The Green Wave

March 14, 2010

Welcome to YouTube, Kate

Filed under: Uncategorized — kate @ 7:09 pm

I’ve been a bit shy about youtube – well, about appearing on it anyway.  I LOVE the chance to see and hear some of my favorite musicians and authors, and I love the big zany grab-bag of everything posted there.  But until very recently I haven’t felt sparked to capture myself on film and share my image with the world.

What changed?

I took part in two events which matter very much to me.

The first was a clinic on creativity and songwriting my dear friend Lauren Passarelli and I held at Berklee College of Music on February 23.  Lauren is a professor of guitar at Berklee, and she is passionately interested in the creative process and in sharing what she has learned from a rich career of making songs and performing music.  One of her students – a brilliant young songwriter – filmed our discussion and performance, and I’m including the links here in case you’d like to see it:

The second event took place at Club Passim this past Monday – a tribute to Seamus Connolly and Gaelic Roots, sponsored by the Boston Celtic Music Festival.  I was deeply honored to be invited to take part in this wonderful occasion because as I’ve written here before, I ADORE Seamus Connolly, and performing with the likes of Laurel Martin (fiddle), Brendan Bulger (fiddle), Mark Simos (guitar), Aoife Clancy (songs & bodhran), and Jimmy Noonan (flute) is pretty much my idea of heaven on earth.  Sean Smith who organized the event took some film footage of two of the big group tunes and posted these on youtube:

If you know me, do not look for my familiar face.  You will catch a glimpse of me instead in my white hands in the dark, merrily vamping along with the fiddles and flute and bodhran.

Will I do more with this medium?  I think so.  At the very least, I am so grateful to have the “souvenir” of youtube footage from both of these joyful occasions.  And as long as I don’t have to operate the camera myself and if I can be spared the worst of seeing myself in the contortions of extreme emotion that sometimes happen when I sing and play, I am game.  And someday, oh someday, how I would love to make a little film – a video – to accompany some of the poem-songs I’m making these days.  Just imagine the images that might float along next to “Recuerdo” or “The Fire of Driftwood” or – oh! – “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”

So a little stretching with new technology is all for the best because it leads me to delicious new dreams.

March 7, 2010

Blessings of the Green Days

Filed under: Celebration, Irish, Music, Spirit — kate @ 12:47 pm

If we’re friends or if you look at my performance schedule (which probably means we ARE friends), you know that I’m about to enter my busiest time of the year.  I am a lucky duck to have all these chances to do what I love best and also to share music with so many musicians I love and admire.  I am blessed to be able to really celebrate this season of Irishness and to help other people feel included in it, blessed by it, uplifted by it.  Lucky, lucky girl!

You might be surprised to learn, though, that I tend to get nervous at the start of all this bounty.  I can engage in very crazy thinking on the cusp of such opportunity.  If I’m not careful I can talk myself into feeling that I’m not up to the task, that I don’t have enough fresh repertoire, that I’ll get sick with all the driving and racing around, that there isn’t enough time to do things well, that I’ll disappoint listeners or myself… I could go on longer, but I’d rather not.  These fears and nagging whispers are not what’s important.

What’s important is what I hope:

  • I hope that the music, stories, and poetry I share help people feel that the beauty of the world belongs to them.
  • I hope that my performances bring pleasure, respite, engagement, fun, and warmth to my audiences.
  • I hope for moments of wit and levity, for moments of sweetness and warmth, for moments of imagination and the opening-up of possibility.
  • I hope to feel, at the end of this little “tour,” that I have really celebrated the vitality of what I love:  connection, inspiration, courage, humor, imagination, warmth, and a certain jauntiness that looks right into the face of fear or heartache and says,

“Be that as it may:  here’s a little tune I invented for the occasion!”

February 28, 2010

Mistakes

Filed under: Music, Poetry, Spirit, Storytelling, Writing — kate @ 2:43 pm

I woke up thinking about mistakes because – well, you guessed it – I’ve made a spate of ‘em recently.  At a concert on Friday night, I bungled some harp parts.  I tripped over a wire.  I forgot an important (and funny) detail in a story I told.

Was the performance ruined?  No, it wasn’t.  And did I do do other things well?  Yes, I did.  But what woke me up this morning?  The memory of my mistakes.

I make mistakes all the time, but only some of them rankle.  In my Irish classes, I regularly forget a word or mess up a spelling.  As a writer, I occasionally revisit my essays or poetry and find something that is over-written or factually wrong.  In my performing life, I miss notes, chords, words, and even whole verses from time to time.  But many of these mistakes are easy to laugh off, excuse, or forget.

So why do some mistakes feel so important?  Why do some of them char into memory and leave that awful burned smell in the mind?

I recognize the big-deal variety by the kinds of things I hear in my head:

  • I should be past that by now.
  • I should have known that.
  • I can’t believe I did that in front of her.
  • Now they’ll think they wasted their money.
  • Now they’ll know I’m nothing special.

The killer mistakes – or the ones we allow to turn into killers – are rooted in shame and vulnerability.  We feel we should have known that fact, or that we should be beyond getting so rattled by a funky microphone, or that a really good musician doesn’t make such slips.  From there, it’s only a short step to:  “I know less than I should know.  That means I only appear to be an authority.  That means I’m a fraud.  That means that I’m deceptive.  That means that I’m worthless.”

Ouch.

The other kind of mistake is more like a sneeze than a deadly virus.  I recognize them when I hear these things in my head:

  • Well!  That was silly!
  • Gracious, I’m just tired tonight.
  • Oh, well, I didn’t hear her right is all.
  • Oh!  Now I understand!  They wanted this and not that.  That’s easily fixed.
  • No biggie.  Anyone could forget a thing like that.

These mistakes seem unattached to me somehow.  They are simply a part of the weather – external, natural, changing, neutral.  I don’t take them to heart.  Yes, they are often smaller (like missing a single letter in an Irish word, as opposed to forgetting a pivotal concept), but they don’t touch my self-respect or my notion of myself as competent and worthy of people’s trust.

So the big difference between the ranklers and the non-ranklers is my own idea of who I am and who I should be.  Like so many things, this is a story I tell and a style I choose for telling it.

I could tell a new story about a woman with a huge thirst for life who takes on millions of creative, artistic, and scholarly projects.  I could say that this thirst for life is more important than being right all the time.  This desire to use all the gifts and try out the wings and test the skills necessarily means there will be some mistakes and failures.  I could gently pry away the shadow of shame by respecting the attempt more consciously.  I could re-imagine mastery as a fluid process, rather than as a static destination.  I could decide that mistakes are the buds that flower into something new.

Even as I sometime writhe over my mess-ups, I’ve always believed it important to live a life marked as much by mistakes, attempts, and experiments as by success, achievement, and mastery.  Otherwise, one’s tenancy on Planet Earth is rather dull and uneventful and we never even try to use all the fantastic equipment we came with.  Living that way is like falling out of an airplane and refusing to pull the parachute ripcord because it might not work.  There are many things worse than failing.

Not failing, it turns out, is one of them.

And since I’m in no danger of that, I’m a success!

February 21, 2010

Library Dreams

Filed under: Music, Pleasures, Poetry, Storytelling — kate @ 2:03 pm

Last Friday I had the wonderful chance to perform an hour of songs & stories at the West Springfield Public Library as part of their lunchtime concert series.  The people who came were delightful:  they munched their sandwiches and sipped their tea in between grinning and clapping, and occasionally, obliging me by trying to say or sing some Irish words.  It was a great pleasure to spend that time with them and also to find myself, once again, making music in a library.

I hadn’t realized how much that meant to me until then, nor how long this combination of libraries and performing has been in my dreams.  Like many things in life, you look back and all at once see the tracks leading to where you are now; you’ve been making them without fully understanding what you were doing.  But there they are!

These last two years I’ve gotten more and more chances to give concerts in libraries. I remember that my first library came close on the heels of a particularly disastrous attempt to play at a bar.  The place was altogether too cool for me, too laid back, too dark, and too distracted.  “Know thyself,” commands the ancient Greek Delphic oracle.  Well, OK, then.  I’m really not that cool and I rarely find myself in a bar, and I spent that evening battling upstream with a tea-spoon instead of a paddle.  I wasn’t at home.

In the library, on the other hand, I am happy in a familiar temple with its cherished holy items (books and maps) and its priests and priestesses (the librarians).  I’ve been a library-goer all my life, finding solace in their silences and dignified spaces, and finding delight and instruction in their books.  My life opens up as I scan shelves or pore over the card catalog (yes, I’m a fan of those old magic boxes – but I also love the new wizardry of keying in a search and receiving the instant rewards).  Libraries have always provided me with the particular shelter my soul most requires:  gentleness, learning, curiosity, and the understanding that the world is waiting to open its pages to us.  All we must do is ask.

When I was young, my mother and I used to attend concerts, plays, and poetry readings at our local libraries (the Dyer in Saco and the MacArthur in Biddeford).  Those nights glow in my memory.  Our libraries, usually quiet places, bloomed into life and merriment.  I can remember a night when the the MacArthur was so full of people that I sat on the floor to leave my seat for someone who needed it more.  This afforded me the thrilling advantage of being even closer to the performers – Northeast Winds that night, I think – and getting to watch their hands and even notice their set list, taped to the floor.  I watched them quietly negotiate changes to the list and share a private joke.  An inside view:  I loved that!

I think I loved it most of all because it brought together the things I loved best:  music, books, poetry, learning, art, kindness, and festivity.  These are still my favorite things (apart from moons and oceans and birches and apples which best fit in libraries in the pages of books).  Watching those concerts and plays and readings, I lived two lives:  in one, I just soaked up the beauty of what was offered.  In the other, I dreamed that I could be that person making music or reading poems there in that most perfect of concert halls:  the library.

And now in the beauty of life and all its winding and mysterious ways, I am.

Isn’t that rather wonderful?

The West Springfield Public Library

January 24, 2010

Piggybacking

Filed under: People, Poetry, Spirit, Writing — kate @ 2:34 pm

There are a million great reasons to roll up our sleeves and get cracking on our creative projects.  Here are just a few:

  • the excitement of being busy and engaged
  • the excitement of turning an idea into a creation we can share
  • the excitement of being artists who regularly make art (on this point, my dear friend Lauren Passarelli has written an an inspiring, helpful, and generous essay on her blog, Pass Words; don’t miss it!)
  • the excitement of seeing our body of work grow and change over time
  • the fantastic feeling of flow and power that comes with making things!  (doesn’t matter if it’s a book or a Zentangle:  just making something produces great satisfaction and pleasure in me)

Today I’d like to highlight another reason – one I think of as  Piggybacking.

By this I mean that sometimes, creating one thing greases the gears so powerfully that another creation follows close on the heels of the first.  And often that second creation comes with very little effort or struggle – a benediction after hours of fasting & praying.

I first noticed this when I was writing my dissertation and found that after a good work session, I was often so charged with a poem idea that the need to write it down felt as urgent as the need to drink when you’re thirsty (or visit the loo afterwards!).  At the time, I thought of the dissertation-writing as “throwing off sparks.”

I’ve noticed it, too, when I sit down to write poems for an “assignment” – usually an agreed-upon topic with Cheryl Perreault, my Friday morning poetry partner.  I might start in a cheerful but dutiful way and find that the first poem is fine but that the second poem shows up unbidden on the winds of real inspiration.  This phenomenon I think of as “stirring up the mud.”

(These little aphorisms sound like katas in some ancient Asian martial art:  “First, perform “stirring up mud” and then leap straight into “throwing off sparks.”  Then you are the Master!”)

This week I took on a new writing task:  fashioning an artist bio for my friend, marvelous singer-songwriter Nancy Beaudette.  I worked for hours on this project and found that every part of my brain was engaged and excited.  Getting the tone and shape right was a little like working at a puzzle, and as I sharpened and brightened the piece, I felt tremendous satisfaction.  When I finished, I could have turned cartwheels!

At the same time, I thought that was enough work for the day, and I decided to give up the evening to a well-earned rest.

But out of nowhere came the thought that I could write an introduction to my new book of poems if I’d just sit back down and try, that I had not only all the information I needed but also all the inspiration.  I didn’t think or worry or assent consciously but obeyed the impulse.

Less than an hour later there was the introduction – a completed project I’d been thinking about for 3 weeks!

If I hadn’t worked so hard and so pleasurably on Nancy’s bio, I don’t think that would have happened.  I would probably be still thinking about the introduction and assuming I needed to do research and thinking before digging into it.

Instead, I went to bed feeling like a busy, excited, productive writer!

Try it yourself with any of your projects.  Do some Piggyback Writing, some Piggyback Painting, some Piggyback Jewelry-Making, some Piggyback Cooking, some Piggyback Dancing, some Piggyback Photography!  Anything at all.  We’ve all heard Goethe’s brilliant words, but they bear repeating again and again and again and again:

“Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it.

Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.”

(He probably came up with that bit of timeless insight after writing a business letter.  Early 19th century Piggybacking!)

January 14, 2010

Tracks

Filed under: People, Pleasures, Spirit — kate @ 2:15 pm

On Sunday, I rose early to go with my friends Kathleen and Craig to the Oxbow National Wildlife Refuge for an introduction to the basics of tracking.  We had the great good fortune to land in the group led by Rona Balco, an inspiring teacher and experienced outdoorswoman.  Let me put it this way:  while most of us tromp down the path, perhaps noticing the warmth of the sun on our shoulders and commenting on the odd birch tree, Rona reads the natural world the way an English professor reads Ulysses.  It is a huge sounding board of intricate signs and signals, replete with tales and tragedies, good characters and savages, hard luck and fortunate moonlight.  She is a native speaker of the woods – or at least she has become so fluent in nature that she passes as a native.

In her company I began to sense the possibilities for interpretation, the many clues to read and wonder over, all played out on the vast canvas of the snow.  Thank heaven for the snow!  For without it, a complete newbie like myself would have a much harder time even seeing the signs, much less understanding them.  Rona told us that in deducing the story behind the signs, you have to take everything into account:  time, habit, preference, ability, environment.  When the tracks end, as they do many times, you look a little ways off and realize that the creature has traveled for a time under the snow where it is warmer and safer.  (We do this, too, of course; the tracks of our lives disappear briefly when we go under the snow for safety and respite).

I came away with deeper respect for the wisdom of the creatures who really are the First Peoples of this planet:  for the beavers who teach their one-year-olds to build dams but who are willing to accept these youngsters back if things don’t work out in the wide world; for the coyotes who trot in tandem over the ice and work as a hunting team; for the deer that sniff out hunters and take themselves without further ado into safer territory, like people without drama leaving a mean party; for the trees themselves that pass along word of changes or dangers through chemical signals in the soil.  Through Rona’s eyes, I saw an intricate web singing with vitality, cleverness, generosity, bravery, instinct, adaptability, and wisdom.

Rona herself is leaving such beautiful tracks.  She is a consummate teacher – passionate, patient, eager to see us all learn and love what she loves – and she is also an advocate for better communities, for better stewardship of the earth through wiser use of resources, and for the Oxbow, which seems to be her dearest dear.  She is also a woodcarver, a mother and wife, and a wonderful friend to the people in her town.

If we followed her tracks we might see them disappear at the edge of the river and wonder where she went.  But we could use all she taught us to deduce the real story:  this is where she took to the wing.  What a life and gracious, what lovely tracks!

January 3, 2010

My Friends, the Writers

Filed under: Pleasures, Writing — kate @ 4:42 pm

There are times in my reading life when I crave challenge, risk, edginess, and the kind of confrontation that shakes up the status quo.

This is not one of them.

Lately, I turn to my books as to the faces of beloved friends. I open them up in hopes of finding not a tongue-lashing but a comforting chat with a trusted confidante. The tone I’m after is conversational, confiding, kind, and interested in the world. There is something leisurely and good-humored about their prose; yes, they see problems and questions, but rather than screech, they’d rather pour a second cup of tea and imagine their way to a better world. They know that there is as much meaning and interest in a shoe-lace as there is in a political summit. They are prepared to ruminate on the difference between daisies and lilies, but they’d be ready to listen if you put in a word for roses.

In short, I love their company. In time, they come to seem like friends to me.

Here is a partial list of friends:

  • J.B. Priestley -  When I finished my first reading of Delight, Priestley’s collection of essays about dozens of pleasing things such as pine forests and reading detective fiction in bed, I wrote in my journal that I had met a new friend.  I never wanted to be out of his company nor lose his particular way of seeing the world.  Now the book – formerly a library copy – sits by my bed.
  • Anne Fadiman – In At Large & At Small, Fadiman writes what she calls “familiar essays,” and by that she means both essays about familiar, ordinary things (coffee, ice cream, and mailboxes among other things) and also the sense of family and relationship.  Her curiosity knows no bounds.  In her company we travel from the world of insect-collecting to the world of Charles & Mary Lamb.  She wears her knowledge so lightly you scarcely realize how much you are learning -but learning you are, and not just facts, either:  a way of taking a deeper and livelier interest in the world.  She feels to me like a kindred spirit.
  • Charles Dickens – I wrote about him in my last post, “Scrooge & Me,” and my experience of his writing is fairly limited to the “greatest hits” (Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol), but I will amend that gap now that his good humor and humanity have impressed themselves upon me.  He is that person at the party who seems at first quite ordinary and later is revealed as the most extraordinary person in the room.
  • Robertson Davies – Pick up anything by this Canadian writer for broad-minded, intelligent company, but if you like essays, get Happy Alchemy, his book about music and the theatre, two of his life-long passions.  And for sheer delight, check out his book of academic ghost stories set at Massey College in Toronto, High Spirits.  Great laughs!
  • M.F.K. Fisher – Fisher writes about food, but not just about food:  food as a metaphor for the way we take in life, how we digest experiences, how we dine on relationships or abstain all together.  Her essays tell us about the pleasures of eating alone (she seems to favor an omelet, a green salad, and a glass of wine – OR she’ll go for something messy and forbidden), about the feeling of extreme hunger in youth and how older people forget what it is to be ravenous (for life, of course!), and even about the various sinks and kitchens in flats she rented throughout Europe.  You can start anywhere with her, I think – her early books about cooking and eating (Serve it Forth or How To Cook a Wolf), or later books of essays like Sister Age, or dip into her journals and letters.  She’s honest, unflinching, friendly without being saccharine, and wise.  Another friend I’m glad to know.

This is just a tasting plate, and I’m sure you have your own list; if so, I’d love to meet your friends!  Happily, all it takes to access their company is to open their books.  So tonight I’m throwing a dinner party and inviting all of these and others (the poets and novelists who belong at the table, too).  I hope MFK won’t judge my cooking too harshly – but since we’re friends, I think she’ll be gentle with me.  And besides, we’ll be dining on words, words, words, with whimsy for dessert!

December 24, 2009

Scrooge & Me

Filed under: Celebration, Spirit, Writing — kate @ 5:44 pm

I’ve spent a batch of happy hours this week reading Charles Dickens’ wonderful book, A Christmas Carol. Like many people, I’ve seen the play a few times, and the story itself is ubiquitous almost to the point of losing its punch. We all know about Scrooge and the three ghosts, and how the miser is transformed into a warm and joyful human being by book’s end.

But I’d never read the book, and that, as Frost says, has made all the difference. For one thing, after a forced encounter with Dickens in high school, I’ve hardly paid him any notice, and now I see that the loss is entirely my own! What a writer he is!

He has a marvelous sense of humor and sometimes seems to nearly wink from the page as here when he describes dead Marley’s face: “it had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” A bad lobster! Those words elicited from me a snort of pleasure!

Dickens’ imagination roams among many characters and places; he introduces us to thieves and miners, sailors and lighthousekeepers, country people and London merchants. He takes us far out to sea and underground, into the city slums and business quarter, into sitting rooms and counting houses. And most wonderfully, he tours the past, the present, and the future and carries us along for the ride.

And he’s not afraid of sentiment – OK, I can hear some of you thinking: I’ll say!. But overall, he strikes me as much like a great cook who aims for a perfect balance of flavors, and so some sentimentality is perfectly acceptable alongside the more piquant tastes he offers. It’s that bouqet garni that allows us all to come along with Scrooge on the journey he makes: without the blend of humor, sentiment, hope, and the acknowledgment of poverty and hardship, we would only observe Scrooge changing, rather than going along with him and changing ourselves.

That is what really struck me in reading A Christmas Carol. I am Scrooge. No, I am not as mean or miserly or cruel. But I have missed opportunities to show kindness, to be generous, to forebear offering an opinion and instead to uplift and encourage. When Scrooge sees the young Tiny Tim ailing in his chair by the fire and when the spirit tells him that this will likely be the little boy’s last Christmas, I felt such a pang of understanding. I, too, have seen suffering and turned away.

Sometimes it all seems too much to address in any meaningful way. Yes, we have limited resources of time and money, and the world cries out for help and healing. All the time. All the time.

But Dickens doesn’t bang us over the head with piety or tell us that we’ve got to give up everything we own in order to be spared from the fate the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge will be his own if he continues as an old skinflint. Just being a champion laugher – like Scrooge’s nephew of whom Dickens writes, “If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge’s nephew, all I can say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I’ll cultivate his acquaintance.” – seems to elevate a person. If you are prepared to smile and celebrate, you are lifted up, too. And if you are blessed with extra wealth and if you should spare some of it to help the poor, you will not die alone and unloved for you have “sent your spirit abroad” as Marley tells Scrooge we are meant to do in this life.

After his encounter with the three ghosts and the visions they show him, Scrooge learns how to send his spirit abroad into the world in a useful way. He gives a large sum to charity. He gives a raise to his clerk, Bob Cratchit. He sends a turkey to the Cratchit family and takes an interest in Tiny Tim that ultimately prolongs the boy’s life. But he doesn’t save the whole city. He can’t fix all the problems in London.

But he can do his best. He does what he can, and he does it with a joyful heart. He knows there is no time to lose and he throws himself into the business of being joyful and generous with his whole heart.

Having read this magical book, I am inclined to do the same.

Merry Christmas, friends! God bless us every one!

December 20, 2009

Irishy Things

Filed under: Irish, Music — kate @ 1:07 pm

Just a quick hello today and to tell you that two of my wee articles on Irishy things – the Irish language and the Irish harp – are available on line at Encyclopedia Britannica. Here’s the links in case you’d like to read them:

The Irish Harp

The Irish Language

December 6, 2009

If you can’t sing…

Filed under: Music, Poetry, Spirit — kate @ 12:43 pm

I’m fresh out of vocal cords today: no singing for me today at the benefit concert for my dear friend Kathleen’s uncle. Instead, I’ll be blowing the flute (and sipping throat coat between tunes), strumming the harp, and tickling the ivories.

Lately, some days I haven’t felt up to doing even those things, so I’ve stayed in bed, written poems.

And when I don’t feel up to writing a poem, I think about words.

And when words seem distant, I imagine beautiful things.

I can always imagine beautiful things. I am an expert day-dreamer. I am an artist of lovely inner visions.

If you can’t sing, why not fly?

Photograph by Kathleen Callahan

Photograph by Kathleen Callahan

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