April, 2009 - My Dad spent his summers writing in a little cottage on the shore. We kids would take turns bringing him his lunch. Once a week this responsibility fell on me and it was all I could do to contain the anticipation. I was about 5 years old and it felt like such a long and scary journey through the woods, the lunch basket was heavy and I was so scared something would go wrong; would I get lost walking through the woods, would I spill the soup, or drop the basket? In fact I was sacred of him too….he was a stranger to me, but I wanted him, wanted to have him greet me bearing the gift I had with me, wanted his eyes on me. What I remember of those meetings was that they were mostly short, he’d take the basket from me, say my name, thank me, I’m sure he took some delight in my presence, yet he had work to do so he’d go back to it and I’d leave, longing for more of him. I returned through he woods, no longer afraid but aching for something more, something I couldn’t name but I now know was simply wanting my father’s love.
I wanted my Dad but I got my Mom instead. I felt rejected by my Dad, I went to my mother and found comfort there. I was her youngest son, the 5th of six kids, and she used me to fill her emotional needs. I learned that there was no love in the world for me from my father, only from my mother. Her love came with shame because I really wanted my Dad’s love. I didn’t feel as if I had a choice with my mom: I had to take her love, that’s all there was. My mother doted on me and I hated it. I hated myself for not having my father’s love. I was trapped in a cycle of feeling abandoned and feeling suffocated. On the one hand the pain of wanting my Dad and feeling as if I’d never have him. Of feeling squashed by him, humiliated and rejected by him. On the other hand my feelings of revulsion and anger at my Mom, and the shame of just wanting to be loved at all costs.
The rejection I felt from my father evolved into a pattern of making women the focus of my emotional life. I came to believe that women were the only source of love. I was dependent on them, but I hated my need of them, hated them for just being themselves. What I was really hating was my vulnerable self, the boy who wanted his father. And without him any love from a woman would just fuel my rage and feeling of having been betrayed.
Any rejection by a woman triggered the pain of my Dad’s rejection. I confused the two so that I couldn’t actually feel that it was abut my Dad. I believed it was about the woman. Underlying all this was how I was at fault: I knew that when I was rejected by a woman it had something to do with me, that I had responsibility in her rejecting me. So what happened is that I blamed myself for a pain that was really about the loss of my father, for which I was completely blameless. I didn’t do anything wrong my father just couldn’t love me the way I needed him to.
Gradually I became my father: I withheld love from the women who loved me, in the same way my Dad withheld from me. I became aware of this pattern and chose women I knew I wouldn’t be vulnerable to. This kept me away from my pain and any awareness of what I was missing. It kept me isolated and alone, and when I risked coming out my isolation my pathology made sure I pushed away whoever was close to me.
Dream: I am headed towards the rendezvous point with other noe folks. It’s the end of the world and we’re either going to be tele-ported back home or we’ll all die in an explosion; it doesn’t matter to me what happens, we’re together, we know where we’re going. There’s a guy who thinks we’re crazy, he is freaking out terrified of the end of the world. He has a plan to save his life and I watch him scurry around in panic. I am so sure about what we’re doing, I know its right.
When I am the scared guy trying to save his life, there is no desire, no vulnerability, no excitement. I feel like I don’t have any choices. I can be doing something I want to do, something I really care about, and then I can suddenly feel like I have no choice. When that happens I freeze, my passion disappears. I get angry, and try to hide it. Being this way it can look like I don't care, when in fact I do care, I'm just frozen. I’m the guy scurrying to save his life. As if it was a life worth saving….
Dream: I ask a girl to help me move a table, and she says no, she is going to go have sex for the first time and is too excited to help.
My work is to be this girl and as her I want only to be with the man. Long ago I remember feeling her in me, her need and desire for love. When I am her I know my need and want of the man, I feel my desire for him and know that nothing can come between me and this need for him. She has desire for him, she is vulnerable in her wanting and I am all of this. I feel his love for me, in my girlness, I feel his love for me.
And I am still the boy who carried his father’s lunch who wanted his father’s love. I am the girl/boy filled with excitement, passion and God’s love.
June, 2008
In my dream I am following footsteps up a creek bed. I feel happy to follow them. Then I’m at a wedding and the groom is wearing a cap. A man gives him a top hat to wear and I feel the rightness of this.
The groom is me, accepting God’s love. When I follow his footsteps I come to the wedding and accept his love for me. I am following these footsteps because I am looking for God. When I am not following these footsteps I am lost, projecting my fear and pain into the world, living the myth that I am an abandoned child.
In another dream I am cleaning my brother’s shit off the car and then I am with a little girl who has her own stash of cookies. I can either clean my brother’s shit off the car or I can be the girl who has the cookies. In my life cleaning the shit off the car looks like this: I can only get love if I do something to deserve it. So if I clean the car really well, I’ll get the love. But its not His love and it leaves me empty so I go back to the car to clean a little bit more, sure that I’d have a place in the world if I just did things better. When I’m the girl I know that He wants me to have what is mine, my fear and pain, joy and excitement, laughter and tears.
In my life now I am stepping in his footsteps each time I answer a google ad, each time I feel the pain from my childhood, each time I sit to play music and feel him listening, each time I make a place for myself in His world and choose being with him over the pathology’s version of who I am: the abandoned child, who has no place. Every time I call to Him and ask: “am I yours? Am I special to you? Is there a place for me in your heart?” He answers “yes you are my son, special and precious to me. You need only open to me, need me, ask for my guidance. I don’t judge you when you separate from me, I don’t judge you when you separate from others. I never judge you. Come with me onto this boat and we will go down into the whirpool where nothing survives and we will be below the surface and stay together there. You can stay forever with me. Surrounded by my arms. You never need to leave my embrace.”
It’s a huge deal that I can feel this and write this. So many times in the past the pathology has stepped in and tried to make me doubt what I know. Its not a big deal that it tries to do this. The big deal is knowing He is always there, whether I turn to him or not, and He will always be there.
October, 2007
When I was in 2nd or 3rd grade I used to make my sandwich the night before I had to go to school; I liked taking responsibility for this one small thing and having it ready the night before. One night my parents were discussing a family trip that would take us away for the whole weekend, not returning til late Sunday night. They were concerned about the logistics (six kids, two cars, hotels, etc) but when I realized we’d be getting back after my bedtime I said “BUT I HAVE TO MAKE MY SANDWICH!” For me this shows the fear I felt as child: the fear of never being held and comforted. It shows my attempt to manage that fear and control things around me so I would be ok. I’ve been doing this ever since, projecting my fears onto the world and trying to manage people so I wouldn’t have to feel my fear.
As a child I was sometimes a target for my father's wrath, and I learned to fear him. I learned to fear my mother as well, who used an emotional intimacy with me as a replacement for being connected to her husband. I learned that there wasn't love for me; I learned that I wasn't special to anyone. Eventually I created a self that I thought people would love; I became a musician, a performer. And the better I performed the more love I would get. But I wasn't getting the love, the not-me was. The more love he got the more desolate I felt. The better I did the more love he got and the worse I felt. I convinced myself this was the only way. This began to break last winter and I started to feel some of the pain that was underneath all this maneuvering to get love. The more I felt into this pain and vulnerability, the more my homework would lead me to the archetypes. From this place I began to have a relationship with them and began to experience their healing of me.
Dream:
I walk up a hill with Bill, we are enjoying ourselves. There is a beautiful light in the sky. Near the top we come upon a man who is working on a millstone, freeing it up with a chisel. My friend Ruthie is helping him. I watch in awe at how hard he works, how intently. It’s a huge grindstone and it begins to move freely, I know that he is working on me.
Like a grindstone he is bearing down on me. What is left standing is the me that is true. When I do my homework he points to the dust on the floor and says, “that is not you, it never was and never will be.” The not-me is being ground away and the pain is excruciating. In this pain I know I am loved and I feel his love blossoming inside of me. It’s terrifying and exciting.
People have seen how I have stepped away from the vulnerability of feeling that elemental and original fear and instead project my fear onto the world, and then react to those projections. My pathology would say “Hey I‘m in my fear so that’s all I have to do.” But if I’m not in my vulnerability then nothing is happening and I’m not actually feeling the fear I need to feel. My edge right now is to recognize the difference between these two fears and speak about them.
September, 2007
Earlier this summer my homework was to be in my discomfort in the strange room and to be with the man who comes in. I did this homework and felt his presence very strongly. He starts dancing with me, playfully putting on different outfits and making me laugh. After a few days, I began listening to the pathology: it wasn’t real, he won’t come back again. Then a week later I have a dream where we are dancing together; that becomes my homework. I struggle with this homework, resisting it.
I am afraid to dance with him, but I do it.
In my dream the following week a woman appears. In place of a face, she has only the color blue. I know she loves me and my homework is to feel this love. The pace of my work is picking up and I am feeling the connection and love more often. Then I start listening to the pathology again. I dream I’m flying a plane all by myself, in bad weather. I’m scared. There’s a shift and I’m with two old men sitting on a bench in a courtyard. They are so peaceful and loving. I see that this is my choice: I can be with them men or be in the plane. When I choose to be in the plane, I can play the shame game and listen to the pathology telling me how bad I am for choosing to be in the airplane. Or I can just feel the pain that happens when I loose my connection to the men.
They say that I’m always welcome there and that I can come and leave the courtyard to my hearts content. It’s my complaining and shaming that takes me away from them, but they are always there. Loosing the connection is devastating: to know the love and then have it go away is more than I can bear. For weeks I turn away from this pain and try to manage it, not feel it. My progress slows as I struggle with my homework of being with the old men.
Then I dream I am a squid and I'm brought to a woman who is an expert in squids; it takes many people to organize this and I just sit there being carried to where she is. She knows everything about squids especially our sexuality. Then we are alone together and she tenderly touches me and brings me to orgasm after orgasm. I completely accept her love, I feel nothing but her attention and her love for me. This dream says to me: you are special and precious and everyone involved in this dream is there for you and loves you. It’s the love I’ve wanted all my life; that I’ve always thought I had to manipulate and manage things to get. It's what I learned to do and its defined who I am. Now I know differently: I’m either in the love, in the pain, or in the shame/blame/complain.
From the place of love and the place of pain I can be a partner and teacher in Noe. From the place of shame/blame/complain I can only shame, blame and complain. My work is to recognize these places in myself and speak about them openly and honestly.
December, 2005
As a musician I express myself mostly through music. Here’s a look at my inner work using words:
Certain kinds of music have the power to bring out my tears and help me connect to my little boy. When I was a teenager that openness was scary to me. If I listened to music that opened me up, I would cry, and it didn’t take very much: Chubby Checker singing ‘Never Never on a Sunday’or a Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. I felt as if I couldn’t afford to hear music that would speak to my hurt self because when the music stopped I’d be left all alone. Instead I used to listen to bebop because it left me emotionally neutral. I could listen and enjoy it without the danger of my hurt spilling out.
My experience growing up was of being cared for one minute and abandoned the next. After a while it never seemed safe to let down, and I withdrew into music and myself. I believed that it wasn’t safe to let down with a person. I could listen to music over and over again, and remain in what I thought was a safe place.
Today when I listen to music I don’t feel abandoned anymore but that doesn’t mean I feel safe. I feel my fear and a sense that what is happening in my life is what needs to happen; it’s not my will that drives it. This is where my experience of god and music become intertwined: I see a path and I follow it to where I am in the company of my little boy. Music can help me stay on the path, keeping me open. Listening to music can help me feel enveloped and protected and writing music can lead me from the place of feeling abandoned to the place of now: not safe but not hidden either, not abandoned, but connected. When I write I feel seen and heard before I even get up from my desk. I am with the boy when this happens.
This past year I’ve been working on a new CD called Freetown, which is the capitol of Sierra Leone, in West Africa, where my family lived for a year when I was eight. For me it was a year of newness and exploration (swimming in the ocean at Christmas), trials and fears (fire ants, snakes, sharks). The first dream I ever remembered came from that year:
There is a barracuda in our freezer. It gets out and starts walking towards me on its tail. I am terrified.
I don’t remember what was going on for me that year, what things produced the fears I experienced then. Over the years Sierra Leone has changed, from a peaceful country to one that has seen incredible violence and civil war. My sense of my life at eight years is similar: I used to think of it as tranquil and innocent and now I wonder about the barracuda climbing out of the freezer.
Some of the music on Freetown is an expression of my grief. Grief over the death of my Mom who died eight years ago; grief over my little boy who has had to endure so many years without my care. Some of the pieces are more playful, and are expressions of my gratitude and acceptance of grace in my life.
January, 2004
Six and a half years ago I had a dream that shook me out of a different kind of sleep, one I had been in for many years. In this dream I was being driven by a cab driver who was physically deformed, instead of a hand he had only a stump. He was barely able to drive, seemingly oblivious to the conventions of car travel, and when I shouted at him to be careful and pay attention to the road, he would yell back at me, and poke me with his stump. During the course of our journey he drove me by some of the most beautiful scenery I had ever seen: a sunset of intense colors over a bayou filled with wild birds. He became very relaxed and peaceful, but would still occasionally poke me with his stump. I said, "If you do that again I'm getting out" and opened the door to reinforce my point. He was very upset, and said, "You can't do that!" I said, "Look, we don't have a relationship; you're the cab driver and I'm your rider and that's it."
At that point in my life, my relationship to god and the work was essentially non-existent. I constantly felt something was missing, without knowing what exactly it was. I would fall in love and then fall out of love. Each time I left someone my heart would break, knowing it was not them but me that needed to change. Although I knew my leaving had to do with my fears, I was unable to experience them, only the loneliness that inevitably followed. Today my connection to god and the work is more apparent; my dreams have connection and succor in them, and I now feel some of the fear and love that has been hidden so long.
In my music, as in my life, I am discovering, exploring, and shaking up the patterns of loss, disconnection and loneliness. I read other people's life stories with a different perspective. When Amede Ardoin, one of Louisiana's first Creole musicians to record, sang these words:
The Sun is setting, the cow hasn't been milked, it's time for me to go. Oh how will I make it? Where will I go? Bonsoir Moreau
His voice sounds exactly like another early black musical pioneer, the far better known Robert Johnson. There is the same longing and despair: their voices betray intense grief and pain. The lives of these two poor black musicians traveling in the American south during the 1930's was filled with a level of misery, hardship and fear that I will never know, but I cannot listen to them without being moved, and that is their gift to me.
Much of the music I am drawn to comes from this same place of raw feeling. Not everyone with a miserable and desolate life makes music that will move me, and there is music made by those who are comfortable and secure that has the same ability to move me as Amede Ardoin. What is the common thread in these types of music? Is it similar to the connection I feel now with the divine, and is it possible to create from this place music that is not only filled with despair but also hope?
I recently completed a CD entitled "Hummingbird" with Seattle violinist Ruthie Dornfeld. My inspiration for this project came from reading French author Jean Giono's novel Regain, which is the story of a man who lives alone in a remote village, in the southeast of France. The only other occupants of the village are an eighty year old woman and the village blacksmith. When the blacksmith leaves the village to live with his children, and the old woman dies, our hero is left to face life in the village alone. In my imagination I see the man dreaming of the village as he once knew it, filled with the sounds and memories of his childhood: people laughing and singing in the town square, musicians playing as dancers waltzed in circles around them. I visualize him waking to find it is only the wind in the treetops and what he took to be an accordion, only an owl, hooting in the distance. By the end of the novel the man marries a woman who gives birth to his child, thus the prospects for the village's future appear to be improved.
I hope to capture the sense of loss and regain that Giono does in his novel by presenting music that is both foreign and yet familiar: music that we have lost yet can still regain. It is a combination of with music that is centuries old and newly composed music of my own, drawn from Celtic music, medieval music, French music and Contemporary Improvisation.