November 13, 2006

Howdy my Thanksgiving Friends,

Could there possibly be anything less representative of the delightful Thanksgiving Season than a man sobbing uncontrollably while crawling around in the mud and the muck? Slipping and sliding, sputtering, cursing, flailing about in the dark, dank underside of a recently flooded house, looking for the nice shoes he'd had on just moments before? I don't mean to sound unthankful, it's just that those shoes meant a lot to me. I'd bought them a year ago for my first date with the sweet woman who is now the love of my life and well, they have a lot of sentimental meaning to me. Plus, they housed my feet on this particular cold, wet, rainy day. Barefootedness was not an option I'd considered when I stuck my head out my door that morning to check the weather and decide on my attire. "Hmm. Let's see. Rainy. Cold. I guess I won't be needing no dang shoes." Of course, I didn't say no such thang - mostly 'cause my mouth was full of granola and I wouldn't have been able to understand me. I have too much respect for myself to go around mumbling incoherently with a mouthful of hearty grains. (contrary to popular opinion) 

After carefully choosing my work outfit, I'd driven out to Snoqualmie to help my friends Rick and Ruth clean out the soppy mess under their house after the swollen river had flooded their town. Luckily, their house is raised five feet off the ground, so water never actually got into the house, but it left a soppy, oozing mess underneath it. When I arrived, Rick came outside to greet me and I started hauling work equipment out of the back of my truck; six packs, lawn chairs, rubber boots. "How is it under the house? Will I need these boots?" I was picturing quicksand conditions but he shook his head and said, "No, surprisingly, it's not that muddy under there." I should have asked him then if he'd had beer with his waffles, but instead, I foolishly took him for his word. 

For the first couple of hours, I worked mostly outside the house, Rick threw junk out an opening while I hauled wheelbarrow loads of it; soggy fiberglass insulation, water-logged boards, bricks and cement chunks, and with huge, groaning effort, heaved it up over the fence into the back of his pick up. When the truck was hunkered down almost to the ground with the heavy load, he floored the gas pedal and the ol' clunker groaned and shuddered a couple of blocks into town where the City had set up gigantic dumpsters and workers were helping everybody unload their flood damaged rubbish.

We got back Rick's and I crawled underneath the house. This is when I found out that my rubber boots would have been a jolly idea after all. I should have looked deeply into Rick's eyes (something people rarely dare to do) and discerned that the boy was a little water-shocked from watching the river rise almost to the porch where he and his wife and kids were standing in shock for two days. It would shake up any daddy, I guess. He'd just told me about the unexpected nightmare of having to find a place for your 80-pound dog to poop when you live suddenly in the middle of a lake, so the fact that he'd advised me to put my boots back into the truck and then enter the dank bowels under his house with my special slip-ons on is forgivable - I guess. If you're the forgiving type. We had to walk around bent over under there, banging our heads on pipes and floor joists. The last time I'd been under there was a few years back when Rick and I were wiring speakers so he could have constant musical accompaniment even when he was showering. I'll never forget Rick shrieking like a little girl at the hundreds of spider webs draped about and sticking to our faces. I remembered that he'd always been unusually frightened of spiders, but I was taken aback at his shrill, girlish reactions. Being a Texan, and more manly in nearly every way, I simply licked them webs off my lips and nose and swallowed them.

It's very different under there now. No dust, no spider webs. The flood changed everything. But mostly, it took my shoes. I truly believe with all my heart, that my shoes will always be down there. Oh, maybe someday there will be an archeological team looking for signs that people actually lived in the region. They'll be searching for artifacts that may lead them to understand our mythic culture. What did we believe in? Who did we worship? What brands did we wear? In which case, if they dig up my shoe fossils, they will see that we were adherents of the Sketcher faith. We wore things Sketcher. Is that something a man my age ought to be proud of? Well, it could be worse. I could have had on Dockers, but that would be just giving up. 

Really, the fact that I came out from under the house sobbing and blubbering about my shoes is not the worst tragedy. My most devastating calamity was not discovered until after Rick's daughter, the lovely Livy Lou, finished training the powerful stream of gushing water from the hose on her Uncle Michael in order to wash away the clumps of slimy, nasty, odorous mud off my feet. Feet that, caked with muck as they were, appeared to be about the size of ottomans. Dang, that water was cold! Plus, Rick had just handed me a cold beer, which was probably premature timing, shivering in the freezing rain as I was with his gleeful little girl pressure-washing me down like one would a dump truck. It took probably five minutes to get to the point where you could tell that there were feet inside those mounds of mud. As cold as I was, it was a hopeful sight to view my skin again, as it had seemed unlikely that I ever would. 

While Livy was spraying me down as if she was part of a HazMat crew, Rick had run inside to put on some bluegrass for our cleanup session. I was flinching from the stinging water and looking up toward the window and hollering a conversation back and forth with Rick  about whether we liked the banjo player on the song he was featuring at high volume on the back porch speakers. See, Rick cannot go through even a disaster without accompanying music. Music must accompany all events in life for Rick. I've seen him, on occasion, stop in the middle of putting a band aid on one of his children to peruse his vast CD collection and choose the perfect soundtrack. (The First Cut is the Deepest - Sheryl Crow) 

Livy was still wielding that hose and the sideways geyser was icy and stinging. I was dancing around in the gravel, hollering for her to please, in the name of God, stop it!, when I caught my reflection in a car window and understood why all the little children were laughing and giggling so merrily. Apparently, the mud had taken not only my shoes and socks, but my britches as well. Can you even imagine being so muddy that you don't realize you're nekkid from the waist down? That slimy mud had sucked off my pants and my underwear, both! And the freezing water! Could there ever be a more embarrassing time to be nekkid? Them dang kids were on the ground in convulsions. Of course, I did the only thing a man with very little remaining pride could do: I lowered my Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle and walked behind it all the way into the house, where I stole Rick's favorite pair of suit slacks and donned them without a stitch of underwear on. (he looked at me sadly and said to burn them when I was through) I had to wear those nice slacks with my muddy jacket on my drive home, in case, you know, I got pulled over by an officer or something. Hey, I'm no prude. I'm certainly not opposed to the occasional pantless casual drive around town, but I always like to have a pair ready to pull on in case of an emergency. 

Making a New Record (yes, you can still call it a record)

I'm in the beginning stages of bringing together musicians for my upcoming recording project. I haven't put out a full-band album since 1998's Trace the Sky, and I'm really looking forward to it. It's an exciting time, working on my songs and trying to make them stronger and better; creating arrangements and imagining how they might sound with the contributions of other musicians. It's always a little scary too, the process of taking songs which I love just as they are, sung with only my guitar. In some ways, it's nearly impossible that they turn out as good as my imagination perceives them when I sing them. Even as solo-acoustic versions, they feel so full to me when I stand onstage and sing them in concert. It's as if I feel the Music of Nature moving through me. I hear the harmonics of the strings of my guitar and it feels to me that I'm accompanied by rain and wind and rivers and birds. 

That probably sounds a bit grandiose, but it's how I think of my music. For many years folks have often told me that they never get tired of my songs. I've even had people ask me why that is, as if it's a formula I use that causes them to stay interested and to enjoy my songs over and over again. If there is a formula it is this: I follow the melodies I am given. I pick up my guitar and just start strumming or finger picking and sometimes melodies come to me. They are nearly always melodies that I love and this is how a new song begins. Often, I will have the entire song in musical form, melody and chord progressions completed, before there even is a single lyric. When I do this, it feels to me as if my music is a natural element like wind or rain; something from Nature that I have not altered in any way. The hard work, the seemingly impossible task sometimes, is finding lyrics that fit the melody, that stay true to the loops and swirls of notes, the high and low movements of the melody which first coursed through me. I stay with it, sometimes for years. I will keep trying to find words that say what I feel and that are in alignment with what I believe, yet that rhyme and meet the meter of the song I'm writing. 

Sometimes, when I'm singing onstage with my eyes closed, what I'm really doing is marveling at the song. I'm actually up there thinking, "Damn! This is an amazing song!" It's true. I'm not thinking so much that it's something that I did, just that I'm enthralled with this wondrous thing I'm singing, this spring shower, this summer wind, this night of stars that has come into song form and allowed me to sing it. Can you imagine how fortunate I feel to get to do this? To open up a new song as a child might open a present on Christmas morning? I've been doing this for decades now and it never gets old.

Long before you hear any of my songs, I've sung them hundreds of times in the writing of them. They work their magic on me, the healing ways that melodies and phrases can change your very makeup, your mood and vision, these things have been happening to me since the moment I heard the melody and began to sing it. Still, I'm not tired of a song by the time I sing it for you. It becomes new to me in the moment that I'm singing it. To this day - 23 years after I stood in the forest in the Cascade Mountains and wrote it - Run Like the River Runs is a song that I still love to sing. When I sing it, it feels to me like it was written this very day, this moment.

~Thanksgiving ~

I have long thought of that particular song as my own song of thanksgiving. "If I run like the river runs, if I fall like water falls, oh, if I breathe like the wind will I ever learn it all?" It's such a song of gratitude because that is what I felt when I wrote it: I had just moved to the Northwest and was filled with gratitude for the new world I was living in, the beauty of having green forests surround me; mountains and rivers and lakes and seas all around. I was in the very early stages of realizing my dream of being a songwriter and performer for my living. I have a chapter in my "mythical" book (which I'm still actually writing) about the day I wrote that song and the Thanksgiving Day a few months later, when I sang it for a houseful of new friends for the very first time. I sometimes read that chapter in concert and will probably do so when I play Denver next weekend. It's such a reminder to me that being thankful is my favorite way of being. When I'm feeling gratitude, every other thing just falls into place. You can't feel truly grateful without also feeling compassion and kindness, without feeling love and joy somewhere in your heart.

I know our world seems a disastrous mess these days. Sometimes it even feels wrong to seek personal peace and happiness in the midst of so much suffering. But that is not true. One sure way to help others in the world is to foster your own peace and share it where you can. I feel like those who can find joy and peace need to do it for the benefit of those who are lost in suffering. Your peaceful heart - and what you do with it - may just be the very miracle that calls me out of my own pain. 

Just over a year ago I met someone who calls me out of my own pain. I met my true love. It sounds almost silly, that way of talking, but I actually found the woman my soul was yearning for for all of my lifetime. Her name is Patricia and she is the greatest proof thus far in my life that there is a reason to have faith; that there was a particularly wonderful reason to stay hopeful and to seek always to be kind and loving and peaceful in my life. We met in a mutual effort to help the people hurt by Hurricane Katrina and were in return given the greatest gifts either of us have ever received: each other. Just like all that is evolving in the world, we two are a part of a vast evolution of hopes and dreams and joys and disappointments and sorrows. Together we have been able to stay with our beautiful process; sometimes painful, often joyful, and embrace together all that comes up in us. We have reveled in the joy and love and breathed through the frightening shadows that inevitably will also emerge whenever two people allow their hearts to open in trust and love. I once read in a book by Louse Hay that, "Love will bring up anything unlike itself." I agree and see it this way: when we find someone we can really love and trust, there is at last the safe place where we can allow not just our love to arise, but our pain, too. To me, this is exactly what is also going on in the world. When my sweetheart and I have contractions, we often will remind each other; "This is the same dynamic that causes nations to go to war. This fear between us. If we can love our way through this, loving all parts of ourselves and our process, maybe we will help heal divisions in the world, too." It gives us a stronger sense of purpose and union, remembering that every time we breathe through fear and allow it to come to light, it is always, always replaced with love and gratitude.

It's been a very grateful year for me. Certainly this great love I am sharing is overwhelmingly enough reason for me to feel thankful this year. But I can promise you that even in lonely, difficult years, I have never let a single Thanksgiving come and go without feeling grateful to be alive. As joyful or as painful as your life may be right now, please know that I and many, many others have compassion for you, for what you're going through and for what you experience in this life. We are all in this together and if one grieves, all of humanity grieves. Also, if one holds peace in his heart, all have access to it. Please sit with this thought for a moment and see if you can feel that human beings you don't even know might possibly have compassion for you. Imagine that the trees and birds and clouds and winds have compassion for you and wish you love and healing. Just be willing to hold the thought and breathe in the possibility. If your mind instantly doubts this, avoid the urge in this instant to decide if this is true or not, just allow the possibility. Dare to allow it room to come alive in you.

As this Thanksgiving Season approaches - and even after it passes - find someone to offer your compassion to. It may be an animal or a tree. If all you can muster is a big ol' hug for a tree, the world will be a better place for your gesture. If you are in such pain that you don't think you can do even this, imagine hugging yourself, imagine having compassion for yourself. Isn't that a novel idea? That we would have compassion for our own selves and our own suffering? It's a beautiful thing to do and completely allowed, my friend. You deserve your own compassion.

What would be wonderful this Thanksgiving is if we could find a way to let others know that we're grateful for them, for the fact that they live and breathe. Once you get used to being grateful as a general way of being, it becomes a very natural thing to let others know how much you appreciate who they are or what they do. I love to praise people, to let them know that I notice something about their experience that is extraordinary or very noble. Want to surprise your mailman? Tell him that he does an awesome job of stepping over most of your daisies when he trespasses clumsily across your nice yard to drop mail in your box. Tell a neighbor how much you love the way he turns off his leaf blower just seconds before you were about to go out of your freakin' mind. See what I mean? There's a good side to everything. I plan to go about town looking for just such compliments to bestow all during the week of Thanksgiving. Look out, I may run right into you and then we'll turn into one o' them dang Mutual Admiration Societies. Which ain't a bad idea, if you ask me.

Thank you so much for checking in on me now and then, and for listening to my music and sharing it with friends. You've made it possible for me to continue writing and singing for my living and I've been a very lucky man to have your support and goodwill. I'll say goodbye with the lyrics to my song, Run Like the River Runs - my very own Song of Thanksgiving. I hope you enjoy it. Happy Thanksgiving to you, my friends.

In Friendship,
   ~Michael

Run Like the River Runs ©1985 Michael Tomlinson Tell me what you will, my blue-winged friend Did you hear me from where you drifted on the wind? This autumn wind on a summer day Sure can turn a blue sky gray Oh, it's a lonely day and cold There are secrets you've not told And there are part of me that I have never known And I wonder if you see All the walls inside of me? Feathered friend, I wish that you could say Why you sit on that wooden post and watch me play The sky is yours and the ground is mine Do you want to trade sometime? And let me soar above these trees See the earth through golden leaves Breathe the air and watch the rivers from above There are many things to love But it's these that call to me      If I run like the river runs, if I fall like water falls      Oh, if I breathe like the wind, will I ever learn it all?      If I change like autumn leaves      If I grow like summer weeds      If I'm as quiet as snow, will I ever know it all?      Learn it all? I don't really know from day to day If I'm willing to walk this road or turn away But something here in the silver sky is exactly what I need To begin the song again, help me sing my winged friend With the melody you rise and float away Then I'll leave the way I came, but I'll never be the same      If I run like the river runs, if I fall like water falls      Oh, if I breathe like the wind, will I ever learn it all?       If I change like autumn leaves       If I grow like summer weeds       If I'm as quiet as snow, will I ever know it all?       Learn it all?    from the CDs       Run This Way Forever       and the solo-acoustic Watching the Storm Roll In