Welcome to my pages.
I'm glad you stopped by.
It is a raw, rainy early April morning. This morning I want to share some more Good Stuff...Inspiration for Difficult Times.
Karine Polwart is a Scottish singer/songwriter/conceiver and doer of many things. My good fortune to come across her music, website, and musings arrived a number of years ago while traveling the Internet Highway "Library" - following Crumbs of Information and Inspiration, when I might perhaps read a story about a fascinating being, for example, that points to another story about another and yet another. It's much like traveling the Back Roads rather than the Interstate Highways...there is a chance to see abandoned old houses, old churches, miles of undisturbed farmland, a soaring Red Tailed hawk or Bald Eagle, a singing brook by the side of the road, a roadside vegetable stand, or second hand goods shop selling trinkets of time-weathered paraphernalia, to discover something off the usual path.....To take these things in, to breathe in the breadth of life around us rather than hustle to the next destination via mile markers and the occasional rest area, amid speeding vehicles barely contained within yellow lines.
These side trips via the back roads, or Roads Less Traveled, are how I have found folks like Karine Polwart, and I enthusiastically share her with you now.
On occasion, she corresponds with her community via email (she is also on Facebook and Instagram, which I am not, so these communications are welcome like refreshing breezes).
Today's email communication hit a deep core place in me.
She wrote of her unusual inability of late to muster words - her deep ally and method of sharing her insights, ideas and music - because of the state of things these days.
Her sharing this resonated with me to the core because it is exactly what I feel; while my desire is to write, I cannot find the words - or motivation - of late. We are a nation, a world, of uncertainty of the unknown. There is a constant bombardment of bad news and an unimaginable and unthinkable future. We who experienced the music and the magick and the struggles for civil and environmental rights in the '60's feel it keenly, for we knew the feeling of optimism and hope, and for whatever criticism we faced for it, our innocent desires for love and peace. And I still believe in Hope, yet there is truth to speak of this difficult place one finds oneself in to find the will to write, the difficult place that Karine describes.
She writes of this heaviness she feels of late, and quotes the words of Paul Simon's "American Tune". It of course still gives me chills when I hear it, and I inevitably shed tears for its poignant portrait of the state of collective being he so eloquently describes. I urge you, dear reader, to listen to this song, and to also listen to a more current version of it as he performed it with Rhiannon Giddens (originally aired December 21, 2022), which nails the overlooked experience of Black and African Americans with one simple yet powerful change of lyric: "We didn't come on the ship the Mayflower, we came on the ship in a blood red moon".
They did not arrive on the Mayflower in search of a new life with promise and hope in their hearts.
Karine writes then of MUSIC providing the Heavy Lifting one might be needing these days.
The Heavy Lifting becomes necessary on those days when we feel the crush of the bad news. We reach for inspiration through music, that universal language that can console, comfort, inspire, transform and lift us by identifying with a loneliness inside us, a need to connect, a need to express.
I can only hope that the music I share gives someone a lift, a connection, an identification of similar feelings, to sort things out, to move to the next breath and move forward.
The world has taken on an urgency, a twist so surreal and yet so predictable in many ways that it calls on us all to show our True Selves - of Love, and Good, of any offering of Kindness we can muster, and to have the courage to speak Truth.
Encouragement to find the Beauty, to get assistance with the Heavy Lifting on those difficult days, is not a denial or bypass of the inherent struggles you, or I, face in day to day living. Far from it. Rather, to shine a light on the Beauty that exists - and I hope you find that in these pages, or elsewhere.
On this website, you will find music tracks from various phases of my songwriting, as well as my own photographs, writings, drawings and sketches.
Also on this website, you will find links to Betsy Soares' gorgeous, colorful art (rubysartstudio.com); Mia McPherson's thousands of photographs of the Natural World (a good part of which are of Birds); and words of wisdom from many seekers.
And, again, I offer up this song, "Into Spring", to greet the season of Spring..in Nature, and also in your Heart. It was written in 2001 when I consciously observed awakening of the Natural world, applying it to the question of whether I was living my own life consciously.
I'm glad you stopped by.
It is a raw, rainy early April morning. This morning I want to share some more Good Stuff...Inspiration for Difficult Times.
Karine Polwart is a Scottish singer/songwriter/conceiver and doer of many things. My good fortune to come across her music, website, and musings arrived a number of years ago while traveling the Internet Highway "Library" - following Crumbs of Information and Inspiration, when I might perhaps read a story about a fascinating being, for example, that points to another story about another and yet another. It's much like traveling the Back Roads rather than the Interstate Highways...there is a chance to see abandoned old houses, old churches, miles of undisturbed farmland, a soaring Red Tailed hawk or Bald Eagle, a singing brook by the side of the road, a roadside vegetable stand, or second hand goods shop selling trinkets of time-weathered paraphernalia, to discover something off the usual path.....To take these things in, to breathe in the breadth of life around us rather than hustle to the next destination via mile markers and the occasional rest area, amid speeding vehicles barely contained within yellow lines.
These side trips via the back roads, or Roads Less Traveled, are how I have found folks like Karine Polwart, and I enthusiastically share her with you now.
On occasion, she corresponds with her community via email (she is also on Facebook and Instagram, which I am not, so these communications are welcome like refreshing breezes).
Today's email communication hit a deep core place in me.
She wrote of her unusual inability of late to muster words - her deep ally and method of sharing her insights, ideas and music - because of the state of things these days.
Her sharing this resonated with me to the core because it is exactly what I feel; while my desire is to write, I cannot find the words - or motivation - of late. We are a nation, a world, of uncertainty of the unknown. There is a constant bombardment of bad news and an unimaginable and unthinkable future. We who experienced the music and the magick and the struggles for civil and environmental rights in the '60's feel it keenly, for we knew the feeling of optimism and hope, and for whatever criticism we faced for it, our innocent desires for love and peace. And I still believe in Hope, yet there is truth to speak of this difficult place one finds oneself in to find the will to write, the difficult place that Karine describes.
She writes of this heaviness she feels of late, and quotes the words of Paul Simon's "American Tune". It of course still gives me chills when I hear it, and I inevitably shed tears for its poignant portrait of the state of collective being he so eloquently describes. I urge you, dear reader, to listen to this song, and to also listen to a more current version of it as he performed it with Rhiannon Giddens (originally aired December 21, 2022), which nails the overlooked experience of Black and African Americans with one simple yet powerful change of lyric: "We didn't come on the ship the Mayflower, we came on the ship in a blood red moon".
They did not arrive on the Mayflower in search of a new life with promise and hope in their hearts.
Karine writes then of MUSIC providing the Heavy Lifting one might be needing these days.
The Heavy Lifting becomes necessary on those days when we feel the crush of the bad news. We reach for inspiration through music, that universal language that can console, comfort, inspire, transform and lift us by identifying with a loneliness inside us, a need to connect, a need to express.
I can only hope that the music I share gives someone a lift, a connection, an identification of similar feelings, to sort things out, to move to the next breath and move forward.
The world has taken on an urgency, a twist so surreal and yet so predictable in many ways that it calls on us all to show our True Selves - of Love, and Good, of any offering of Kindness we can muster, and to have the courage to speak Truth.
Encouragement to find the Beauty, to get assistance with the Heavy Lifting on those difficult days, is not a denial or bypass of the inherent struggles you, or I, face in day to day living. Far from it. Rather, to shine a light on the Beauty that exists - and I hope you find that in these pages, or elsewhere.
On this website, you will find music tracks from various phases of my songwriting, as well as my own photographs, writings, drawings and sketches.
Also on this website, you will find links to Betsy Soares' gorgeous, colorful art (rubysartstudio.com); Mia McPherson's thousands of photographs of the Natural World (a good part of which are of Birds); and words of wisdom from many seekers.
And, again, I offer up this song, "Into Spring", to greet the season of Spring..in Nature, and also in your Heart. It was written in 2001 when I consciously observed awakening of the Natural world, applying it to the question of whether I was living my own life consciously.
the leaf, Beth Jochum 2016
all songs, lyrics, content of this website © 2023 Beth Jochum