Mercury isn't in retrograde this time, and I've ruled out the threat of a faulty power source. It's a mystifying event that can only be understood through an imagination's interpretation. It appears as though the laptop signed on for an annual weeklong vacation to some Narnia or NeverLand-like world where it's free to relax and forget about cnn.com, text edit, and this horrible four letter b-word that I still haven't gotten used to. For all the energy and possibility it provides on a daily basis, a spontaneous week off in the summer seems totally justified, and I am happy (and grateful, now) to oblige. I can think of so many people who completely earn the right to slip out of their spreadsheets and recline into something a little more tropical more often than they do. We all know how essential a new adventure is, to our own lives and the collective Damn, I Feel Good-ness of our planet. Even a minor change, to give yourself permission to focus only on the fruits that fuel your soul for today, will inevitably fit new puzzle pieces together in the big big picture.
I don't think it can be mere coincidence, the similarities that link the Crash of 2009 and the Freeze of 2010. Both occurred in mid-summer weeks of recording new songs, just as soon as I announce a release date for another homebaked solo album. After the fact, I try so hard to go back in my mind to the moment just before the collapse. Was it something I said? Was it something I thought?
All too often I'm reminded that Life is always listening. Not in a frightening "You better be careful what you wish for!" sort of way, more in a "Santa's bringing exactly what you wanted this year, wrapped in some very deceiving boxes." I realized both last year and last week that my journal entries and general thinking were focused on nature in the days surrounding each iLeave of Absence. Verses and choruses begging to see Los Angeles through the eyes of its native Tongva and Chumash inhabitants. Drawings of trees. The common self-inquiring question, "Have You Seen Today?" meaning, "it's no wonder I'm so pale and near-sighted, I've been locking eyes with this screen for hours in my dimly lit apartment."
(Sidenote: I'm really looking forward to one day having a home with large windows to utilize the unconditionally radiant light that doesn't really rise or set through the single curtain of my current space.)
You don't need a private eye to decipher what's been going on here. If I fuel myself with thoughts of Nature, inviting my mind to drift away from anything that beeps or buzzes to be surrounded with those that... produce a million other, more beautiful sounds,
then
Life acts accordingly without necessarily waiting for me to make the first move. She's so good at saying, "You supplied the thought, I'll take it from here." Two seconds later my phone busts into three pieces, my computer goes on immediate vacation, as I suddenly find myself outdoors three pages into a 10 page pen-to-paper journal entry on feeling freer than ever.
It's been an awesome seven days of drawing and writing. The aching in my fingers from pens and pencils is a beautiful hurt that I haven't felt in far too long. New doors have been opened in my thinking, as I flip through my journal saying, "Now this is starting to look like it belongs to an artist."
I intend to spend more time away from the computer every day, to write more songs without limiting their lives to what "a song should sound like," and to combine the urgency of "live like I'm dying" with the attitude of "live because I'm freaking alive!" I don't think I should even mention the collection of books I plan to release at some point before the Crumble of 2011.
I'm off to take a page out of Juvenile's book of worldly wisdom and back this thing up.
R.
It's obvious, from the not so subtle signs, that you are being put on a technology "time-out".
ReplyDeleteGet outside!
You may be missing something wonderful out there.
Don't miss it.
Go.
Now.