I wasn’t sure how it was going feel to be there, alone, far out in the country in a land strange to me. But here I was driving out to my temporary writing retreat in the woods. I like to call it “the cabin,” but it’s not. It’s a lovely loft house with all the comforts. But it feels like a cabin – heated with a wood stove and surrounded by an enchanted gray maze of twisted, leafless trees. I’ve always dreamt about a cabin get away, and I often imagined it in the winter for some reason. It is the safe place I visualize in meditation. It’s the place between worlds where I sometimes rendezvous with the incarnate over-soul of all the women I have ever been with. It is the place I calmly long for, especially when the music is clawing at me, trying to get out. Six songs are done and mostly recorded for my next album and 5 more have yet to be written.  Hense the "Get me out of here!" mentality.  I can't write that many songs in a row over a short period of time and still be a part of what for me is normal society - which isn't normal at all thank god (that's another blog) but still.  My songs are loners when they first arrive in the world. They don’t like to come out when there are people around; those first melodies I sing as the piano takes a song’s first baby steps. Alone I am at my most creative. No one is here and that’s perfect.

As I began to carefully unload my studio gear (minding the still-healing broken ribs), a sense of sheer bliss overtakes me. Could this be another manic high that would not last? I don’t consider myself manic, but this year has been full of unpredictably changing sates of mind  - the roller coaster of a life in extreme transition. We’ll see. Hmm. Why don’t I set the keyboards facing the fire place? And set the computer facing the window that looks out at the forest. Oh, yes and oh… wow. Still blissful? Completely. As I settle in I keep shaking my head and saying, “Thank you.” Everything is just right. I feel a bit like grizzly hood. I don’t identify as red riding… but I could work with grizzly hood. I work to start the first of many fires that would warm my nights and pacify my love and my ancient ancestral need for a glowing hearth in winter. Little did I know what the magic and intensity of the fire would do for my writing. Among other things, it’s been blazing a focal point for my eyes so my heart could be cathartic on the sly, without this psycho Aries ram having constant ADD episodes or manifesting a convenient writer’s block to avoid any unpleasant subject material that’s trying to be expressed ‘cause it’s “just too hard to go there.” Oh spirit, what have you done to me now? Bam. Three days and the first song is done, start to finish. And I even left for an overnight Big Bad Gina excursion to Eureka Springs. (HOT as always.) The song is called Warrior. I can’t wait to play it for everybody. I am considered uploading my rough piano & vocal to audioboo. But because of my cold, my M’s and N’s sound like B’s and my raspy throat sounds like a mating swan. You like that? Mating sawn – better than the dying goose analogy but the sounds of it are just as bad, I’m sure (even tho I confess I have never actualyl heard a mating swan - and neither have you). 

One down and on to the next song. And again, thank you – to the owner of these fine digs (who will remain anonymous here) and the folks who helped get me here. It’s one of those Kevin-Bacon-degrees-of-dominos-falling-just-so type scenarios that includes many people I love and events as minute as a leaf blowing across a parking lot somewhere, I am sure, but all spirit and all magic as I realize I am where I have been before, this time for real.