home sweet new home

 If you have begun to wonder where I have been — I return to you today.  My winter has been scattered with work and play, both of these have required a certain type of brain energy that leaves me very tired by midday. My November was twenty days away from home as I embarked on a songwriter tour from Alberta to British Columbia and back through. I saw the mountainside before and after an avalanche, I listened to the prairie wind howl, the sky-like space that rolls between each ocean wave, I sang for my supper, I sang for strangers, some of whom became friends. I visited nightly the notes between my lungs and guitar as if every broken moment was meant to lead me here.  If you asked me of the hardest hill to climb in doing such a thing, I would speak of how I missed the early morning coffees at home and the way thoughts have time to gather and conclude when you're not on the road. As you ride the highway, you think often, but you don't have the hours free to make much sense. You know as the wheels roll, you are on your way to a new town with new faces but you don't yet know what they will think of you and what you will be thinking when you fall to your pillow at night. 

You go on singing into the shining lights in a room you've never stood in before and it gives rise to both an uneasy and beautiful feeling like nothing else I have ever known. When I was young, I only dreamed but it seems lately these dreams have come true and I am required to pinch myself in order to believe this reality of mine. Sometimes, I feel like I am just singing into a jewelry box and one day when the lights go dim, somebody will jump out at me and say "wake up, you're still only dreaming.."

the squirrel highway and autumn.

I stood in Griffith Woods as a storm was blowing in from the mountains. The living trees shook and the dead ones crackled as squirrels hurried across the broken down log, their own highway of sorts. I thought about the imagery of a tree being knocked from its roots and falling down in front of me. I shuttered at the way a tree stands so tall, then quite suddenly, something like the weather roars and rattles, swallowing whole what once stood so tall and it made me begin to wonder about the very strangeness that is my own life.

These woods. This wind. The cutting down of our snapdragon crop. Never knowing if it is too early or too late to pull the flowers from the ground and making dried bouquets. I take what is left of the tomatoes and watch them ripen on the kitchen windowsill. Dreaming, always dreaming of berries cooked in pies and the way sunlight bends through these spaces we have come to know as ours.

my life in photographs

 It has been thirteen days since I last posted here — which quietly breaks my heart. I found an interview I did years ago and it reminded me of why I began blogging in the first place. It was not for the applause or the very small promise that is sharing your inner world and hoping others like it too.  No, it was an escape shoot from the mundane, a way of finding myself as a girl, as an artist, and beyond all, my own way of figuring out what it meant to be a human being. I could convince you with certainty that I am a better woman for having had this blog. It has been the greatest task I have ever followed through - because of what I have learned, because of who I have met, because of how vulnerable these blog entries turn me and I am so glad to have shared these years with you.

sunlight on the staircase

the wild call of summer

Where has the time gone? It seems to me that it was only yesterday when the wild call of summer came knocking on the door, now it is passing us like a sprinting pony and all I can do is try to hold on without quivering or crying at the thought of this warm hug of a season leaving me. I had plans, I had dreams, I had a lot to say in the months of June, July and August but mostly, I simply moved through the days and now I am here, sitting beside the climbing sweet peas, knowing one day they will be no more, but doing what I can to remember how good it is when they are here. I guess this is what happens when you make an album or take a dream from your head and try to make it into something you can hold. You spend so much time sitting on the stoop thinking about it, wondering if it is good, if it is worthy, if it is the best you can do. Art is a strange thing and nothing swallows time quite like over-thinking.