A Ball of Goo, Rolling Down a Hill

*solo %trio #quartet

• Friday July 25, Allen County Fair, Iola KS *

• Thursday August 7, Pickin in the Park, Paonia CO *

• Friday August 8, TBA

• Saturday August 9, Trade & Post, Del Norte CO *

• Friday August 22, Rowe Sanctuary River Stage, Gibbon NE %

• Saturday August 23, 4th & Main Listening Room, Wray CO %

• Sunday August 24, Aspen Sun Deck, Aspen CO %

• Sunday August 24, TBA, Idaho Springs CO, %

• Monday August 25, Aurora Rhythms Concert Series, Aurora CO %

• Wednesday August 27, House Concert, Salt Lake City UT %

• Friday August 29, Billsville West, Walla Walla WA %

• Saturday August 30, Juniper Jam, Enterprise OR %

• Friday September 5, Scroat Belly w/John Depew, Replay, Lawrence KS *

• Saturday September 6, Depewgrass, Moonrise Bike Ride, Ottawa KS #

• Sunday September 7, TBA, KCMO *

• September 18-21, Walnut Valley Festival, Winfield KS %

• September 28, Arkansaw Travelers Folk Club, Fayetteville AR *

• September 30, Columbia Public Library, Columbia MO *

With a couple of weeks of slow(er) time around home to rest and reflect (and try to catch up on a mountain of home-things that need done), I’m finally starting to have real thoughts again. It’s interesting how difficult it is to make any progress in this regard when I’m busy traveling, playing shows, rehearsing, and everything that comes with that. On the surface, it would seem like tour would be much like a normal person’s vacation, and in certain ways it is. We get to visit places we’ve never been before, generally eat pretty well, try new things. And simultaneously, for me at least, there’s near 100% absorption in the project at hand, i.e. what time do we need to leave in the morning, how long is the set tonight, what’s going to be on the setlist, do we have time to work on a new arrangement, refine an old arrangement that never got enough attention, should I check my email? oh shit, I forgot to respond to this person about this show, etc. It has it’s own kind of zen, which I love, and in a lot of ways seem to be more content in, maybe because there’s not much room for reflection in that life-mode.

But I’ve also been feeling increasingly isolated in more and more ways, despite being around people I dearly love all the time.

Getting home from a busy period has some real difficulties, because I’m just emotionally drained and exhausted in a deep way that I don’t really recognize in the moment of being busy with music life, a cumulative exhaustion that isn’t on the top layer of physical awareness, but hides deeper, waiting for a time to express itself. It’s taken a couple of weeks for me to really even begin to process where/who I am, not to mention re-form a vision of what the next step(s) might be.

I had a great conversation over coffee one day this week with my buddy Dave, who is right about a lot of stuff. Among other things, he encouraged me to think bigger, artistically and otherwise. I’ve built up a cage of self-imposed limitations and presumptions about what my artistic voice is or can be, about what business demands I have to accept as priorities and how my engagement with those things must look. About what I am or am not capable of doing and saying in all sorts of ways.

So this week, I’ve found myself again choosing sobriety, exercise, and looking for space and silence, looking for openings to new ideas, openings to truth, trying to look at the foundational assumptions and ask questions that target those assumptions. There’s a lot there, by golly. I’ve been a ball of goo, rolling down a hill for a while now, picking up debris and incorporating it into my character without much control over direction or speed.

And maybe that’s all any of us really are, at the root of it. Balls of goo, rolling down a hill.

Like I mentioned in a previous article, another friend recently suggested that perhaps there is no ‘getting it right,’ that we move along through life in this constant interplay between what appears to be ‘choice’ and what seems out of our control, he called it ‘destiny,’ and that what seems to him to be important is to be attentive to what we might learn from this process, and participatory in the now, while it’s happening, no matter what’s happening.

So as I look forward, I’m trying to have an open mind. I’d like to shed some of the things my ball of goo has picked up, or at least put them in their right places, and I’d like to make space for some things that have been buried in the center of the pile to come forward. It’s all quite unfocused as of yet, but the lens is turning in the right direction, I think.

Another thing Dave asked the other day: if you could say anything to humanity and know that it would be heard, at least by some, what would it be?

My answer: I don’t know.

And that is one of the most true things I could say right now. I wish the world were different in a whole bunch of ways. On some level, I think we have the power to make it different in substantial ways, although it often (usually) doesn’t seem this way in lived experience. But that’s the thing, I’ll just speak for myself here and say generally I experience time in two ways: 1) presence in the now, and 2) a sort of cumulative of my past experience. It seems very difficult to zoom out just far enough to think of my life, past AND future, as one large movement and to think then that each small movement is contributing to that. Climbing a rock face or performing a dance or playing a song on an instrument, or heck, washing the dishes, lighting a fire, almost anything we do in daily life can be broken down into a series of micro-movements. It takes a bunch of coordinated micro-movements to create one note on a guitar. And it’s easy enough to think of the note in the context of the whole composition. So that’s what I’m thinking about, trying to look at each moment as some micro-movement that contributes to one note of a phrase of notes that means something in the grand composition that is everything happening in the universe over a really freaking long time.

Our lives are going to happen, one way or another, and then they’ll be over, and that will be that. Seems like it’s worth doing the best we can with the materials available.

now this…

cicadas inform me in their husky voices
there’s more to a song than its melody