Takin' a break

Friends of the blogosphere~

I am taking a break from blogging for a spell-- be back soon!

~J

Learning to love the fool

“I must learn to love the fool in me-- the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries.”

~Theodore Isaac Rubin

Another good one from Cheri

"What we do about our feelings determines the quality of our relationship with ourselves."

~Cheri Huber

Stress

"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another."

~William James

Dirty pain

The belief that dirty pain is intelligent is itself the fundamental lie we keep mashed against our poor sad faces. We can free ourselves from this the instant we choose to believe in our felt experiences over our self-created stories.

—Martha Beck, Steering by Starlight

Stop Being A Pleaser

"You have to let your father and father figures go. You must stop seeing yourself through their eyes and trying to make them proud of you.

For as long as you can remember, you have been a pleaser, depending on others to give you an identity. You need not look at that only in a negative way. You wanted to give your heart to others, and you did so quickly and easily. But now you are being asked to let go of all these self-made props and trust that God is enough for you. You must stop being a pleaser and reclaim your identity as a free self."

~Henri Nouwen, "The Inner Voice of Love"

Guilty as charged?

"The workaholic maintains a frantic schedule. He is consistently preoccupied with performance. He finds it difficult to refuse additional responsibilities. He is unable to relax. If someone you know exhibits these characteristics, he or she is probably a workaholic."

~ Bill Hybels

(Not hating, just inquiring/reflecting...)

Bullfighting

"To fight a bull when you are not scared is nothing. And to not fight a bull when you are scared is nothing. But to fight a bull when you are scared is something." ~unknown

Sweet Darkness

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~ David Whyte ~

(House of Belonging)

A real posting! On the value of a co-producer

This is a straight-up blog posting. Shocking, I know! I spent the day yesterday working on lead vocals for "Eating the Menu", "Sometimes", and "River" with my co-producer Don Turney at his home studio in Hayward. I was feeling *terrible* going in. I had had a root canal procedure on Wednesday and been going back & forth between the devil & the deep blue sea-- incapacitating headache or high & nauseous on Vicodin. I wanted to cancel yesterday's session, but that really puts Don out because he could have used that time to be clocking hours with someone else. I took the Vicodin & showed up.

It was awful! Listening to your singing voice through an expensive, highly-sensitive microphone through expensive, highly-sensitive earphones when you are in a somewhat high, delirious, and nauseous state is a bizarre experience. Like talking underwater, or some sort of audio hall-of-mirrors. I ended up doing 3-4 takes of each song from front to back and we patched final vocals from those. Also weird! Like taking 3-4 photos of yourself and sitting down with a photoshop guy and saying, "Yeah, take the nose from that one, and the booty from that one..." Maybe that's how they do it in Hollywood, but if you're coming out of the folk music tradition like me, the ol' chip-chop is slightly distasteful and pretty much considered cheating.

Oh well. Turns out, the ol' chip-chop is a saving grace when you show up to an uncancellable session slightly chemically distraught & disoriented. Don was able to really steer the ship into the harbor, so to speak, and we finished the day having nearly finished 3 lead vocal tracks.

Can't wait for you to hear them!

Small Things

"Small things with great love... It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing."

~Mother Theresa

Self-Care

"Approach any and all obstacles in your path not as problems, but as opportunities to learn to stay the course with your self-care." ~Geneen Roth

...

"I was a treasure and I longed to be known..."

~J. Mapes

duties

“Duties are not performed for duties' sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty- the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.”

– Mark Twain

On Time

“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

- William Faulkner