Dreamways

As I was sitting in my local coffee shop working on this website, "In A Big Country", this surging and beautiful song about dreams, filled the air and my ears. Synchronicity: me and this song bumping into each other just as I was pondering the world of dreams. Synchronicity: me perceiving meaning in this coinciding of events. Synchronicity: an aspect of the Dreamfulness.  read more »

Sleep Dream.  I am in a village somewhere in Latvia, standing on a hillside, looking out at a winding dirt road that rises and falls over several other hills, passing below where I stand. It is a sunny summer’s day.

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At the beginning of this fascinating book ( 2006. Durham: Duke University Press), the author, Ted Gioia, asks: „Can songs born of hard labor and the workaday life hold relevance for us today?“ (pg. ix) In the pages that follow, he answers the question with a resounding YES. The author’s attitude toward work songs, songs created by individuals to accompany various forms of labor, is one that sees these spontaneous creations of unnamed people as an immensely meaningful and meaning-producing activity, a healing process.  read more »

When I awoke this morning, sounding in my head was this Jesus-y Latvian new year's song from my childhood:

Katru gad’no jauna,
Kristus bērniņš nāk;
Pie mums zemē ļaunā,
un mūs pestīt sāk.

We saw the docu-film Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man last night at Chez Artiste. His songs were performed by various artists at a concert in the Sydney opera house, interwovern with his history and current interviews. Only a few of his Big Hits were sung, most of the songs unknown to me. The film evoked washes of emotion, surges of tears in me. The silver haired man of today possesses an ease, a humility, a humor and an intelligence that I find attractive. The performances were very good. This was my first time to hear Rufus Wainwright and his sister, Martha.  read more »

A song snippet that I heard yesterday is echoing in my mind’s ear this morning:
Do you really want to hurt me?
Do you really want to makle me cry?

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Two major and completely unexpected surprises at Donald and Steve’s festive gathering last night. First, the response to my singing of “Dziedat, meitas, vakarā“ was unexpectedly strong and positive, I’ve never received such warm applause, nor gotten such enthusiastic comments about my singing. Not even close. It completely caught me off guard. As I sang, I felt quite centered, with a sense of where I was going musically. When I forgot the penultimate verse, it was a one second blankness and a quick recovery, moving on to the final verse.  read more »

Yesterday was an emotionally stressful day for me, with F in fete-preparation mode. I am seeing with some degree of greater clarity what happens to me, inside myself, in such circumstances: I feel hurt, emotionally bruised. Several dynamics converge that throw me off balance. First, it’s that F becomes 100% focused on what he’s doing, preparing the meal, so that he emotionally contracts and does not interact with me anywhere nearly the Same as Usual. He is emotionally absent as far as being an interactive entity. I feel left high and dry.  read more »