Swoop

If there’s one place on earth where joy eclipses toil and grief, it’s music.

But there’s an endangered tribe running through the bliss fields, prone to miss the magic. You guessed it - musicians.

Recently I heard Judy Collins describe her struggle with depression, alcohol and drugs from early on. If a singing angel yearns for joy in the midst of plenty, what’s to become of the rest of us?

Many people tell me they love music. Some of them are musicians. Most of them are connoisseurs, curators of their music collections, fans of bands and troubadours. At least that’s how it seems to me, but of course I’m biased because I’m a musician endangered by the making of music.

Music can be a buffer against the cares of the world. A friend of mine had a tough childhood. Hank Williams on the radio at night was his refuge and salvation.

But it’s hard to find joy in a craft you love that also says ‘get out there for the world to hear.’ Getting it out there is more than hooking up some mics and amps and letting ‘er rip. It’s a rowdy expertise we call ‘marketing’ which has a tendency to leak frustration, doubt and a certain crass materialism into the pure realm of music euphoria.

Imagine a winged creature at home on the wind, suddenly forced to truck around bird ads on her skinny legs and spritely feathers. You think we’d expect her to sing too?

I haven’t figured out how to avoid the derangement of the market place. Yes, I do love music. But I’m hopelessly inept at sales. ‘Swoop with me into the wild blue yawn?’ I might as well tell you to get religion (my religion), which won’t be happening anytime soon.

See what I mean? Hopeless.

Painting Margret Hofheinz-Döring, Meeting of Birds Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Why do music?

My sister Mariah’s got a phenomenal cache of recipes. A large bunch of fresh dill from a Chicago farmer’s market needed one.

‘Do you have Mrs. Waltz’s dill bread recipe?’ I asked her. She clicked back immediately, ‘It’s in Mom's recipe booklet I gave you, Montana Dilly Casserole Loaf - and I love the attached potato salad recipe - it's the first thing I thought if when I heard fresh dill.'

Mariah’s our family recipe caretaker. Our mother used to say, ‘I’m not a good cook. I just have good recipes.’ Because of Mariah, Mom feeds us still. Caretakers abound where humans love.

2 Men and a Campfire shared songs they love at the Beck Cafe Thursday night. Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, Lennon-McCartney songs with spot on harmonies and well hewn guitar grooves had us humming down nostalgia lane. Dale and Ryan care for the good songs when they perform them and emulate them in their own compositions.

An original Lennon lyric sheet just went for $1.2 million at Sotheby’s. I’ll take the live rendition any day. Recipes are made for cooking/eating, songs for singing/hearing.

And what to make of the 45-year-old carpenter who retrieved his high school class ring from a quarry he’d lost it in as a boy, swimming with friends? Care taking is a communal story. Somebody’s got to drain the quarry and somebody’s got to want what’s down there.

Recently I strapped on my guitar to begin again to sing the songs I left behind some years ago. It can seem pointless, in the glut of digital music distribution, to be caretaker of songs I write. The communal piece appears lacking - no Beatlemaniacs or Dylanatics revere my tunes, hankering for more. Scarcely friend nor kin has asked about the golden ring ‘on a ledge that would have been 35 feet under the water line.’ I guess it’s up to me to drain the quarry and tote the ring, both.

A recent TED talker describes his 'why' discovery this way: ‘People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.’ He says rational explanations about how a product is so necessary and desirable miss the point entirely. Buying decisions are made in the intuitive, feeling part of our brain. The ‘why’ of our exertions draws others to things we revere and offer up creatively.

It’s not the zeitgeist's job to track down my songs for posterity. I’m the caretaker, quarry drainer, ring bearer - chief cook and bottle washer. I do it because I love making music. I do it for community. I do it for love.

Next to godliness

I like cleanliness.

When our boys were young, their two little hot wheel runaround pals named Ian and Evan moved away.

A few months later, we visited their upstairs apartment in a large brick house painted gray. Wading through the rooms knee deep in randomness, I wondered if I dare leave my boys to play and possibly be swallowed whole by swamps of stuff.

As I recall, I made a flimsy excuse and darted for the door, my sons in tow.

The generation of our children is one I know more closely than most. Now young adults, my children and their friends buoy me with selflessness and candor. They would save the world, or at the very least proclaim it worth their efforts.

Most of them are graduates of rented student houses rife with late night schmoozery. I've never been in one of those communal digs where bathrooms or kitchens got a once over more often than maybe once every rent cycle, which could be months or years depending on the student migration timeline.

I remember my own collegiate avalanche of under-managed personal debris, the dredge of deadlines daunting me from term to term. Then in nursing school I shared a small flat with Grace, a contralto at the institute of music who was rather disciplined as I recall. I think we did the dishes and I can't remember bathroom chores becoming points of tension.

Gradually I think I just ran out of slovenly excuses, cleaned up my act and proceeded on to quasi-ordered adulthood.  Messy, at times. Dirty, not so much.

Those people of the upstairs rental I mentioned earlier? I remember the parents. They were from Montana or Idaho or some such windswept scape. She was soft spoken, evanescent, kind. He was a thinker. He told me once he couldn't imagine why a soul would ask him if he believed in God or wanted to accept Jesus as his savior. (Not that I had, or would. It was just a subject that came up.) I'd never met anyone so sure of the intimacy of that question and the sanctity of inner space.

No matter how well our long abandoned Ian and Evan learn to breach the creep of stuff, the bilge of pesky matter, I'm confident these sons will be alright. And so will mine and all their fond companions.

Unfazed by tidy elders, let them brave this unkempt world.

Lithograph by Ehrgott, Forbriger & Co., President Lincoln writing the Proclamation of Freedom

All the world is somewhere else

'All the world is somewhere else... I am the mask. I am the bird. I am the animal. I am the spirit... I transcend with the being of the mask.'
Chief Robert Joseph, Kwakwaki'wakw (Kwakiutl), recalling his youthful experience as a ceremonial dancer, 1998

'There are three things that maintain a culture - language, religion and art. You lose these three and you lose the culture completely.'
Jackie Paisho, Pikuni (Blackfoot) bead artist, 2005

'You say prayers when you start a basket and you let it know that it is going to be started, to be created and when you are finished, you end with prayers to let it know that its birth is complete.'
Frank Turtle, Yubi-Wailaki, painter and basket maker, 1999

'Art comes from a deeper source somewhere - it's part of the act of just living; you know, let's put on the beans and get the clay out.'
Rina Swentzell, Tewa-Santa Clara Pueblo artist, author and schollar, 1994

For Rina Swentzell, clay can be 'a gritty reminder of the land, a way to hold the places of her ancestors between her fingers.' I tried my hand at gritty reunions last week with a lunge at gardening. Soft and green at the work, my blistered palms sent me to the sidelines to let the weeds have their ancestral way.

The same hands scribbled quotes, shards of artist truth scattered through Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection last month. At the time, I felt the author-artists pushing me out of my complacency, where everyday tasks outweigh the urgency of grappling with my far, forgotten roots. Then of course those same tasks led me down the road of practical oblivion, my bits of penciled wisdom moldering in the dust.

My people were Swiss and English, poor orphaned clans. My clay - my songs, my words - forget or deny their sacred worth. Ironic, and perhaps deserving, that the peoples who appropriated this land often sacrifice the very ties to Europe that might redeem their streak of stubborn independence. Stark individualism relegates our heritage to a wan relic of a lush communal presense just beyond our consciousness.

Prayerful art, say the land's native prophets, might yet be our salvation.

Photo Edward S. Curtis, Blackfoot Bear Bull