Hey, I'm Here

Treefort Music Fest, March 27, 2022, photo by Jason Sievers.

I’m here sending love to you from my heart. In a way I’m sending this as an experiment to remind myself I can. To remind us that we can.
 
I wanted to write a blog to reach out and say hello. To offer my heart and connection. I’ve wanted to do this again and again over the past couple of years. Occasionally I do it. And it feels right. But often I think about putting my thoughts in MailChimp and then I throw my hands up because it feels like – “Get a load of this world stuff, everybody…I have zero answers for it. Here’s a newsletter! Whee!!”
 
I’m not going to lay down everything we’ve gone through (and continue to go through) collectively and individually. Like I was selling it as a bunch of wares on the sidewalk on a blanket. You can already see it all. We remember. 
 
But I will say – I think of us creators often. And I wonder how many of you are feeling a similar sticky stuck muckiness. Those of us with hearts that want to create, that want to do something better, that want to make a difference. I think of us while I’m working on my book(s), or my writing group’s newsletter, or a song, or performing onstage or getting ready to perform. I hope my moments that seem like silence (when it feels like putting it all into something like MailChimp is too hard) don’t feel icy. I’m always beaming warmth. I’m imbuing everything I do and create with deep intention, and I think that makes a difference too.
 
I’m sending this because I do have ideas I want to share and I know you do, too. I do believe art is healing and energetically regenerative and nudges and budges more in the cosmos than we even know. I know connection makes a difference. ALL the difference. Just sometimes the bigness of everything that is going on – the horrible stuff – feels bigger than what I can do. Looming.
 
I haven’t given up. I just get stuck sometimes between the creating and the sharing. 
 
Though I have done a lot of sharing and creating, too, and in some ways am moving creatively more than I ever have. My husband and my band Trippy Hearts played a music festival here in Boise in March that was in part why we moved here in the first place (some YouTubery here!). We’re working on a new album. I’ve written new songs that I’m loving. My first memoir is almost finished (though I’ve been saying that for years – book writers, you know what I’m talking about). Noses and grindstones and asses and chairs have been connected. But in a less, like, shitty late-capitalism, grind-it-to-a-nub-for-the-patriarchy kind of way. ;-) (There she is.)
 
I hope you’ll accept this somewhat messy offering from an artist who continues to keep going, making beautiful things (yes, I’m calling my own work beautiful – that feels like a breakthrough in and of itself), and intending to shift something with my heart even in the face of the goliath of heart-wrenching tragedy. 
 
How are you if you feel like sharing? Anything you’re working on that feels cathartic/poignant/delicious/difficult/all of the above? Anything you’re working on that…feels? Consider this your hand-squeeze and knowing look from someone who gets it. I’m in it too.