This completes the circle for

January 28, 2003

This completes the circle for me. The end of the trail meets the beginning of the trail and you have to decide if the scenery was beautiful enough for you to run it again. I set unique goals for my own music. It would make life a lot easier if I centred on the goal of selling a lot of records. Sometimes I try. My version of what that means can be different than what it means to the people who actually complete this task. I have learned this. Music is a higher power and it can be used to help and heal. The compliments one receives about song craft or performance shrink to bread crumbs in comparison to the compliments about the emotional or spiritual impact of anything you’ve done. You send out a piece of your life and it goes out in a little pod, plastic box, cardboard sleeve or series of binary code and it grows somewhere else. It introduces itself to someone new and then plants itself into a moment in their day. If you’re lucky it stays for longer. If you’re really lucky it becomes part of their sense memory and fires up a creative thought for them. Sometimes the sounds and words can heal wounds and motivate action. When someone tells you how this has happened to them in any way it completes the trail. That scenery makes you want to keep running. I get to hear from individual voices in stray places all over the globe and when their gratitude ranges into these areas I feel like I sent out thousands of messages in bottles with some flexible curative formula on them and one or two were found, tried and actually worked. When the message comes back I have completed such a long shot that I just want to try again. Do lottery winners stop buying tickets right after they win? I start down that loop trail with fresh legs.

for Liz