John Denver

A woman named Kathleen posted a comment on one of my posts from earlier this morning. I went to her blog and spent some time there and was reminded that today was the anniversary of the day John Denver died in a plane crash. I still remember that day. My friend Katy called me to tell me the news. In high school, Katy spent hours and hours listening to me play the guitar (badly) and sing. Most of the songs I sang back in high school were John Denver's. I learned to play the guitar by playing his music.

The very first time I played in public - at fourteen!! - I played at the Sunshine Festival on NC State's campus. I was scared to death and microphone shy so I just played and sang. I didn't speak a word until just before the last song and I said, "I guess you know by now that I like John Denver." I'd played only his songs.

His music introduced me to songwriting. His music introduced me to the joy of singing from the heart. His music introduced me to my greatest muses: love, longing, Mother Nature, friendship, and music herself.

Here is a You Tube video of John Denver from 1976 - the year before I graduated from high school! (Check out the shirt!) I loved John Denver best in his early days when he was goofy and unafraid of being different. Because I was different, too.

I was a horrible teenager. I gave my parents hell!! My mother has always said she doesn't know how any of us would have survived my adolescence without that guitar!! I understood then and continue to understand how my guitar saved me. And because I have always understood how much my guitar saved me, this has always been my favorite John Denver song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_52ob3uVI4

Peace. And thank you, Kathleen from Pennasylvania for reminding me. My memories have been so full today.

My Baby........

Is this not a face that would melt your heart?

This is Baby.

She's one of the most loving dogs I've ever known. She adores me and thinks I hung the moon!

She's a great friend, too.

Not much of a guard dog - not a mean bone in her body - but she lets me know if there are strangers about (especially strange cats!).

My view of the world...........

This is my view of the world these days. This is the view from the little deck upstairs on the back of my house, right outside my bedroom. This is what I see every morning when the sun calls me awake. It's very beautiful, especially in the early morning when the sun is rising. I'm on the seaside now, and the sun rises right out my window.

I feel so peaceful here.

I wish it for everyone. Here's peace to ya!

Smart woman......

From the brilliant mind of Eleanor Roosevelt:

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

"I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war."

"In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility."

"It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness."

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

"Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday."

"Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little."

"You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give."

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it? "

IT

I said, "Take this from me.
It's too heavy to carry
And I don't want the burden of it anymore.
It has weighed me down for so long.
Please, take it from me.
It changes me, it ages me,
It takes away my grace and my peace.
I fail myself because of it.
It does me no good.
It does you no good.
Please, take it from me.
I can hear the cracks it makes.
I can feel the shudder it sends up my spine.
It clings to me like beggar lice from the field.
I hate it. I hate the feeling it brings.
It is cold. It eats up my joy.
Don't you understand?!
Please take it from me.
I don't want it anymore."

I cried and I pleaded.
And then I simply asked,
"Why won't you take it from me?"

And you said, "I cannot take it if you won't let it go."

"Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself. "
-----Tom Wilson

Ethan.........

I absolutely love this video! It's been around for a long time and I'm sure a lot of you have seen it. It's been viewed 19,000,000 times! I go watch it ever so often to just feel good!

Here's to the sheer joy of laughter!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXXm696UbKY

Dave Loggins put it into words a whole lot better than I think I could:

"Now this drifter's world goes 'round and 'round and I doubt if it's ever gonna stop.

But of all the dreams I've lost and found and all that I ain't got,

I still need to cling to somebody I can sing to."

That sure is the truth of it.

Peace.

Heckling........

I played at the 8th Annual Shore Made Festival yesterday. Scott and Clark were my back-up band. We practiced a lot before the Festival, especially Scott and I, as playing folk music on a banjo is not always easy! Scott's a great banjo player, and I knew he'd get it all! And he did! We were all excited about the day and being there and performing as a trio. We did pretty good. We had a couple of glitches here and there but, all in all, we were pleased with our performance. They called us to the stage 15 minutes early, so it was kind of a mad dash there in the last few minutes before we started. I enjoy playing with Scott and Clark so much. It's so much more fun than playing by myself!! And they add so much to my music.

I got heckled for the first time - ever. Even when I played at fourteen and fifteen and I pretty much sucked and I played in front of other teenagers - I never got heckled. And then, at nineteen and twenty and twenty-one, when I played with my friend Patti O'Conner all those times in bars, singing folks songs to drunks - I never got heckled. So yesterday's heckler was a big shock to me. He came down to the front of the stage and yelled at me, raising his arms up over his head and shaking his fists. He had a little boy with him, maybe three years old, his nephew, who copied him and shook his fists, too. I wondered if he even thought about what he was teaching that little boy.

It wasn't about the music. It was a personal thing. It was an act of anger. It was an act of spite, meant to degrade me and make me feel bad. It was meant to do nothing else but make me feel bad. And it worked. I think I could have played anything and he would have done the same thing. The son-in-law of an ex-boyfriend, he was just looking for a reason. Why? Hell, I don't know!! To listen to him, he was yelling at me because of the choice of my last song. But someone else sang it earlier in the day, and I didn't see him heckle that man. And if it was because it was a song that his wife sang - because it was "her song"- if she had been performing, I wouldn't have sung it. Hell! Around here you have to ask permission to sing anything else except your own songs. Like somebody owns the music or something. I don't get it. I don't get it at all. Scott and I just played that song in church last week. We didn't play it to hurt anybody or slight anybody. We played it because we love the song and the three of us play it well together. Period. That's the reason. What is wrong with that? I don't get it. I don't get it at all.

At first, I was mad as hell. It happened during the last song. And I came off the stage and I was so angry, had he gotten close to me, I would have slammed him with my guitar. I wanted to slap him across the face as hard as I could. Or punch him in the stomach. I was so angry. He came back behind the stage and threw out a couple more remarks, but Scott and Clark stood on either side of me and told him, without saying much, to back off. I think a part of me is still mad but not as mad as I was yesterday.

Mostly, it was just a huge disappointment. I've had several experiences now, here on the Eastern Shore, where my music has been invaded - by anger, by hate, by spite, by sadness, by jealousy, by pride. My music has always been a place that I could crawl into and feel a sense of myself unbroken, a sense of my spirit protected - and that sense of un-brokenness and protection has given me the ability to share my music, and therefore a part of myself and my spirit, with other people. Even when the songs I sing are immensely sorrowful, there has always been that part of my spirit that felt wrapped up by the music. These experiences here make me want to not do it anymore.

But, singing is as much a part of me as breathing. Like my sister Emily, music is one of my earliest memories. Music is my oldest friend. I cannot imagine a life apart from singing. I don't know what I'd do without that solace in my life.

So I'll just go on. And in time, the intensity of the experience will mellow. And the memory of it will become separated from the meaning of it and the history behind it. And it will become simply: the memory of the first time I got heckled. For now, though............

Let go. Let God. Get on with life. Get good. Grab the world by the tail and hang on for the ride. It's a rough and rocky place and there are people who come at you sometimes with a mean spirit. But, in the end, this world is what we got. And the next bit of beauty is just right around the bend.

Peace.

I'm so excited.....

I've got DSL!! I have finally moved into the modern age of computer technology at home! I can hardly believe that my old computer can move that fast. I was skeptical. I was figuring that I'd pay the extra bucks to get DSL and my computer would still move at glacial speed. I was wrong! It moves at a speed somewhere between moving-car speed and maybe a jet-ski-like speed. It's great. It actually stays connected!

I hope I get email. I've gotten out of touch with my email buddies since I moved to the Eastern Shore because trying to connect and stay connected with dial-up became a painful process. No more! So to anybody out there who might want someone to converse with by way of email, I'd love to converse!

So be expecting a bit more consistency with my blog! I can get to it, stay with it, and actually add pictures and stuff without it taking up an entire evening and a chunk of what little sanity I still have intact!

Peace.

Politics.....

I've been trying to keep my political cards close to my chest so as not to offend anyone I might offend by having my own feelings about things and people and choices and all. I haven't wanted anyone to lose sleep over who I might vote for. I talk politics a little with my banjo teacher Bates and his lovely wife, Jody. I see them as being wise and connected to the bigger picture and cool, in the way an almost 50-year-old hippie-wannabe would see folks like Jody and Bates as cool. They are cool. So I don't mind hearing what they have to say about the politics at hand. It either reaffirms what I'm thinking to date OR it makes me think a little harder about what I'm thinking to date, depending. I talk with my son Daniel about politics, too. He's more actively involved and on top of things than I am. I believe everything he tells me because he's my kid and he's a good one. I don't mind leaning in the same direction as he leans being I figure he gets his leanings from his mom.

I talk a little bit of politics with my boss, Dr. Scott. Mostly we rib each other, but in a good way. He likes to poke fun at what he thinks are my obvious "bleeding heart liberal Democratic" tendencies. One of the ways he likes to tease me the most is to tell me that I sound like a Republican! I'm not a Republican, by the way. I am a registered Democrat. But let me tell you the story of how I got that way:

I registered to vote for the first time in 1979 as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were getting ready to run against one another. In North Carolina, you can't vote in the primaries as an Independent - you either have to be a Democrat or a Republican. So I was trying to decide how to register. I'd taken a poli-sci class and learned about our country's political parties in college, but, basically, I pretty much had no clue what it all meant. My father is a Republican. My mother is a Democrat. At that point in my life (I was 20), I kind of aligned myself a little bit more with my dad, for some reason. I think mostly because he loves music and is a huge procrastinator like me. So I was thinking I would register as a Republican - to be like my dad. I mean, that's not such a bad reason, right? Think of how many other people have done that........

The night before I was going to register, we had a little get together at our house. I was living with several other people in a big old house outside of Boone. So we were having this get-together and I was telling a friend of mine - Lee Carter - about how excited I was about registering to vote the next day. So he asked me how I was going to register. And I told him I was going to register as a Republican (I didn't go into any of the explanation about my dad and all......I was afraid I'd sound like a kid and Lee was older and intimidating). He looked me right in the eye and said, "Hell girl! You don't make enough money to be a Republican!!". So I registered as a Democrat. I was afraid I'd have to show proof of income or something!

That's no joke. That really happened.

I was incredibly bummed out when Jimmy Carter lost his bid that next year for re-election. I liked Jimmy Carter. I thought he was a good president - in the way that a 20-year-old, non-TV-watching, mountain-climbing, vegetarian, hippie-chick, bartender/cook/waitress thinks someone is a good president. By the way he presented himself. I mean, I liked the things he seemed to believe in and wanted to try to do.

As the years have gone by, I've been glad I registered the way I did. Had I registered as a Republican, I'd have probably jumped ship a long time ago and switched sides anyway. I was so bummed out after the whole Jimmy Carter thing that I didn't vote again for awhile. I became apathetic, like a lot of Americans. During the last election, I got pretty riled up. And I kept after my patients to "go vote, go vote". I asked a local elections board official to send somebody to stand in front of my office and register folks coming in and out. I was working in a county in western North Carolina that had been particularly hard hit by the economic dysfunction of the country. Supported almost entirely by the furniture industry, our county had seen massive lay-offs over the previous two-years. A huge number of folks in the county were unemployed. And almost all of our patients were on Medicaid. It was a mess. The county was a mess. The people in the county were a mess. And anger was rampant. My boss was angry. The office manager was angry. Almost all of the patients were angry and confrontational.

The county overwhelmingly voted for "four more years". I was so stunned, I almost had decided to give up voting again. Daniel had the same feeling. He couldn't believe his vote didn't change the outcome of the election.

I have decided that I will vote. And I'm an Obama supporter. I will be glad to explain why to anybody who wants to ask me why. My reasons, you will find, are not so much politically based as they are based on my own personal feelings about all sorts of different things. I don't apologize for them. They are my feelings and I have good strong reasons for them. At least in my own mind I do.

Plus I just can't seem to bring myself to vote for Sarah Palin as vice-president. I know, I know - it's a presidential election BUT I think now it's becoming about more than just who we elect as president. All of sudden, the country is becoming fully aware of the implications and the ramifications of who the vice-president is going to be. I'm thinking John McCain might have made a really huge mistake. That's just my own opinion. My own thinking out loud. Having Sarah Palin for vice-president would certainly give us four good years of laughs. It's already started and sometimes it's funnier than hell!! But I think about what would happen if......... and it's an "if", I realize that but - just think - IF some madman takes John McCain out (or a heart attack or melanoma or a car wreck), as smart and as strong as she is, I don't think Sarah could keep us all together. Look at the division that's already occured! I don't think she could do it. And, more than any other time in my short life, I believe we're in a time where we all need to be together.

Reminds me of a song from the sixties! I swear I should have been a hippie!

Enough on politics. Peace to ya!