I’ve been doing a lot of internal work recently – some brought about by external things beyond my control, like allergies and a pinched nerve in my SI joint.
But I’m grateful for the challenges and the suffering, because it has helped bring to the surface of my awareness, things that have needed observing, considering, releasing, embracing, accepting, allowing . . . You know how it is. It’s the most powerful work of our lives to shed what keeps us dense, and embrace what lifts us up.
My sisterhood of healing maestras has surrounded me and supported me through this, in truly magical ways. One sister in particular, Sandy Kemp, has been there for me. I’ve been working with her every week. She’s a champion. In our session Friday, some deep understanding about things in my life came to clarity, and she encouraged me to tell the story. So here goes.
I was born for Music.
I was born remembering music. My mother says when I was just a few months old, she crowbarred the family to church one morning, possibly Easter (if she wanted the family to go to church, she had to bully, bargain, and blackmail us to get it done, so it only happened a couple times a year, because that’s all the energy she had for that battle), and little infant me was singing hymns – in tune – with the congregation and the choir. I was born in December, and Easter is in late-March, early-April, so three or four months old.
At three, my parents let me stay up and watch the Smothers Brothers one night. I saw Tommy Smothers walk out on stage with that big blonde Guild of his, and lightning may have struck me. I remember so clearly thinking, That’s going to be my life, I’m going to do that for the rest of my life. And I remember pointing at the guitar and saying, “What’s that?” and “Can I have one?” A few months later, after much nagging and begging, my parents got me . . . a ukulele. I don’t think I have been so disappointed, or so offended, since. It did not have six strings. They were not steel strings, though how I knew that I don’t know, but it was a huge deal to me. I wanted a goddam steel string guitar, and nothing else would satisfy me.
But I was little, and guitars were big, and at that time, back in 1967-68, small-bodied guitars were hard to come by. So they got me a classical guitar, and that had to be okay for a while. And it was, even though I grumbled about it a lot. My brother (who is eleven years older than me) bought a steel string shortly after that, and when he was in school I’d steal it out of his room and play it, laying it flat on the couch and kneeling in front of it because I couldn’t hold it. He got tired of teaching me chords, so taught me to read chord chart diagrams, and that opened up a whole new world.
And there were records, wonderful, glorious records, which I listened to obsessively, even as a tiny little child. I learned to listen, lift the needle, figure out what they were doing, and drop the needle back down to go on to the next thing. I was figuring out chords to songs by the time I was six or seven. At the time our wonderful public radio station, KUNI, had two folk music shows every day, from 2:00 to 4:00 in the afternoon and from 7:00 to 9:00 every evening. I parked myself in front of the speakers and soaked it up, and bought so many more records. For years, this was my daily ritual.
It was a musical family, from two musical families. My mom was a drummer, played in the drum line in high school (even though she had a withered leg from polio as a child), sang in every choir she could get in, along with her sisters, and sang around the house, in the garden, whenever and wherever she was. All the girls did. My dad’s dad was a master musician, played anything he could get his hands on, strings or not. Accordion and fiddle and guitar and whatever he could find. None of his eight children played music at all except for my dad, who played a little guitar, but not seriously. That came later.
In 1969, I started kindergarten, and met the teacher/mentor who would be with me the rest of my life, Marcia Brandt. She was Miss Brix then; we bonded and I adored her. But she only taught at my school for the first year I was there, and I was a little heartbroken about that. Luckily, when I started writing songs at seven years old, my parents decided I needed lessons, because this was clearly going to be A Thing, and we discovered that Miss Brix, now Mrs. Brandt, lived two blocks from us, and was teaching piano and guitar out of her house. So Marcia came back into my life.
She moved away again, fortunately after teaching me as much as she could, and I found other teachers, mostly at bluegrass festivals and jam sessions, where I was a musical sponge. Yes, that happened. My parents realized that music was probably going to be the very center of my life, and what did they do? They learned to play better so they could give me as much music as I could eat. My mom learned to play the doghouse bass, and her being barely five feet tall, that was quite a feat. Her years as a drummer served us well. She held down the bass end and locked in the tempo, even though I don’t know that she was consciously doing it. But she was always the first to tell me when I was rushing something, so it’s very likely that it was just instinctive for her. My dad got better at the guitar than he ever imagined he would, and we all played together as a family band starting when I was about eight years old. We played for nursing homes and even at local festivals and outdoor events, and soon started going to monthly bluegrass jams out at our local community college, where we were invited to some bluegrass festivals . . . and so it went. Music festivals were pretty much our life every weekend from the time I was nine until I was about sixteen, when I hit the bluegrass wall hard and couldn’t bear another note. To this day I have an extremely low tolerance for bluegrass. I can take maybe an hour of it before I start to twitch uncontrollably and have to leave.
Now, here’s a curious thing. When I said I had endured all the bluegrass I was willing to endure, my parents didn’t argue, protest, whine or complain at all. Dad gave me his super nice 1972 Gallagher G-50, Mom sold her bass, and they both promptly forgot everything they knew about playing. My dad started to teach himself classical guitar several years later, and literally had to start form scratch. Mom developed a serious jazz addiction and listened to our local all-jazz station KCCK from the time she got up until she went to bed, but stand up a bass next to her and she would not know which end to blow into.
After bluegrass, I got serious about songwriting, and wrote a ton of really bad songs, and a handful of decent ones, and eventually, a few good ones. I was introduced to Celtic music, and discovered DADGAD, and sort of never looked back. I had the skills and the chops to start the next leg of the journey on my own, and I went. I got into my 1968 Chevy Impala with my guitars, a PA system, and a suitcase, and I took off. I graduated high school a year early because my feet itched so badly for the open road. And I did that, for a few years. When I wasn’t gigging, I was sitting on the floor with a guitar in my hands for six to eight hours a day, learning, creating, honing, perfecting. I think I put in my second 10,000 hours between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four.
But this is also when I got a serious itch to figure out how to heal people with music and sound. I started writing short stories about it, journaling about it. I began to visit the Masonic Library and check out all the books I could find on Druidism and Bardism, looking for the answers to questions I didn’t even know how to ask. I hungered to be a healer, to be able to use my voice and my understanding of how music fits together to ease pain and distress of all kinds. It felt like something huge, and sometimes scary. I didn’t know how to approach it, and the answers were hidden from me, probably because I had more learning to do before I would be ready for what was, inevitably and eventually, coming.
Then I got married, started doing more prestigious gigs, made some CDs, did a lot more traveling, and worked my ass off to be the best guitar player it was possible for me to be. I did alright. Those years are a bit of a blur and I don’t remember most of them. Lots of driving, lots and lots of driving. My son was practically raised in a car seat, poor wee one. And after a whole lot of fighting and a whole lot of miles and a whole lot of years, I left my marriage because I was asked to choose between music and him, again. You don’t ask me to make that choice.
My immersion in the healing arts came after my divorce. This life was not something my ex could have supported. But I dove in with everything I had, desperately searching for a way to combine music with healing, because I knew that was what I wanted and needed to do. I tore through Reiki and Light Language, doing my best to put them together with frequency, melody, harmony and rhythm, but they never really fit and I would get frustrated. When I found out there was a thing called Sound Healing, well, imagine my delight.
Eventually, I found the Family Folk Machine, which is home, too, and I’ve already written about that.
So that’s the history. Next, the Mystery.
But this is getting really long, and I don’t want this to become a TL;DR, so I will save the mystery for next week. If you have made it to this point, thank you. I appreciate your patience and your attention, always, and I’m about to get vulnerable and share some deep stuff, so double thank you for taking the time to listen/read. Ye Saga Continues next Tuesday . . .
