"Moonlight Bay"

It was fun working on this one a bit more in my voice lesson today. It was short enough to run through a bunch of times, trying different things.

[Happy Birthday to my incredibly wonderful and generous little sister, Beth! I don’t mind at all that Mom loves you more! Really!]

I like the process of this learning to sing (again). Until this year, every year for the past dozen or so I’ve gotten away to some sort of retreat: personal growth, or meditation oriented, and most often, I’ve done one of each. Then this year, nothing. One gathering that I loved was cancelled (and for the future has changed into a form that I can’t afford), and the other retreat was timed such that it was attend that, or my brother’s wedding, and that was a no-brainer. (Admittedly, the wedding was in the Virgin Islands, I got to go with a very dear friend, and spend time with my awesome family, so I didn’t suffer overly much there, but it wasn’t relaxation, per se.)

I missed the time away to naval gaze. Time to look inward and decide what I thought about what I saw, time to rest my tired parental brain. Time to process. I once wrote a song: “Process. . . process teaches, eat your lessons, love the process. . .” and I do love it. I know how process works, how one takes new information, makes it one’s own, hard wires it into the system, and runs with it: rejoicing, accepting, acknowledging. I know all about the watching time, where I just have to pay attention, and remember to pay attention again. I know how things I’ve ‘put on a back burner’ come to the fore mysteriously soon, get solved, or accomplished. I know what resistence to process is, and how sweet it is to break through into something that later always seems easy--if I didn’t know how damn tough it was to do the breaking. I so miss the processing this year.

So I can latch, a little, at least, onto these vocal excursions into me, into my issues around my own voice. Today I realized I’m afraid when it seems too easy. As much trouble as I’ve gotten into in the past, I distrust when it feels too good also, a little. Surely the entirely sensual pleasure I take in my voice must be wrong somehow, right? What if someone hears that? And then another part of me says, ‘Goodness, girl, just get over it! Surely you’re old enough now that you don’t care what anyone else thinks.’ And maybe, finally (for the most part, and for all practicality), I don’t. Watch me process, folks. Gory details are optional.