Update: Yipes, I posted the wrong song link… I’ve corrected it, you can find the actual song here. Sorry about that…

This song has possessed me. New songs can do that, but this one especially. It’s rare for me to write songs inspired by a world situation; I’m normally more self and relationship-focused and inward-looking with my songwriting. Only three times have world events inspired me to write a song.

The first song, ‘The Women Are Rising,’ was inspired by the Montreal Massacre… the second, ‘Red Hands‘ (this version is from the TreeRoots Revolution CD, “Deeper Than Grass“) was written the day after they started bombing Afghanistan.

My newest song, which I wrote yesterday, is called “The Story in My Head” and you can hear it here. I posted the lyrics in a previous post, here.
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The parameters for the poems are arbitrary; I look at the photo and write from the voice that I hear from that particular face, the emotion expressed, and I stop writing when I’ve come to the bottom of the photo. It seems to work out pretty well so far.

do not disturb me
for anything less
than a change
in fundamental
laws for
the way it has been
has killed me
too many times
there must be room
for my heart
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It’s a little past the New Year, but I feel like taking on another daily challenge, or as close to daily as I can manage (giving myself lots of rope). My photography project (the arty self-portraits) for this year is to focus on expressing emotion through the photos.

That seemed to invite joining poetry with the photos, which serves the bonus purpose of keeping me writing. Here’s the first few installments.

frozen heart

Sad eyes
gaze quizzical
from bluezone
distances
hope froze over
long ago
and now
nothing ever happens
her veins have changed
from hot flood
to lacy traceries
no more beating heart
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[update] as I’m prone to do, I’ve rewritten the lyrics fairly extensively after the first round… this version is, I think, pretty close to its final form.

It’s the Capricorn New Moon tonight. As I hoped, I found a song to write for Haiti.

The Story in My Head

there’s a story in my head, and this is how it goes
we start at the beginning, go as far as we can go
and we grow in all directions, and we struggle for our pay
like a mismatched collection of scenes from a pointless play
and it’s too much work, too hard, I give up
and then I die

there’s a story in my head, and this is how I know
the end is the beginning, and what I see is so
and what I dream is real, and who I am is how I feel
and you know that you should let me, you should let me be real
it’s too much work, too hard, I give up
and then you die
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Apparently I haven’t been posting often enough to keep up with my daily art photos over on flickr; I’m way behind now. So I’m going to just post them all and get them out of the way. This way I can post them in a larger size too. Photo essay!

I’ve started the next year’s worth of photos already and I’d like to start the new year without being way behind on the last year. And I want to show them ALL! Unfortunately, this blogging software doesn’t allow me to effectively display photos; in particular, I can’t post captions under a particular photo. If you’re interested in seeing captions, you can click on a given image and go see the original caption on my flickr page.

And if you just want to see the originals for the last half-year on flickr in a nice slideshow, you can go here:

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It’s a new day, a new year, a new decade in a next-to-new millennium, and I must be excited by this at a purely body level because I woke very early this morning (before dawn) despite going to be very late and have not been able to fall asleep again. I surrendered at last, and rose at 8:30 to consider this thing, this new thing I’m in, this new life.

This could be the beginning of something utterly unprecedented in my own life and in human history. Then again, it might be more of the same old, same old stuff on a greater scale. It’s entirely up to me and up to us on a macro / world / political level.

There is something coming up this year that astrologers have been calling the ‘Cardinal Climax’ and I’ve been talking about it to my astrology students for a few months now. It’s an opportunity for a profound new awakening, or perhaps disaster of epic proportions. Yikes!
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I haven’t forgotten. What a shock it was, all our fears manifest at once. Fourteen young women, massacred for no other reason than being female! We were rocked to the roots by the proof of the pudding of fears our generation of women was fed, to wit: ‘don’t dare pursue your dreams, you’ll be killed if you do‘.

(In case you’re American or too young to remember, you can read all about it here.) Murder sucks for any reason, but random, gratuitous slaughter of the young, ambitious and promising is particularly horrifying.

The tragic irony of Tempest Gale’s murder in November just a few weeks before the twentieth anniversary of the Montreal Massacre just serves to stir the pudding. But dammit, change must come.

I recorded this song last night. It’s raw and rhythmically ragged, but a powerful version, I think; I was alone in the room and feeling emotional at the time. I wrote this just after the Montreal Massacre.

Actually, it was on the following International Women’s Day. Anne Cameron had come to Hornby and given a rockingly powerful talk at the Hall, after which I went out and bawled my head off in my car then wrote this song.

It hurts to sing, because after twenty years, so little has changed. Still, so many pointless losses, so few gains, politically speaking, socially speaking. Oh, women now have the right to go die with the boys in the sands of Afghanistan, I suppose. It was never my ambition to be Sgt Rock.
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Last night, I came across a poem I wrote back in 95… the title grabbed me with its reference to the wind (Tempest + Gale = wind).

I was in a Pluto square at the time and in a big rage at God (or whatever masquerades as God in most organized religion), pumped up, feeling like death couldn’t hurt me.

“Come and get me! Yeah I said YOU, chickeenn…’ the poem said.

Then, I got scared, put the thing away and never did anything with it. I know, I know.

Personally, I feel sure that if I die, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay right here, enjoy my body as it melts into the earth, still aware but slowly expanding to become one with her.

It’s happened to me before. Every past life regression I’ve done (three, with three different hypnotherapists) has taken me back to that same experience. I’ve *never* ‘gone to the light’, whatever that means. It feels alien to me.

It’s probably because I’m fey. The Church used to claim that the fey folk have no souls, which just means they don’t separate from their bodies and go off to some other place, they stay and change form until they reconvene in another time and place.
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for Tempest Grace Gale

I am pixelated,
lacy fronds of frost encasing
the heart of my matter
etched in stone patterns of grief
for she whose existence
we all depended on
now ruthlessly bereft
of future

she, robbed of life;
we, denied the gifts
she had still to bestow

…………………………………………………………………………………………………

Tempest Grace Gale
Feb 5, 1984 – Nov 17, 2009
murdered in paradise

Hear her music on myspace

Oh what a strange journey life continues to become, never ending, ever changing! Full of zigs and zags and unexpected turnings. Just when I have the near future nicely mapped, it jogs to reveal some new vista, unplanned, a sur-prize.

I had a sweet plan in place to travel down to Seattle this week, pick my sweetie up on the plane, spend some time visiting with a friend… but disaster befell the friend’s son (at whose home we were meant to stay). So, the plan has been ditched and it’s back to business as usual, me at home, he on the bus to find his own winding way, calloo, callay.

Business as usual is a jog in the path, when you are expecting the unexpected. Still, I’m partly relieved to be relieved of the task of all that packing and driving long miles in predicted heavy weather.

***

My new classes are proving to be just as much fun as I had hoped; the bright eyes and willing hearts of my students inspire me and re-ignite my passion for this work. All right!

Astrology is so much more than a belief system; in point of fact, belief is not required. One stunned soul said to me after I did an in-depth reading for him as a gift, “I want you to know, I don’t believe in astrology, and that hasn’t changed. But [long pause] I have to admit it was right on.”
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