Roughly All of Your Time
Today, 6/29, 3:45pm Greenbank Cidery, Freeland WA
Tomorrow, 6/30, 2pm Montgomery Court House, Mt. Vernon WA
Tuesday, 7/2, 4pm Denver Botanic Garden, Denver CO
Saturday, 7/6 6:30pm Bee Tree Folk School, Weiser ID
Wednesday, 7/18 On Court House Concert, Burns OR
7/18-30 Jo(h)nathon, backpacking somewhere in Oregon
Thursday, 8/8 Lovegrass Music Festival, Wilson Lake KS
Friday, 8/9 The Kettle, Beloit KS
Sunday, 8/11 Rowe Sanctuary, Gibbon NE
Monday, 8/26 Rural Grit Happy Hour, KCMO
I read something from banjo master and artist Danny Barnes this week, he says
‘see the truth is, it is a full time job making sure your OWN lifestyle expression matches your own ethics. that's going to take up roughly all of your time from now until you are dead.’
Truth.
Right now, I’m sitting on my sister’s back porch on Whidbey Island, where you can look out through the buildings and see the Olympic range across Puget Sound. It’s about 60 degrees, sunny. Sorta feels like vacation. But the thing is, I played a gig last night, I’m playing one later today and another tomorrow afternoon, then flying to Denver and back for yet another. So it’s working vacation, I guess, which is pretty much how I would sum up my life in general these days.
There’s a part of me that feels guilty about this, like what did I do to deserve this? (I had a dream a week or two ago where I asked that very question to God, or something like God, and it replied “It’s not what you did, it’s what you will do.” Yikes.)
Somehow a part of my brain broke, and I stopped worrying about a lot of the particulars of life, I mean completely stopped. And without my worrying, a new direction seemed very clear, and also with or without my worrying, the particulars of life continue for now to fall into place. I don’t truly know what the lesson is here, if there is one. I used to pass a lot of judgment on people who didn’t worry and plan what I considered to be an appropriate amount. Now, I have a bit of a challenge to come up with what I’d rather be doing than this, and it doesn’t feel that necessary to plan exhaustively for the future if you’re fully involved in the present. At least that’s the sense I have lately. So I’ve gained compassion for people who are engaged with the now at the potential expense of tomorrow.
For all my adult life, I’ve had a strong internal feeling that the pursuit of wealth, money, retirement, health insurance, whatever, was not really where it was at for me, I mean, not really what I wanted to build my persona around. And perpendicular to that I had and continue to have a strong inclination toward self-sufficiency, financial and otherwise. As BRNZ says above, its going to take a long time to sort out how to square those personal ethics and embody them correctly in my own life.
I also read something in Rumi the other day that stuck out to me:
If I had known the real way it was, I would have stopped all the looking around.
But you don’t, so you have to look. You have to try on different ways of being that might later seem foolish, because you don’t know if they fit or not until you’ve worn them a while.
Figuring this stuff out is gonna take up roughly all my time from now until I am dead.
Here’s a tune
A song written by Robbie Fulks that I’ve had on repeat in my brain the past couple weeks on the road. For all you purists, yeah, I’m pretty sure I altered the changes to be simpler, his version is better. Someday I’ll put the time in to figure out the right way. Old Time Music is Here to Stay
and this…
Nick was on the beach this morning
A man I saw last night, in a noisy bar
who made eye contact while I was singing
a song about turning hogs into sausage, respectfully
On the beach, he smiled, shook my hand
and thanked me for coming here.
Wind billowed in the sails.