Blank Canvases are Immobilizing

This past year has been difficult for me, for various reasons.
I have made several changes in my life, from diet, to the way I take care of myself, to work responsibilities, and in that process I have been changed.

I suppose when I started all the changes, I figured there were things about my life that would change, but that my fundamental personality would stay they same.

I was wrong.

The problem with fundamental personality shifts is that you retain the memory of who you were before, what you used to do, what you used to like, and how you used to react to things....kind of like program settings.

When you try to apply your old life settings to your current settings it is confusing, and doesn't work out very well.

For example,  since I work from home and don't see other humans during the day, I was alllllll about going out and socializing in the evenings.  It didn't really matter what else was going on in my life, I was up for just about anything at anytime.

Now I find myself starting to avoid  most social situations if there will be more than a handful of people. Sometimes I avoid one on one time too.

It's not that I'm unhappy about avoiding social situations, either.  I'm actually quite pleased about it.  I've been relishing quiet time more and more.  I like hanging out with my dogs and putzing in the yard.

The issue comes when I compare the two settings, I suppose because I don't fully comprehend how I went from one extreme to the other.

In some ways if feels like I'm starting over- now that I understand I don't HAVE to live by my old settings, I can choose something different!

However, I am one of those people that have found blank canvases terrifying, immobilizing. There's so much opportunity  that the choices are overwhelming.

I find myself drifting.

I feel like I need a plan, any sort of plan, to give me some direction.

Compared to where I was a year ago, this is not a bad place to be .

I just don't know how to figure out what to do next.

The Blessing of the Double Rainbow

In order to get the full significance of the double rainbow, you need to know a little back story first:

I'm in a monumental transitional point in my life. As I was approaching my 30th birthday about a month ago, I kept thinking I really wanted my 30's to be a decade of true authenticity to myself.

I started shedding relationships and situations that no longer served me. I also started what could be described as intuitional coaching- where my coach uses her intuition to identify issues that are holding me back from having a really fabulous present and future.

Like most people, I had some experiences during my formative years that I had  negative reactions to, and I still deal with some of the emotional fallout of those experiences today.  Two of the big ones are self doubt and a very strong feeling of unworthiness.

The call where these issues came to light was five days ago.  I had very intense dreams the first two days after the call that shed some light on both issues, and the rest of the week I've been trying to allow feelings of worth and deserved-ness (is that a word?).

This evening, I decided to take my dog for a walk. It was sprinkling a bit when we left the house, but I decided to keep going since the temperature was so nice.

As we walked, I was thinking about worth and deserving, and how several people in my life have been telling me lately 'you deserve ____'.  If several unrelated people from different areas of my life are telling me the same thing, then it must be true, right?

As I'm thinking these thoughts and I get to the end of the street where the parallel rows of houses stop, I look up and see an intensely colored FULL double rainbow.  I mean full as in it appeared to touch the ground at both ends. The bottom rainbow was as intense as when light shines through a prism hanging in a window, and the top was about half as bright as the bottom.

I stood there, with leash in hand, staring up in absolute awe. I felt a wave of gratitude wash over me. For me, seeing the double rainbow felt like a blessing from the universe, a sign that those things I was thinking were absolutely correct, and it was natural for me to allow and receive things that make me feel worthy.

My next thought was 'of course I would leave my camera phone at home for this particular walk!'.  After thinking about it more, I decided that a picture would have somehow been inappropriate, though I can't explain why.

Claire and I walked up the short street that ran parallel to the rainbow, then turned and headed away from it.   I could now clearly see the sun, and see that clouds were starting to cover it.  I kept looking back over my shoulder to watch the rainbow change in shape and intensity.

The next thought that hit me was the timing of the whole event.  Had I left my house a few minutes earlier or later, I likely would have missed the double full rainbow.

By the time I got back to my house, the rainbow only reached across part or the sky, and was much less intense than just a few minutes earlier.

By the time I got home, I felt like it was ok to take a picture of the partial rainbow, so here it is!

I remember hearing and reading that when you step into the 'flow' of life, synchronicities start to happen. They are definitely starting to happen in a big way!

The Prayer of the Snow Shovel

As I shovel, I give thanks for the snow, for our lakes our empty.
As I shovel, I am filled with gratitude that my body is strong enough to scoop the copious fluff off the sidewalk and onto the buried lawn.
The scrape of metal against pavement and the fluid motion of the toss becomes hypnotic.
Because I know what it is to be a single home owner, my shovel and I visit each next-door neighbor in turn in the hopes it somehow makes their day easier.
I have become an implement of purpose, an appreciative observer, my hands moving of their own accord.
The snow and I, we have reached an understanding.  It falls from the heavens, and I ascend to a higher self.
As I shovel, I not only uncover the driveway, I uncover parts of myself.

My new favorite song writing tools

When I first started writing songs, I thought using anything besides my brain was cheating.  At some point I got stumped with lyrics and started to branch out from my melon.  Here are my current favorite song writing tools:

The first:  The Thesaurus

Or, more accurately, Thesaurus.com.  Sometimes I come up with a phrase, and I find it too common/boring/sucktastic....so I take the most common words and get the synonyms.  This doesn't always help change a specific word, sometimes the whole phrase gets changed around depending on what I read.

The second: Rhyming Dictionary

I used to think going to a rhyming dictionary was way worse than the thesaurus. It was major cheating.  Then I learned to give myself a break.....one cannot possibly come up with all ryhming words on ones own.  The thing I really love about the online rhyming dictionary RyhmeZone is this:  not ONLY will it spit out rhyming words, but it will spit out rhyming words of MULTIPLE SYLLABLES!

There are certain songs where the number of syllables in a particular line is actually more important than the rhyme, so looking at multiple syllable rhyming words gives me options to add or decrease the syllables when I need to.

That's it!  That's all I wanted to say this evening :)

(Listen to my music and find upcoming shows  here)

Sometimes I feel like a wigwam and a teepee....

I'm two tents (or, too tense)!


I have started dreading the weekends. I wake up in the mornings paralyzed because I don't know what I should do. When I eventually get out of bed, things start to flow, but for about an hour each weekend morning I'm pretty miserable.

How did I get here?

Feel it to release it?!?!?!?

I just had a profound thought that I'd like to share.

I read a book a few months ago called The Open Focus Brain, which talks about different ways of paying attention.

One part of the book discussed if you are feeling pain- physical or emotional- that it's your bodies way of communicating something, and that by paying attention to your pain, you acknowledge what your body is saying. After paying attention to the pain it often lessens or disappears.

I'm feeling sad today. Normally I try sort of ignore that sadness...I would pay attention to other things..I dig into my work.

Today I decided that it's ok to feel sad, and that in order to release it I need to FEEL it.

I then thought about other things that would hurt you if you held on to them, and came up with this analogy:

If you pick up a scalding iron, and you don't feel the pain, holding onto that iron is going to cause quite a bit of damage to your hand. BUT...if you FEEL the pain...the searing of your hand, you will let the iron go and less damage will be done to your hand then if you held on to it.

This goes back to the message of The Open Focus Brain. When I first read that part of the book, I logically understood it. But after today I GET it.

Another analogy that I thought of, but I don't know if it will hold true...

If sadness is like a sandwich, and we only allow ourselves to feel a little bit of sadness at a time (taking a nibble of the sandwich), then it's going to take a long time to finish that sandwich. It will probably start going bad and growing mold if we spread it out over weeks and months (festering emotions, anyone?!).

Perhaps if we really feel the sandwich.... if we eat the big bites in a couple of sittings, then the sandwich is eaten and gone, without the mold.

I will try not to ignore this sadness. I will acknowledge it, FEEL it, and move through it.

A thought from early this morning:

There's nothing wrong with being emotional. I've had people tell me I'm emotional like it's a bad thing. I say F**K THAT!!!! If there wasn't emotion, we wouldn't have great songs, and great art, and people that are working for change. If there wasn't emotion, we would be zombie like.

Emotion makes people uncomfortable when they see it in someone else. I'm done with living my life because things I do make people uncomfortable. It's not about you anymore. Now it's about me.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Releasing the forgotten poet

I have been very quiet.

Without going into too much detail, I decided to start a blog for just my poetry.

It's been an idea I've been tossing around for a while, but never quite got around to actually doing anything about it.

I started writing poetry when I was young, and as I got older, I wrote less.

Poetry is what inspired my to learn how to play the guitar- so I could set poems to music.

Poetry was the safety release valve on emotions that I could not verbalize.

Poetry was what allowed my truth to surface, even when I was not conscious of it.

I let it be forgotten. I forgot a part of myself that was (is!) important.

So now, in the very depths of feeling very broken about one too many things, that part is bubbling up through the cracks.


Some will be new, some will be old, but all on them will contain seeds of my truth.

The Forgotten Poet