delights in forgiving us. What is new to me in this translation is the concept that we must forgive each other and ourselves. Maybe this kind of forgiveness is uniquely Jesus's to teach precisely because Jesus had within himself so much anger and resentment. This possibility makes me like him even more than I did before. I am much more willing to follow someone who has actually struggled with what I struggle with and has overcome it. (Mitchell reads the story of the woman being stoned for adultery as a moment of insight into Jesus’s own anger with his mother--when he writes in the dust, perhaps he is rewriting his own "story", realizing as he does so his own teaching, that as we judge, so are we judged. He forgives the adulterous woman and in doing so makes peace with his own biography.)

Jesus preaches over and over that the Kingdom of God is at hand--here, now, in all that is around us, good, bad, boring, distracting. The tsunamis, the cancer, the babies born, the lilies of the field, the billboards, the filibustering on CNN, the miracle of life. When we align ourselves with the flow of it all, we lose track of time: this is the eternal life we gain. When we let go of our self-pity, selfishness, obsession with our status, wealth, waistlines; when we act out of love for our brothers and sisters, for our enemies and for the strangers we encounter on the road; when we see that we are all connected and that any small act we do for anyone else we do for Jesus (and for ourselves), we are reborn. We are made new. We are in heaven.


Mitchell does away with some of the most familiar parts of the Jesus story: the Christmas scene, Bethlehem, The Last Supper, and most importantly, the physical resurrection. This last is the part I flinched at. My own childhood fear of death, fear of annihilation, hope for an afterlife where I would be reunited with everyone I loved and where we would all live in peace and harmony with no billboards and filibustering, and where somehow we were not bored by the monotony of perfection, still remains. I don't want to not exist. I don't want to be nothing. I passionately want to BE! Death terrifies me. I want a heaven. I want a resurrection. I want to live forever with Tom, Jay and Elle, not to mention Katryna and Abigail and my parents, and all the writers and friends I love. I want to see my grandparents and Mimi again. Call me spiritually immature, but that is my truth. I have been tortured with fear ever since reading this book; real existential fear. What if this really is it, if it really does come down to this moment and nothing else? Then I am truly screwed every time I space out, check my Facebook status, worry about food and money and clothes, leave the Kingdom for my myriad of plans for tomorrow. I am wasting my one and only life.

I hate this thought so much.

So I have been praying. God, please show me what You really mean by resurrection. Show me what you mean by Heaven. Give me a new idea, one that I can embrace and pursue with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, all my strength.

I called a friend of mine, a lifelong Catholic and told her about my doubts. She surprised me by concurring with my questions about the veracity of the resurrection of the body of Christ. She said she had prayed during a retreat for answers to this, and experienced Jesus saying to her, "Here are my wounds. Take them. It doesn't matter whether I rose or not. What matters is that you have risen." Steve had said a similar thing when our group ended last week. “What matters is not whether Jesus rose,” he said, pointing at each of us. “But that you do. That Karen does. That Betsy does. That Tom does.”

Later, as I was pondering these thoughts on my run, I thought about the pain of Ego, the pain of wondering if my shows would sell out, if my work would be received well or poorly, the pain of judgment about my physical appearance, the pain of comparing myself to others. I thought about the pain of wishing I had what I don’t—everything from a gas/electric Wolf range to private school for my kids to free health care for all, to having everyone around me acknowledge at all times that I am right about everything. And suddenly, I got it. When I am thinking about these things I am not here. I am in my head, not my body. I am not in the present moment. And even when I am thinking about others and not my tiny limited self, I am still not present. I am not dwelling in Jesus’s Kingdom of God.

As I practice mindfulness, as I love my sisters and brothers and elders and children, as I act as a good steward of the Earth, as I do my Yoga (writing songs, tending the garden, teaching my workshops, coaching my clients), as I try to follow the teachings of Jesus, I move incrementally into a state of less self-centeredness, less ego. And perhaps someday I will lose my passion for having things go the way I think they need to go. If I do my work well, and am blessed with a very long life (for it will take this gal a very long time to practice thus!) then maybe I have a shot of rendering my mind fit for an afterlife of stillness, of unity, of oneness.

On Good Friday, Tom and Elle and Jay and I went to the airport to fly to Virginia for our show at Jammin Java's in Vienna Saturday night, and Easter with the grandparents Sunday morning. As we moved along in the terminal after our security check (we always mark each passing of security with a hearty family high five), I rose out of my habitual whirl of worrying, mom-planning, spinning in my small self, and gazed up to see Tom, Elle and Jay running and jumping and dancing as they made their way to the gate. At that moment, I didn’t need any help to be present, gleeful, with my chest blooming with love and joy. Perhaps this is my Easter moment, and perhaps it is enough.

The Rites of Spring

photo by Jim Henry

About this time of year, I find it necessary to listen to Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, the 1913 ballet that caused riots at its debut in Paris. The piece depicts Pagan Russian fertility rites and supposedly features a girl who dances herself to death. I first heard the piece when I was a freshman in high school, where I promptly fell in love with all things early twentieth century, and choreographed my own version in my bedroom later that week. Each year, right around post-tax day, in the pre-tulip, pre-lilac, when it's still red-bud April I need to hear it.

I am not alone in yearning for a reflection of the season. Last night Katryna and I played a show at Shelburne Falls' Memorial Hall. In the green room on the second floor of that lovely old building, we looked out over the Falls and could barely carry on a conversation for the noise of all that golden snow melt cascading down, crashing over and churning it all up.

We played with a band called Flapjack Overkill, a stupendous student band directed by our own Dave Chalfant and fronted by three seventeen year old singers, who each possessed a lovely, unusual, gorgeous voice capable of sending the audience into riots of joy. The band was not what the promotor expected at a nice little folk show with Tracy Grammer & Jim Henry and the Nields. Instead, it was a 13 piece ensemble complete with horn section, keyboards and killer rhythm section who rocked the house. They joined us on "Easy People" and will remain one of my all time great musical memories. Something about the pure power of all that youth behind us made me feel as though I could handle anything this spring, even revolution.

By now it's a cliche to talk about all the other kind of adolescent disruption that seems to take place so often around Hitler's birthday which is April 20. April 19 was the day the 51 day Waco siege ended in fire, and a year later, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. April 20 was Columbine. April 21 was last year's BP oil spill. Ugh. There seems to be something in the early spring when the sun is about to leave the first sign in the zodiac--the adolescent Aries, a ram kicking its heels into the air and butting anything before it with its blunted horns--and enter the more congenial territory of Taurus.
But before we enter the sweeter part of spring, I want to try to walk the razor thin line that runs between the intoxicating chaos of life coming back to life with the promise of all that energy I saw in the Falls and hear in the Rites and Slapjack Overkill, and the places where it threatens to spill over and engulf us all in the violence that I believe can only come from the same God that I worship as the gentle parent I know in my most quiet and centered moments. God is that big. God is that mysterious. God is that unfathomable.

Notice, PS, that there two other pretty large cultural/religious events that happen at this time of year: Passover and Easter. (Actualy, I am quite sure there are parallels in each of the major faith traditions the world over,and I invite readers to educate me about this.) In each case, life and resurrection, in the form of new patterns, new traditions, emerge out of shocking violence. Passover's seed story is of "God" asking the Hebrew slaves to mark their doors with the blood of a lamb so that "God" can spare them the last of the ten plagues: the killing of all first born sons in the land of Egypt where they are enslaved. Easter is the story of Jesus being brutally murdered by crucifixion. And yet in each case, these events gave birth to the fundamentals of each religion. The Hebrews were able to leave Egypt in the wake of the "passing over" of the massacre of the first born, and eventually come to the land of Canaan. More importantly, Passover is seen as the beginning of Yahweh's covenant and protection of the Jewish people. Christianity of course springs from the aftermath of the death of Jesus; his martyrdom inspires countless followers to go to any and all lengths to promote their faith.

Tom and I have a friend who is dying of cancer. We got a message last night that he has weeks to live. The doctors have taken him off chemo. His thirteen year old daughter has been told. This daughter, by the way, was adopted from China by our friend and his partner. When the daughter was five, our friend's partner died of cancer. How can it be OK that a kid lose not one not two not three but four parents before she hits puberty?

Steve Philbrick, upon hearing this said a couple of things. One was, "That kid sure must need to be here, if they're shooting out all the parents under her feet." He also said, "It ain't much of a God if you can easily discern His will."

Oh, right. What kind of a God would it be if it all made sense to me? If it were all predictable? If we all knew for sure that when they rolled aside that rock almost 2000 years ago and saw no body, if a risen Jesus had appeared on CNN and granted some interviews, there would be no need for faith, or for a leap. Faith without a leap is just more of the information gathering we do anyway. Then faith is just the ability to Google.

I played the Rites of Spring for my kids the other day. I crouched down on the middle of the carpet where the pattern makes a circular design and the three of us pretended to be small plants just below the crust of the earth. When the music got loud, we jumped up and danced around. But then I made the mistake of pointing out that the drums and bassoon might be a bear. Jay jumped in my lap at that point. Elle stated, "I am not scared like Jay," but then she too jumped in my lap. I abandoned our ballet to make tomato soup for their lunch and turned off the music, which I had decided was really about the same as playing them Marilyn Manson at their ages. Jay followed me into the kitchen. "Where is da beaw?" he asked. He wanted to see a picture of the CD cover. I picked him up and cuddled him and talked about how you can make up all sorts of things in some kinds of music and make pictures of them in your mind. He has been talking about the "beaw music" ever since.

Lots of good happens between April 19 and 21 too. Some of my favorite people are celebrating birthdays. Life is expensive, this period seems to remind us. In all the things we want, the things we fear, the things we push away, the places we grieve and mourn, we can forget that we have been given this most precious gift of all: awareness and a heart that beats. We don't know for how long we get to have this gift. But spring gives us great hope that even when we are gone, the gift remains.

You Are All Beautiful

I took the photo at the top of this post a couple of days ago, just walking down the street. I almost didn't stop, but the colors in the yarn caught my eye. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the artist had not only cozied up the meter pole; she had also stitched us a message: "You Are All Beautiful."

Monday was the first day where we could take off our shoes and let our tender pale feet begin to develop their summer calluses. It was the first day where the bugs were more than a curiosity to my kids; the first day we had lunch and dinner outside. I took the kids over to a friend's house and the two of us moms watched our older ones swing on her swing set while we cuddled and breast fed our little ones. She was telling me about a friend of hers who was expressing some distress about the fact that she was choosing to pursue her career full throttle at the expense of spending time with her kids. It seems like there's always some new variation on this one. In her friend's case, the mother was wistful about all that she was missing in order to not compromise her very successful career. My friend said, "The hard part is, in the beginning you are feeling bad for your child. All the mommy your baby doesn't get. But later, you feel bad for you--all the child and child-time you don't get."

I've taken on a practice this Lenten season. A Catholic friend of mine told me she'd given up negative thinking. How hard could that be? I thought. Way easier than giving up caffeine. I always like to take something on rather than give something up. And so I adopted the practice as well, and found almost immediately that just as with meditation I cannot do it anywhere close to perfectly, or even 25% of the time. But, again like meditation, the practice is actually in the noticing that you are not present, not positive, and then gently steering your mind back to a friendlier turf. You do this over and over and over, as Jack Kornfield says, the way you train a puppy to pee on the newspaper instead of on your rug. And while I haven't had a single day that was truly free from negative thinking, let alone complaining––which is the audible version of negative thinking–– I have to say I have never been happier in my life. I don't feel as compelled to make everyone do what I want them to do. I seen to be happy just observing and participating when called upon. People delight me. Everything seems fresh and amazing. Best of all, I have stopped beating myself up. I don't waste my time being annoyed with myself for failing so miserably at the task of thinking positively. I just go, "Oh, well. I am learning. Nice trying!"

The difference might also be that because I have to drop the thought, I don't get to fondle it, nurture it, explore all the intricate nuances of how right I am and how wronged I have been, how things really would have been so much better if they'd gone the way I'd wanted them to go, how rotten it is that the beautiful 77 degree day we had yesterday has morphed into 45 and drizzly today.

So when I start to feel my jaw tighten and my eyes get hard like a lion about to pounce, or when I feel that queasy feeling in my gut, I get reminded that this is not good for me. I think about something joyful--usually my kids or Tom or my writers making great literature and telling some crucial bit of truth, or that one detail about my kitchen that is going to completely change my life forever for the better (the filtered hot/cold spigot on my new sink!)-- and my mouth turns up, my forehead uncrinkles, my heart feels peaceful and the cycle is broken. It's as if I have a screened-in porch, where before I was at the mercy of the mosquitoes and yellow jackets. I still see them, but now they can't get at me.

Last Friday I got an email from Elle's pre-school. Her graduation is now scheduled for June 10 from 6-7:30pm. Also scheduled at that time is the Jam for the Fans dinner and Meet and Greet, and the open mic which we'd hoped my father would participate in. When I read the email I immediately spun into panic mode. I called Katryna, and she very calmly told me to just call the school and nicely ask if they can change the date.

"Why not?" she said. "The only thing you have to lose is their opinion of you."
So, with great dread (for I care deeply that people hold me in good opinion, but I care more about seeing my daughter's graduation) I did just that. I even tried to bribe them, telling them I would lead the graduates in some stirring folk song appropriate for the occasion, something like Aikendrum.


They did not change the date.

I indulged in some negative thinking. This stinks! I thought. Not only am I missing my beloved daughter's moment of glory, but I am also missing all her classmates, most of whose music teacher I have been for the past two years. It would have been so fun to get the kids to perform! And all those wonderful parents, friends I have made, shoulders I have cried on while we watched our kids go from diapers and temper tantrums to confident organized almost-kindergartners. This was one of those moments my friend was talking about. Elle might be fine without me, but I wasn't sure I was going to be fine missing this event.

And then I decided to see what might be good about this new schedule, or at least about this state of affairs.
1. Elle's grandparents will be in town for Jam for the Fans. Maybe they can shoot over and see a portion of the event.
2. Maybe Elle is meant to be mad at me. Maybe it's good that her dad is the good guy and they can have some special time together.
3. Maybe we can have a special Mommy/Elle celebration some other time. Ditto the kids and their song.
4. Maybe the Fans will tell me to come late to the Open Mic and see my daughter graduate.

Funny that Katryna had to think of this last one. It never occurred to me that I could ask my fans (who, after all, are my employers) if they could spare me for an hour.

Jesus said, famously, "Judge not that you be not judged." He didn't say this in a wagging-a-finger, Law-of-Congress-kind-of way. He said it as the Law-of-Physics-kind-of fact that it is. When we judge, we enter a state of judgment and judgmental-ism. The opinions start ricocheting off any available surface; they are like little arrows stabbing us constantly. Judgments create pain. The Buddha, a tad less famously said, "Opinions just go around bothering people." I am so lucky to have work I adore, work that feels more like a calling than a way to make a paycheck. Some moms when they give up their paycheck gig feel very clear and good about their decision. Some moms are able to keep doing the work they love while missing very few beats in the saga of their kids' lives. I wanted to be so comfortably famous and successful by the time I had kids that I'd be able to chuck them in the back of the tour bus with a full time excellent nanny who would also be one of my best friends and a traveling Kodaly or Dalcroze teacher who also loved to play soccer, and maybe my bandmates would have kids my kids age and we could all go around the country together, one gigantic preschool on the road. Katryna and I would be selling out shed dates and big theatres and then spending the mornings in the lobbies of the hotel, chasing our kids up and down the elegant carpets past flower arrangements the size of my Suburu. My kids would see the country, pooling into Yosemite and Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon whenever we toured these areas. I would have it all.

And that didn't happen. And what I have today is so much better, so much richer, primarily because it is real and not a projection of what if. The projection misses the mosquitoes and the yellow jackets--rarely do such commonplace villains get written into fantasy. But why begrudge the mother who has this? And why pity the mother who doesn't? How could I have predicted that the best moment of my recent life was getting to watch my daughter play a variation of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" onstage with a bunch of other kids on a Sunday afternoon while my son ran around on the grass outside. The best parts are always your real life. The best parts are when you stop, wherever you are--be it in the middle of your detested job, the middle of your never-ending afternoon, the middle of your peak moment onstage or in the operating room, the middle of your walk down Crafts Avenue--and let the voice tell you the truth. You are beautiful.

Waiting for Spring, and Thoughts on Little House on the Prairie

The other day I got a most alarming message from my gmail account. In a glaring red box at the top of my gmail page, I was informed that I had reached capacity and if I didn't delete my excessive emails, they would be deleted for me. I felt panic, but also astonishment. I had used up all my space? How did that happen? I'd always envisioned my available space as outer space, my emails over the course of the past 5 years like tiny specks, the size the stars appear to be--dots on a black canvas--rather than what they really are--giant suns. I had loved gmail when I first signed up for it, right around the time Elle was born. In fact, I went into labor three and a half weeks early in the morning after I'd spent the evening before wrestling for three miserable hours trying to get my old AOL contacts to import into gmail. Coincidence? I think not.

Gmail was so fabulous--it searched and found everything I'd ever written to anyone and everything anyone had ever written to me. I was saved! No need for filing, no need to try to figure out what to keep and what to trash. I could just keep it all! Or so I thought. Discovering there were limits to my cache, I was mortified. Being called on my hoarding tendencies in this arena was just as embarrassing as being called on the hoarding of clothes, tchotchkes, pots and pans, mugs, guitars, books, ancient issues of Yoga Journal, and all those scraps of paper with lines of songs on them. Not only that, for the first time I really got that my storage of useless emails of Facebook announcements, the New York Times, freecycle posts and the like were being subsidized by coal drawn from mountains in Tennessee with their pinnacles snapped off, and nuclear energy from the kinds of plants that are causing radiation sickness in Japan right now. I am the problem, and by deleting my copious emails, I can do my part to be on the side of the solution.



Elle has recently discovered the Little House books. We finished reading Little House on the Prairie last week, Tom and I fighting over who got to read aloud to the older child. These were among my favorite books when I was a child--I joyfully read and re-read and re-read them until I had memorized the songs Pa played on his fiddle, the exact items the girls got for each Christmas, the reverence with which Laura created her dowry, the color and texture of her wedding dress (black, silk). I noticed that the Ingalls girls sang "Bean Porridge Hot" while I had learned the same song as "Pease Porridge Hot." The folk tradition lives. Elle noted that she might play "Old Dan Tucker" on her violin someday, just as Pa did.

But what struck me going back to these books as an adult was the existential discrepancy between the ways in which Americans in the 1870s viewed the land, the country, its potential, and the way we do now, in 2011. It must have seemed to those pioneers that land was all we had. Land and time; when Ma moans to Pa in the last chapter that they have lost a year of their lives in building their little house, toiling the earth, establishing a claim, only to be kicked out for slightly vague reasons by government soldiers, Pa shrugs and says, "We have all the time in the world, Caroline."

For as far as Laura, the eight-year-old protagonist, could see there was nothing but the Kansas prairie grass and wild game. "We can eat like kings here," Pa declares, arriving back to the Little House with two jack rabbits in one hand and a prairie chicken in the other. And he notes that it is no longer so back in the Big Woods of Wisconsin where the settlers have already depleted the resources.

But like my blissful ignorance about my gmail account, which I'd assumed would hold every single email I ever wrote for all eternity, we Americans--actually we citizens of the planet earth--have now clearly come to the edge of our space. Hearing from a friend at a gathering a few weeks ago about her view of the Atlantic while living in the Congo--all she could see as far as the eye were oil riggers drilling off the coast--drove home this point. The world has changed radically in 40 years since I've been alive. And of course the world I read about in the 1870s was almost unrecognizable to the one I inhabited in the 1970s, when the Congo was still wooded and plain.

Sunday was the first day of spring, and Tom uncovered his garlic plants while the kids played in the warming sun. Monday it snowed. I carried my mug of green tea (yes, back on caffeine as of today--the snow did me in) to the couch in the music room and gazed out the window at the falling snow. When I let go of the story--it should not snow! It's spring!--I rather enjoyed the silent gentle falling, slowing covering the barn roof with white. I thought about the way I used to binge: spacing out while consuming a half a box of granola, completely dissociated from my body. In that state, I had been suspended in time, floating in space, just me and my mouth. I haven't done that in years, and I hope never to eat that way again, but it occurred to me today that something might have been lost in abstaining from this behavior. Just as an ex-smoker misses that opportunity to step outside the building for some fresh air, a pause and a moment to reflect, I missed that spaced-out feeling I used to get when I did the outrageous (in my mind) activity of eating copiously between meals. And when I stopped drinking caffeinated beverages, I stopped taking the proverbial coffee break. I know, I know, I could have taken small meditative breaks without the coffee, taken herbal tea breaks. But without the physical need to ingest the chemical, tea frankly lost its appeal. Why drink something that might spill and stain? I wasn't thirsty.

But today I was. I got it into my head that I wanted more than anything to build a small room at the top of my house, with glass all around, and to spend an entire year just sitting there and looking out the window. Just watching the trees change, the birds come and go, the sky turn blue, white, grey, black, purple, orange, pink. I wanted to watch spring come, crocus by crocus, bud by bud, leaf by leaf. I wanted more time and space. I wanted to just watch.

Laura and her sister Mary spend a lot of time just watching. Many chapters in Little House mention this. Laura and Mary sit at the window for three days watching the horizon to see when Pa is coming home from Independence with their ration of sugar, cornmeal and coffee (notice that these pioneers did not do without coffee, though they did without vegetables for an entire year. As far as I could tell, the only fruit they ate was wild blackberries.) Were they more or less bored than a typical child of the 2010s? What would they have made of our swarms of emails? Ma comments to the girls at one point that if they send a letter to their family back in Wisconsin in the fall, they might expect a letter the following spring. It would be less disrespectful to the planet to save one's correspondence if letters came just once a season or less. My emails to my family are copious, though short and usually not precious, though occasionally full of priceless moments: "Jay announced that from now on we should call him Sosuke," I recently wrote (Sosuke being the little boy in Ponyo). I would like to be able to look back and remember this.

I like to think that I am enlightened enough not to berate myself for my email disorganization, to sigh and accept that this is the way it is and let gmail delete all my past correspondence for me. If in a life we leave behind only traces of our past, the way ancestors of Laura Ingalls (of which there are none, actually--none of the four sisters had grandchildren) might have discovered that one letter of 1875, I needn't fret about a dearth of evidence. Even without a single email, I have left plenty. Even if the house burned down (God forbid) and I lose the papers that contain my writing, it will be all right. Songs get lodged in the ears and hearts of listeners and get passed down generation after generation. I think I'd best spend my time writing songs, sitting in a glass-enclosed room, watching the seasons changing rather than deleting emails. Though then again, there was an awful lot of busywork a person had to do back in the 1870s--it probably took fifteen or sixteen trips to the well to haul up enough water for a bathtub, never mind the time it took to heat it up. So I will do the 21 century equivalent of chopping wood and carrying water. I will go through my in-box, say goodbye to what I might let go of. And then I will write a song.

Shiva, Shakti, Seeger, Suzuki

Today in yoga class, our teacher Amy Reed, talked about the dance between Shiva (our bare, pure awareness) and Shakti (the ways in which we harness our awareness to engage with the world.) The two are always at play with one another, going back and forth. Some times we are more introverted--more Shiva--observing the world as it goes by, just noticing, not getting all hooked up in the story. And at other times, we are plunging in, seeing where the holes are that only we can fill. "Blessed are those that play, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," wrote Emily Dickinson. As a musician, I think about Shiva and Shakti all the time. Musicians need, primarily, to be listeners before they ever strike, sing, pluck or blow a note. We need to observe what the others are playing, or even what the silence is compelling us to. And then, at just the right moment, we engage. We come in. We join the symphony, the chorus, the jam, with the part that is ours and only ours to share.

All of which makes me think about my new career as Suzuki Mom. If a year ago you had said, "Hey, Nerissa. What is your biggest parenting nightmare?" I would have said: any situation that would put me in a position to force my daughter to do something on a daily basis. Make that one thing "music" and we move from nightmare to horror show. How could forcing a child to practice for a half hour a day breed anything other than resentment? I would resent her for not wanting to practice, and she would resent me for...well, for being me. Queen of the Daily Practice (be it unloading the dishwasher, writing a song per day, running, yoga, making gratitude lists-whatever if might be, you can be sure I will be compulsive about it. This is not so bad when it's just me we're dealing with, but I feared exposing someone I loved, especially one of my children to this facet of myself.) When the phrase "Suzuki" was mentioned, I cringed at the vision I saw before me. Me barking, "Stand up straight! Bow hold! Bow hold!" My daughter in therapy twenty years later, telling some long suffering analyst how her love for music had been drained out of her one Twinkle variation at a time.

Besides that, I had made a career for myself espousing an alternative approach to traditional music education. "Music should be fun! Just make a joyful noise! Dance like Snoopy! Sing loud and don't worry about the on-key part! Shake an egg to the music! Technique schmechnique!"

I didn't grow up with Suzuki. I learned to play piano when I became literate, which is to say I was discouraged from the kind of exploration that all kids lucky enough to have a piano take on: fists on the piano, arms on the piano, one-fingered chicken scratch on the piano, poking out the melodies I heard around me. I was taught in a structured way, to identify those black ant-like marks on a clef with the corresponding white and black keys on the keyboard. I was yelled at to practice, but always by someone in the next room.

And yet, I became a Suzuki mom. Here's how.

In September 2009, when Elle was just three, Katryna and I were booked to be a part of a Pete Seeger Tribute at the Academy of Music in our hometown, Northampton. My parents love Pete Seeger; their second date was a Seeger concert, and they discovered their love for each other over "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream." They came to town, and before the show, we got take-out from Paul & Elizabeth's restaurant. As we exited Thornes Marketplace, Elle spied a busker on the street playing a fiddle. She'd seen a violin a few weeks earlier in the Elmo version of "Peter and The Wolf."

"Mama!" she shouted pointing. "I want to play that!" I didn't take this too seriously. Since "Peter and the Wolf," she'd also decided to play the flute and the French horn. I'd had to explain to her that she was too little for woodwinds or horns (one needs a certain amount of lung power not usually achieved till the age of 8 or 9). But I knew little kids could play the violin, so I said, "Well, you can if you want."

We proceeded to the venue. Backstage, the promoter introduced us to Emily Greene, a friendly looking woman holding a guitar. "Emily teaches Suzuki violin," mentioned the promoter.

"That's funny!" I said. "Elle just said she wanted to play violin."

Elle started jumping up and down and attached herself to Emily's legs right about then, and so I took her number. I looked up and said, "Good luck tonight. What song are you playing?"

She smiled and answered, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream."

Emily sent us a packet of information that terrified me so much that I kept it on the far corner of my desk for the next nine months. Suzuki parents were expected to practice with their child for a half hour a day, listen to a CD daily, and attend with the child not only a weekly private lesson, but two monthly group lessons! Not only that, we were expected to read Shinichi Suzuki's book Nurtured By Love and join a group discussion to talk about how it might shape our world view. As Katryna and I were on the road almost weekly doing gigs, and cramming to write our book All Together Singing In the Kitchen (a how-to and why-to raise musical children) I just didn't have the time, although it did occur to me in a guilty kind of way that maybe--just maybe-- being a Suzuki mom could inform my writing.

But Elle persisted. For nine months, she asked me steadily when we would start to play the violin. So in June, tiny violin in hand, we marched up to Emily's studio.


Right off the bat, Emily put us at ease. We didn't have to practice a half hour--only five minutes at first. We had some simple tasks: listen to the CD, hold the violin, make a "bow hold." Elle wasn't even allowed to touch it to the violin. And we were given a chart and some stickers. Every day we did these things, we got a sticker. My inner perfectionist was gratified.

And so was Elle. This, I thought, might just work.

Recently--well, since giving up caffeine--I have noticed the pause in between Shiva and Shakti, the moment before the partners take hands for the dance. And this is a good thing for me. I tend to act without thinking; to leap before I look. Taking the time to really think about Suzuki was unusual for me in that sense. But I believed that if I had let Elle go forward right away with the violin that I would have burned out and given up before the practice could take hold. And while I might be able to do that to myself, I felt I couldn't do that to my child. And so when we finally went forward, I made a deal with myself, similar to the deal I made when I became a parent. "I will do the best I can, and I will make a lot of mistakes. I will not be great, but I will be good enough."

This attitude, when I remember to maintain it, works very well in terms of our practice. We don't practice every day, but we never do less than five days a week. I do get impatient, but I have yet to threaten to burn her dollhouse. (See previous post). And when I do feel my temper rising--when she throws her rented violin on the floor in frustration, when she hits her brother with the bow, when she purposely plays the pieces twice as fast or three times as slow as they're supposed to be played (I recognize that these crimes might seem wildly divergent to you, but to a musician, they're all about the same)--I sometimes, OK, often, raise my voice. And then the image comes back of the poor tortured twentysomething in the analyst's office cursing Mommy Dearest. And that's when I get to soften, as we do in yoga when we find ourselves trying too damn hard. And I say, "I am so sorry. Let's take a break. Let's cuddle." And she puts down that tiny violin, crawls into my lap and we sit. We listen. We observe. And when we are ready, we pick up the violin again and play.

Why We Are Buidling a New Kitchen

Photo of the author and our kitchen by author's four-year-old.

I really think all my problems would be solved if I could a. go back on caffeine and b. buy a new iPad. Instead, I am going to think about this poem by Josephine Johnson.

This is the need, the deep necessity of every life:
To scatter wide seed in many fields,
But build one barn.

This is our blunder, to have built
Gilt shacks for every seed,
And followed our sowing on fast anxious feet,
Desiring to grind the farmost grain.

Let go. Let go. Return
Heighten and straighten the barn's first beam.
Give shape and form. Discover the rat, the splintered stair.
Throw out the dry, gray corn.

Then may it be said of you:
Behold, he had done one thing well,
And he knows whereof he speaks, and he means what he has said,
And we may trust him.
This is sufficient for a life.
-Josephine Johnson

One of the writers in my Monday group brought us this poem. It came as a gift on a day when we'd gotten two pieces of so-called bad news.

The first piece of bad news was that Elle had just lost her second lottery in a month to the other charter school we'd applied to. The first school we will not be attending is the Hilltown Charter school, co-founded by our beloved friend Penny Schultz, who teaches music and movement there. Penny is our music director at our church, and certainly one of my Knights of the Jedi Round Table (as my friend and mentor Pam Slim would say). Hilltown Charter is a jewel of creativity, inventiveness and just plain love. I cried when our number came in at 64 and I knew it wasn't going to happen for us.

The second school is the Chinese Immersion School in Hadley, about twenty minutes away from here. Although I don't think I would have sought out an immersion school, many friends encouraged us to apply because of the strong MCAS scores and parent cohort. I wanted to apply because all the kids I knew who go there love it. We drew #111.

On the same day, we got word from one of the two contractors who were bidding on our kitchen, coming in at a number that would make the figure in our savings account cower and wither and beg for mercy.

The next day we got the second bid. It was higher. Knowing that one needs to add 20% to whatever the estimate might be, Tom and I picked up the plans, scouring them for areas to decrease, appliances to recycle, tile choices to reconsider. Maybe we could get rid of a few windows. Or live without an oven and instead build a smoke pit in the center of our kitchen.

In fact, we are reconsidering the whole project. Do we really need a new kitchen? How can I justify this anyway, when down the street folks line up for a free meal at the shelter? And now that my daughter won't have a second language (Mandarin at that) in her back pocket when it's time to apply for college, shouldn't I put all the money in a college fund?

Then it occurred to me to learn Spanish. I have always wanted to learn Spanish! I speak and read passable French (well, passable to my sister who speaks about the same level of French. Katryna, that is. Abigail is fluent.) I could learn Spanish, send my kids to a Spanish after-school program, teach Spanish songs at their local public school where there are lots of native Spanish speakers and somehow shoehorn a kind of Immersion into my kids. Take that, charter school! Immersion, Nerissa-style.

Which might be what I suspect this poem is suggesting I don't do. I am queen of scattering my seeds and trying to build gilt shacks for them all. Do one thing well? Too hard. I'd much rather do twenty things kind of ok. Less boring, or so I think, anyway.

Speaking of boring, I read the reviews of Amy Chua's book with a kind of morbid fascination. For those who missed the news cycle of mid January, Amy Chua, AKA Tiger Mom wrote a memoir (note: NOT a How To) on her parenting style, which is somewhat if not completely Pavlovian and includes threatening her children with burning their dollhouses if they don't get their piano pieces error free in their daily three hours of practice. Of course, like the rest of America, I would not raise my kids that way. But sometimes I think that's only because none of my friends would let me. There is definitely a part of me that wants to raise my kids the way (some people) raise prize winning show dogs. And Amy Chua said one thing in the Wall Street Journal excerpt that I keep mulling over: "Nothing is fun until you're good at it."

Is this true? My kids certainly have a blast banging on our piano and hurling their adorable bodies around the living room to the soundtrack of Peter Pan. Their movements certainly resemble interpretive dance of a certain kind, but are they "good" at it in the sense of mastering skills? Probably not. And yet, I do remember when I was learning to play the guitar I was often so frustrated by my limits that I would give up after a few moments of miserable strumming to do something else. But, as I was self taught, I must have kept coming back for some reason. It wasn't fun not to be good at guitar. And I had what Ellen Weiner calls "the rage to master," which I presume Amy Chua's kids had
too, since at least one of them has played Carnegie Hall. But I only had the rage to master a certain level of guitar. I wanted to build gilt houses for a bunch of songs, including ones I would write myself. I did not make guitar the foundation for my barn. I did not build a guitar barn.

The lessons of this week keep circling back to this: I am building a kitchen partly because it's fun and indulgent and I love pretty tiles and BlueStar ranges; but mostly because I love to cook for friends and family, and like most families, we live in the kitchen more than any other room. The kitchen is our foundation, it is where we meet in the (sometimes cranky, sometimes luminous) bleary morning; where I write most of the day (my desk is in the kitchen now); where we gather at the day's end to thank God for our food, health, friends, family and say what was good about our day, what was bad. It's where Tom and I meet after the kids are in bed for a cup of mint tea and a recapping of the day's events. I clean the counters before turning the lights off--one of the last chores before sleep. And we hold retreats in our house where the kitchen is a whirl of flavors, laughter and activity. Songwriters write in the large bathroom cum recycling center which will turn into a pantry. Weekly writers know where the tea is stashed, how to get hot water quickly. This is a communal house, not just mine but belonging to the muses of the writers who write here.

When I was in college, I hung out at a vegetarian restaurant called Claire's for hours with my fat volumes of Shakespeare, thin Sam Shepard paperbacks and scores of Bach, and my friends from Tangled Up in Blue. One night, on a napkin, I drew my dream home: a place in western MA with three buildings. A recording studio on the left and a space to worship on the right. In the center was a house with a gigantic kitchen where we would all gather to eat and recap the day. I imagined all my friends from college coming and going, making music, sharing stories of their adventures. I imagined myself living here after my touring days were over. I'd take the cue from Voltaire: "Il faut cultiver notre jardin."

I guess I am there now. And so we are joyfully sending Elle to the local public school a couple of blocks away from here, and I hope to give as much as I will get to my community. I will teach our songs, and I will learn the new ones from the kids she goes to school with. Meanwhile, I will clean house, reinforce my barns, cook some fabulous vegetarian meals on my BlueStar stove and let go. Return.

March Meditations

March. Sweet, heartbreaking March. Today started with promise, and the sheer lake of ice that is my backyard parking area got a gleen of melt on its surface, and I could see a time in the not-too-distant future when I wouldn't have to worry about my children slipping and breaking their teeth (a strange obsession of mine.) And then this evening the wind is whipping up, flakes of snow are flying and I retreated into my warmest sweater and wool socks.

We had a fantastic retreat here this weekend. Writers braved the ice storms and any social anxiety to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard and share what they had just written with the gang. My friend Kris McCue took some fabulous photos of our Saturday evening HooteNanny in which one amazing young writer revealed herself to be a master of the Nyckelharpa, an unusual Swedish instrument that is part lute, part violin (one plays it with a bow) and part harpsichord. Elle and she played every song Elle knows from her Suzuki Book One repertoire. Beth DeSombre and I accompanied (which was easy--all the songs are in A. To read Beth's post on her experience at the retreat, check out her blog--and her music. She is wonderful!)

March brings something else for us this year too. This Friday would have been my mother-in-law's birthday. As readers of this blog might remember, she died a year ago March 13, and we are experiencing what fellow writer Marilyn London-Ewing says is "yahrzeit" a Yiddish word meaning,"a year's time." It is a time of remembering; in the Jewish tradition, families light a candle and keep it lit for 24 hours while they say prayers. I feel as though our family is coming out of a dark time into the light, just as the sun is making herself more available to us here in the Northern Hemisphere. As D.H. Lawrence writes in his poem "Shadows,"
...and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and
snatches of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet
new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new
blossoms of me––

Life goes by very quickly these days. The kids grow, master new powers, tyrants are overthrown in the Middle East, people push away last year's iPads to get the new version; firm beliefs--ideas that used to work-- within seeking individuals are out grown and tossed aside when they discover some new truth.

And my question of the day: John Gardner, the wonderful novelist/writing teacher was purported to say (by his student, my friend and fellow writer Elaine Apthorp), "What actually happens in life, and what you can convince a reader to believe, are two different things."

Why is this?

Jam for the Fans Information

Jam for the Fan tickets will go on sale Tuesday March 1st around lunch time. We will first put out a Facebook and Twitter announcement with the information you will need to order tickets, and we will then send a mass emailing a few hours later. (On Facebook, make friends with NerissaandKatryna Nields, or you can "like" The Nields. To follow us on Twitter, follow NerKat.)

Dates: June 10-12 2011

Package includes:


Friday evening: Registration and happy gathering time (snacks included)
Friday night: *Open mic (package purchasers will have first option to sign up)
Saturday Morning: *Family show
Saturday day: Scavenger/ Treasure Hunt
Saturday Evening: *Iron Horse show- 20 Year celebration. ALL members of the Nields will take the stage at some point!
Sunday Morning: Gospel Brunch (show only, food can be purchased separately)

Tickets for the whole package include a goodie bag with super fabulous (high quality) premium items and a BINGO card for a special round of Nields Bingo before the Iron Horse show!


Adult tickets will be $100 plus a $5 processing free.

A word on children: We have decided that the best way to deal with ticket prices for kids age 10 and under is to allow you to buy their tickets a la carte. There will be a VERY limited number of a la carte kids' tickets to the Sunday morning Gospel brunch so if you want those, order immediately.

Here are the a la carte Kid prices for Jam for the Fans:
Friday Night- Open MIc and Welcome Party free for kids accompanied by adults who have weekend passes
Saturday Morning- Family Show $5 for kids accompanied by adults who have weekend passes. Without the weekend pass, tickets for the Family show is $10 for adults, $5 for kids, babies under age 1 are free.
Saturday Evening- Iron Horse $20- limited supply
Sunday Morning- Gospel Brunch $10- VERY limited supply

If you buy the WHOLE kid package for $35, the child will get a special Nields Goodie Bag, Jr.
We are going to compile a list of babysitters for the weekend for you out of towners, but we cannot guarantee you a babysitter.

There will only be 90 adult tickets available.


* some tickets will be available for these events separate from the package, with the exception of the Gospel Brunch which will be for Full Package purchasers only.

Muse Food

It's Day One of our Mid Winter/Almost March-Spring-Can't-Be-Far-Off Retreat. Our theme is Feeding and Nurturing Your Muse. I have people writing in every corner of my house. We just had a nourishing meal of Butternut Gruyere Tart and Roasted Corn & Kale Soup. I stayed home from yoga today to focus on the theme, the food, the house, madly tossing huge pieces of furniture into closets so that my writers would have clear spaces on which to sit. I consulted recipes in cookbooks and then did what I usually do--wing it. I had some interesting food allergies to work with: a no-onions vegetarian, someone who is gluten-free, not to mention the hostess who is sugar and flour free. Tom had hidden the blade for the Cuisinart, so the ingredients of the soup which I'd intended to puree came out fully intact, which ended up being better anyway.

Things usually are better when I let someone other than me into play. Why do I forget this over and over again? It's the lesson God's been trying to teach me ever since I was a kid and didn't think it was such a great idea to have a little sister. You can see how that turned out. Good thing I wasn't the boss of that. And this is lesson #1 in Feeding the Muse: let the muse in. Don't doubt. I have observed, in years upon years of running writing groups, that we writers almost inevitably think that our work is bad as it's coming out of us. Oh, sure, every once in a while we have a Nanci Griffith moment where a song pours out of our mouths into our pens on onto the page in ten minutes, but more often than not, it's a tortuous process where the draft feels like it's all hemless and hopeless. It's not. Trust. Have faith in your own process. Also, you are not necessarily the best judge of your own work. In an interview with Matthew Sweet I read in the 90s, he said something to the effect that some other, more experienced and celebrated songwriter had said to him, "Just wait till you get a hit. You will be shocked which song it turns out to be."

What is Muse Food?

Well, of course, it's different for everyone. Just as each of us has our own particular food predilections, aversions and allergies, so do our muses. Some like to go to art museums. Some NASCAR races, Some use Libraries. One writer friend I know gets inspiration from really junky TV.
My favorites sources these days are:

Long walks and talks with Tom
My minister Steve Philbrick's sermons
Self-righteous documentaries that tell me the planet is going to hell because of corporate greed and quarter pounders with rBGH cheese
Bob Dylan albums
A daily run
Yoga practice
That book (whatever is currently compelling me)
Ted Talks
Taking a bath with my kids
Doing a puzzle with my kids
Prayer
Meditation
Cleaning out a drawer
Tidying a room, especially the sorting, dusting, arranging
Cooking a meal from scratch
Having a frustrating conflict and talking it out
Making a themed snack for my kids. The picture above is from a snack entitled "White Plate Snack." Very popular.


When I go too long without these things, my lens shrinks. My mind is less a glittering room full of color and texture and bright natural light and more a dull, depressing studio whose one window looks out on its neighbor's brick wall.

One way to starve my muse is to give me something to count--like calories, or items in my budget--or something to worry about--like where my daughter is going to kindergarten (and therefore, naturally, where she will go to college; who her friends will be, how mentally healthy she will be, etc.). The other way is to make me extremely busy. Though it's not the regular busyness that throttles the muse. My muse actually likes a busy Nerissa. The kind of busy where the laundry sits on the bed for an hour or so while I'm making the yogurt, and there are forms to fill out that get mailed, and the trip to the bank gets wedged in after child-pick-up and we stop at the co-op to get bananas, and then I race home to coach a client, make dinner, tidy the house for the writing group, write a song, fill the dishwasher, kiss Tom and go to sleep--that kind of busy is fine. It's the kind of busy where I notice I haven't spoken to my parents in weeks, I tell Katryna "I can't talk right now, sorry, overwhelm" and I miss evening meditation--that kind of busy does me and my muse in.

What are some of your favorite ways to feed your muse?

Fun Family Music Links

Wonderful interview of Katryna by our friend poet and mom Amy Dryansky on her great blog Pokey Mama.

And....drumroll please.. announcing our new blog, Singing in the Kitchen!

Savoring: Another Artist/Mom Post

It's Tuesday afternoon, which means I am writing with my Tuesday group, a delightful group of woman (and man) who travel as far as the Eastern part of the state and as near as down the street to exercise their "show up" muscles and visit with their muses. I am so grateful for these fellows on the writers journey I almost don't know what to say. I love the moment when we shut our lap tops and pause before we take turns reading. I am constantly amazed by what bubbles up in these fifty minutes sessions.

Today I re-read an email from a former client, asking when I would teach a workshop called "Guitar Chords for Dummies" (twist my arm--sounds like fun) and noting that she is off taking her son to visit colleges. "Time flies," she wrote. "Savor every minute."

That was helpful. As I sat down with Elle to practice her little violin, I got as present as I could, pushing from my mind all the things I wanted to jump up and do (such as sort through the gigantic tub of her drawings and paintings, none of which I seem to be able to part with) and instead let her practice at her own speed. She wants to play her "Twinkle" variations as fast as she can; when do I interrupt to encourage her to refine her pitch or draw her awareness to her wrist alignment? Today I said, "Let's let the CD play the harder variations and just listen to them go by." "Yes," she agreed. "Then we can just, you know, relax." As she said this, in the timbre of a tweener, bobbing her head side to side and gesticulating with her wrists. "Sometimes it's fun to relax."

Out of the mouths of babes.

Savoring is my creed. And most days, with savoring--being present, being attentive, being grateful--it goes pretty well. But there are times when the old anxiety dragon yawns, and its loud hot breath prickles the back of my neck, and I start to think I should be doing something more...important. Timeless. Making something that will last. Writing a classic song. Publishing my poor neglected novel. Inventing something that will save the planet from climate change, or at least make the life of a mother with small children easier.

Oh, and bring in huge amounts of income so I never have to wake up in the middle of the night worrying about things like burial insurance and other morbid-flavored thoughts.

One of the pratfalls of parenthood is that one can mistake the real and practical need to make a living to support these blessings we call kids with the delusion that our kids (or we) will die if they
-don't go to private school
-don't have iPods
-don't have dance classes
-don't get to play video games
-ever utter the phrase "I'm bored"
-don't go on a trip abroad before they are 18
-don't get squeezy yogurts in the lunch bags "like all the other kids."

I am sure, if you work closely with kids, you have your own list. When I am not in my savoring mode, I get hooked into believing that I need to run around acquiring all these desires (and many of them are mine, not my kids') and that if I do, everything will be OK. They will grow up happy, they will be high functioning, talented, socially integrated adults and most importantly, they will love me and never fail to mention the word, "Mama" without that soft, dreamy far away look in their eyes.

And I still want to be an artist on my own terms, which means, most likely, never making a higher salary than that of a (private school) kindergarten teacher.

As I am sure I have written here before, Katryna and I are gearing up for our big Twentieth Anniversary weekend called Jam for the Fans, June 10-12, here in Northampton. It's going to be a Nields reunion of sorts. My ex husband David is flying up from North Carolina to play a few songs with us ("I'm rusty," he cautioned me. "So it really has to be just a few songs.") I ran into Dave Hower, our drummer, in Thornes Marketplace last week. He is about four weeks away from becoming a new dad himself. He will be onstage with us at the Iron Horse as we blast through our 20 year repertoire. I am excited, terrified, in denial, dissociated and curious about the whole weekend, even as I try to market it and build it and manifest it. Which is pretty much the way I have lived my whole life.

But most of all I want to savor it. And to that end, I am going to pace myself, just as Elle paces herself with her Twinkle variations. I will gear up, and I will stay present and witness. I will show up for myself and my family and my bandmates.

My Grandmother's Couch

After our gig in Watchung NJ last weekend, Katryna and I spent the night for the last time at our grandmother's apartment in Manhattan. Readers of this blog will recall that she died at the age of 103, in her home, last July. Since then, her daughters have been painstakingly going through her effects and trying to decide what to keep and what to throw away. As you might imagine, there is much to keep, even if it seems of no value. I don't know how they are doing it. Every third item they pick up is drenched in history, significance, some kind of import connected with a woman who outlived a century, and who happens to be their mother. Even the shoelaces seem to hold value. As someone who hates clutter (and yet can't let go a single paper I wrote even a line of lyric on, let alone a drawing by one of my children) I do not envy them this task. I have a rule: I can't bring anything into my house unless I give something else away. And as the recent beneficiaries of several lovely pieces of furniture from my mother-in-law, we don't have a lot of space anymore. As my mother and aunt ask me what I would like to take from the apartment, I feel as stymied as they do. What do I really want? What will bring my grandmother to mind in a lovely quotidian way? And what is just 80-year-old clutter?

Even the things of value are suspect. The books, for example. Actually, the books are the perfect example: they pain me so. No one wants them. What of the Encyclopedia Brittanica? I lusted after these volumes when I was a high school student, begging my parents to buy me a set only to be told they were too expensive. Now I can have my grandmother's--but why? Who needs 120 pounds of dusty old books when there's Wikipedia? And the books are dusty. My eyes water when I get near them. Will my kids really read them? Will their information from 1945 even be accurate?

And no one else wants the books. They are not worth that much, and do I really want to box them up, lug them down seven flights, pack them into the van and drive them home, and then search for space on our limited shelves? I can have the complete collection of Shakespeare on Kindle for free, after all, and that weighs about four ounces and takes up approximately one centimeter of shelf space.

But I haven't quite cottoned to the Kindle I was given for Christmas. After the initial excitement--and a week of the stomach flu during which time the only thing I could figuratively stomach was reading snippets on the Kindle of books on the Amazon website, which sadly led me to inadvertently purchase Portia deRossi's memoir on anorexia (oops) --the device is shoved into my book shelf next to the real books. I love real books. I have way too many. And so I stood on the stool next to the bookshelf, hovering. Should I take the Shakespeare? The Dickens? The Encyclopedias?

The apartment is a mess. When I talk to my mother about the huge task she has been involved in since last July, I want to swoop in and support her, wielding boxes, sharpies and packing tape, me a whirlwind of efficient helpfulness. And yet when I enter the space myself, I am overcome by a powerful inertia that is hard to explain. My mother and aunt had eleven days to empty the apartment, and the last time we were all together, I found them sitting on the floor each going through separate photo albums, exclaiming about their tiny young selves, their adventuresome mother (who traveled to every continent but Antarctica, I believe), seemingly oblivious to the enormity of their task. And yet I too felt suspended in time. I too couldn't figure out whether we should keep the yards and yards of raw fabric my seamstress grandmother had piled in one of her closets. "Here's a half knit sweater," my mother said, her voice pleading over the phone. "You are our knitter; do you want to finish it?" That time, I was paralyzed with indecision and left carrying just a paperback volume of the Upanishads from the seventies.

This time, we took a top hat that had belonged to my grandfather, and a tiny blue tulle ball gown. I will have to alter it; my grandmother weighed about 90 pounds for most of her life. Katryna and I are going to dress up for a photo shoot to commemorate our 20th anniversary of being professional musicians.

It takes time to make these decisions. The articles I kept from the estate of my other grandmother who died in 1996 are still precious to me; even such things as the cheap aluminum stew pot and the circa 1972 spatula, and the cracked unmatching china pieces. Every time I use these things, I think of her. Grief takes up time; books take up space. And for me, both are worth it, even when I think otherwise and want to barrel through with hard nosed efficiency.

In the end, I took the Shakespeare and the Dickens and left the rest. All week, my writers used the old volumes for prompts. On the inside cover of the Shakespeare, reads This is a limited edition of which 500 were bound. You are holding," and in red handwritten ink, "No. 158." They were published in 1899.

Today the rest of the furniture arrived. The weather is finally thawing up here in Massachusetts, and my kids danced on the porch and sang songs of joy to Shane and Miguel, the moving men who brought us my grandmother's couch, her bedroom rug and some other pieces. My mother got on a train this afternoon, and when I spoke with her, she was more tired than I have ever heard her. There is a second death in the releasing of these things that bind a person to the earth, and in letting them go, it can seem as though we are abandoning the beloved. I am glad we did the sorting, and tonight Elle and Jay bounced on the new (old) couch which I had bounced on as a child as young as either of them. Maybe one day one of them will claim it for his or her own and my grandchild will be bouncing too.