If it makes you feel worried, small, powerless, or in any way LESS (hopeful, eager, strong, passionate), it's NOT FOR YOU. If it makes you feel strong, eager, alive, expanded, empowered, or MORE yourself, it's FOR YOU. This goes for advice - solicited or unsolicited, comments, thoughts, ideas, marketing, opportunities and possibilities, and anything else [...]
It's the most natural thing in the world. There are some who will tell you that you can only do it when you're well-rested, when your throat is "open," when the Moon is in Venus and the Lark hangs on the Eastern Star... They will also tell you that your voice is "delicate," that it [...]
"Everything is energy and that's all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics." ---Albert Einstein There is food and drink here for artists and creators. Match the frequency of [...]
Friends, we are the artists in the world at this time. Let that sink in. We are, to quote Arthur Shaughnessy, the "music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." If you're making songs, poems, paintings, dances, or anything else that was born first in your imagination and heart and then brought forth [...]
You've heard of Shark Week, of course, and what a great idea to devote a week to these amazing nearly preternatural creatures. But this week, my musical friends, is SCALE WEEK. I hope you'll join me! Yes, it's a week to enjoy the foundations of our musical language and to practice scales every day. I [...]
I love April because although we can celebrate and enjoy poetry all year, we dedicate EXTRA love and attention to poetry this month. And that makes me happy! As always, I'm celebrating by writing a poem each day. This year, for the first time ever, I'm nine for nine - meaning, that I haven't yet [...]
I bought a dozen pearl arrowhead erasers - an affordable luxury at .19 a pop. So of course I had to sharpen some pencils to go with them! (Poems come from such small things, don't they? From pencils and and erasers and pencil sharpeners, from those who lived in our homes before us, from awkwardness, [...]
I'm thinking today that to be lucky and to know it is a double-gift - an extra-blessing. I've had two experiences lately that have impressed this upon me. Last week, I visited a wonderful school for children with severe challenges. The children depend utterly on their care-givers as none of them can walk or take [...]
Today, two suggestions and one story. Once upon a time, there was a girl who read constantly. She laid on her belly, propped up on her elbows, reading book after book as the afternoons of her youth flew by. As a young adult, she read even more, adding scholarly articles and essays to the fiction [...]
Creating is a joyful, unpredictable connect-the-dots, often with periods where no dots seem to connect, and with other periods when there are more dots than expected and no idea how to connect them. Case in point. I'm composing songs to accompany, and I hope amplify, some paintings by Winslow Homer (and perhaps other New England [...]
