If you have time, listen to what this wonderful lady has to say about hope in our time.

I spoke in an earlier post about singing through different parts of my body. I said that I discovered that the quality of the sound and the emotional content change as I explore different areas.

Since I started being more aware of my own inner processes in the past couple of years, I have learned about chakras and a little about what the meanings are in the different regions along the spine in the front and the back. The concept really isn’t that far out. It’s not unusual to hear people talk about a “gut feeling” or a “guttural sound” or “speaking from the heart”.

I think that to a large degree, people have come to judge the lower chakras, those that are more connected to the earth, as lowly and less deserving of attention. These areas are connected with basic survival instincts, security, money, home, appetites for food and sex.

These needs and instincts have been used as weaknesses; as tendencies to manipulate. We manage these needs of our own and each other with a focus other than love. We exploit ourselves and each other just as we exploit the earth itself. I want  to focus love and attention on these lower chakras especially. Maybe it is OK to be so very human. Maybe we need to accept each other’s humanness. Maybe it is OK to love and accept the very materiality of the earth. Maybe it is OK to be here, really here. Maybe here can actually be heaven.

My music is responding by coming from a gut level. It is often gravelly and very connected to my body. I can’t help but move as I play and sing. And I don’t want to intellectualize it. It is, I believe, what often is considered primitive; a wisdom that I believe is important now to offset a world which is so out of balance. The outward world seems to be based so very much on control, manipulation and exploitation. And perhaps also the inner world which has its counterpart in the control that we feel we need to exert over our bodies, seeing our bodies, and perhaps our very souls as simply objects to manage.

We need to remember that those “objects”, those bodies and souls are our very being. We really are alive. We really do exist. It is easy to lose track of our present reality when so much of our life is connected to computers, TV’s and cell phones. Maybe I can’t speak for anyone other than myself. I must open my eyes. I must do everything I can to save this thing while there is still time.

I am still so preoccupied, I spend most of my time in my brain. But I am finding my music to be an avenue which brings me back to a fuller perspective which includes my heart, my emotions and my great desire to survive.

I have a hard time putting all of this into words. I am used to using words in a narrow way. The best poetry can convey amazing depth of feeling and more. Perhaps this blog can be my practice in bringing words to that which I want to convey. What I want to convey feels so big and undefined to me, that I find it difficult to begin. My focus is general. It is both upward and downward. It reaches up to God, (and I am not even sure what I mean by that), and downward through my own body and self with all of my foibles and roots itself into the earth. I want to draw nourishment from both directions just like a plant. I feel like I have been focusing so hard lately on the sun that I have forgotten that I also need water and nutrients. The earth feels so arid right now. We need to take care of the earth.

I’ve been talking mostly about the inner world of my emotions lately on this blog. Every day for quite a while I’ve been playing my music also for at least two or three hours a day. Sometimes I feel like I am being irresponsible in this respect. I should be concentrating on how I am going to pay the mortgage next month.

In any case, as I have been feeling a shift inside of myself as I go from emergency crisis mode back into a more stable outlook, (yet an outlook which has certainly been colored by my experiences), my music has been deepening and becoming more confident in its presentation. Strange how I can feel like I am falling apart in my emotional life and yet be anchoring myself in my music.

I really enjoyed playing last week at the Wildflower, being backed up by one of the most spontaneous, fun loving young guitarists that I know there. I hope to do more of this in the future.

I also really want to make some of my music available on the web site as soon as I can. There are a few technical issues I have to approach first. When it happens you will know!

My dear friend often uses humor with me when I am depressed. I was talking to him yesterday about the bracelet that I was given to help me become aware when I am complaining to myself. As I said in an earlier comment, I was told that perhaps if I switch the bracelet from one wrist to another every time I complain to myself, I will become more aware of how much I complain.

On the one hand, I did find it somewhat useful to become aware of this part of my thought process. I guess it’s always a good thing to be aware. On the other hand, I have a tendency to be very hard on myself as it is.

My friend was joking with me: “Oh, I was just stabbed in the back! Oh oh, I’m complaining! I’d better switch the bracelet! Oh, I was deficient in my awareness and I got in front of that bullet! Well, better switch the bracelet again! My goodness! I am such a complainer!” He had me in stitches. It felt so good.

I would like to quickly change perspective. It is easy to get caught in anger and judgment. It is easy for me to judge those who I perceive to be judging. It is more helpful for me to turn it around again to a sense of gratefulness.

I really am blessed. I have enough to eat, I am warm, I have two wonderful kids, I live in a community where I have friends who I love and who love me. I have a sense of purpose now which is still developing.

I do, occasionally, fall and need to be helped up again. I am human. I ask for help. Maybe admitting this vulnerability and asking for help is a gift: the gift of the opportunity for someone else to give and be helpful.

We really need each other. I think that we are just pretending when we say to ourselves that we are independent.

I have heard that it is possible to accept this interconnectedness, vulnerability and insecurity so deeply that a basic sense of love and wholeness emerges.

I quote here a series of sentences that a friend offered to me which helps me when I repeat it like a mantra:

Could I can let go of wanting to figure things out?
Could I let go of wanting to know what to do?
Could I let go of wanting to know the answers?
Could I let go of wanting to know  anything (for this moment) right now?
Could I let go of wanting to think?
And again and again.

There is something that I need to remember. I need to remember that when a person responds with judgment and not compassion, that says something about that person who is judging. I am quick to believe other people’s assessment of my situation before I allow myself the time that I need to make my own assessment. True, I am looking for help. Sometimes I am really grasping.

Sometimes I feel like I am in a free fall. I have heard that if you can relax and allow that free fall that fall can turn into flight. Please Lord help me to let go.

I have always thought of myself as being a giving and compassionate person. I have seen myself as a person who gives sometimes to her own detriment. I have been giving a voice to that part of myself that has been put aside for so very long. It has generally felt so wonderful that I have felt confident in simply allowing myself to go where I will, believing that it must all be for the good.

But I have continued to be self centered in this pursuit of expression. Yes, I am generally a giving compassionate person, but I am discovering that there are some boundaries between us which are necessary.

Fusing the anger that I am becoming aware of within myself with good intention is very conscious work. My life generally must now become more conscious and less random so that I will not further the anger and fear that has been placed on me over the years. It is necessary for me to be aware of my own limitations and my own potential to do harm.

This morning when I was playing and singing I found that this is already expressing itself in my music. Some of my music has been simply wailing like a wild animal. OK. That pain is real. But now what do you do with it? There is a lot of pain in the world. How do we transform that into positive action and feeling? This is my challenge. Maybe this is what beauty is about for me. I have not wanted to define what beauty is. I have not wanted anything placed upon me which would limit me. But I do have a responsibility for what I create.

Thank you all for supporting me through this difficult time.

I was noticing this morning as I was playing the guitar that when I hold my guitar in a relaxed manner, when I hold it and don’t grip it, when I pluck or strum the strings with only as much force as is necessary to bring the sound out, that sound which emerges is so much fuller and clearer than when I try to force it.

Just like the rest of my life.

Yes indeedy, yes sir ree sir! Come and see me come and read me everyone because right here today you will be transformed by being in my digital presence! Just come to www.suzemusic.net and you too can become enlightened!

Shoot. Hmmm . . . I wonder. You see folks, I am feeling a little depressed in the past couple of days. And I read my posts and I can’t help but think that I take myself a little bit too seriously some days.

True, I love music. True, I focus on spirit, (meaning, I guess, that I try to and sometimes, I believe, succeed in seeing a picture a little bit bigger than myself). But it is also true that I hope to make music and writing a way to make money. Or maybe more accurately, a livelihood. I am not sure yet how to get around the money part. But how can I put all of those things together? How do I avoid “selling out” in one way or another?

Back and forth and back and forth between depression where I don’t allow my own humanity and puffing myself up within my own mind out of a sense of insecurity; I really do want the love and approval of my fellow human beings, but I guess I need to find my own approval first.

This is a discussion that I would like to have with a bunch of you who are out there. I am feeling my way through my own process of creating, what, well, everything that I have an influence on in my life.

Maybe every moment is a piece of art. Every moment intersects form and substance; movement; being. But it usually feels like movement of substance through form to me. Sometimes it feels like form coming down on substance like an encasing prison. Other times if feels like substance freeing up and going everywhere before it settles back down again wherever it will.

I am just playing with this now. Maybe it is best that I just continue to play with it as gleefully as I can without using my serious eyes to place all of the pieces where they “should” be.

What do you all think? Or feel? Or do?