Every once in a while, I get the “disappointed” look from someone when I tell them I’m not gigging anymore. It’s a look I am intimately familiar with and highly sensitive to.
Some people think I gave up out of heartbreak and sadness that I never got my pitcher on the cover of the Rolling Stone. Other people think after my divorce I didn’t know how to run the business side and I simply failed.
Neither of those things is true. I knew, going into Folk music, that the Rolling Stone was in a parallel universe for me. It wasn’t even on my radar, and I sure as hell wasn’t on theirs. And that was fine with me. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll try. It’s like this: when I play for an audience of 10,000 people, I feel stretched and thin and fragile, and my music just gets swallowed into a vortex and I don’t know where it goes. But when I play for an audience of 50 people, it’s magic. I can connect with everybody, I feel abundant and alive and powerful, and totally confident that my music is going to go exactly where it needs to. I wouldn’t trade that for any cover story.
As far as the business is concerned, I feel pretty confident that I ran my own career as well as my ex did, and I was far happier doing it. We did not have the same vision of what I wanted at all, no matter how many times I would try to explain what I wanted. And so, when we parted ways, I got to follow my own vision and that was better.
But it was never enough.
Don’t get me wrong, music is a huge part of my life and always will be. It’s my center, my touchstone. Music always wins, especially if it has meaning.
Because I have always believed, with my whole heart and soul, that Music is a Gift from Source to Humanity.
Music, at its very Highest, can heal, transport, and allow us to transcend. It is a Holy Force and not to be trifled with. And up until people realized how much effing money they could make sellin’ it to people, it held its meaning (well, more often than not) and was pure and good and true. But once the money-mongers got control of it, it was no longer pure and good and true. It was marketable.
But that’s neither here nor there. Music, in it’s purest form, is a Holy Force, and I am an acolyte, no more, no less. I have never wanted anything so much as to heal people with music. I started writing stories about healers who used music, tones, intervals, and rhythm to heal, back in the 80s when I was barely more than a kid. I had never heard of “sound healing,” had no idea that it even existed. I knew there was a way to combine music with some healing force, some formula to amp it up so the power within it could flow. I had no idea what that would really be, what it would sound like or look like or feel like . . . But the idea of it consumed me. And it was 90% of the reason I kept gigging at all, because at least something might happen–even if I wasn’t aware of it–to allow somebody to heal because we played the right combination of notes and rhythms and harmonies for just long enough to kick-start their internal healing processes.
Fast forward 30-some years, and I discovered sound healing, and it was instantly home. It was everything I had dreamed of, fantasized about, written about, longed for . . . All the meaning and all the music and all the healing and all the joy all rolled into one thing. Hosanna in the Highest, here it is. And right on the heels of sound healing came the Family Folk Machine, which is nothing but meaning and joy and transcendence, and the opportunity to co-create heart-centered music with a group of people that I have fallen head-over-heels in love with on the highest possible level of consciousness feels like the very most healing cherry on the top of the healthiest, most delicious sundae ever made.
Now, you may be wondering, why am I telling you this rather long and wandering story? Because I know that some of you are also longing for the opportunity to have what you love most and do best actually be of deep service to Humanity, and you just can’t quite put your finger on how to make it happen.
Expression is always healing. Always. Art is the greatest gift of humanity, and everybody should do it. You don’t have to shoot for the moon, open a store on Etsy, start marketing yourself and try to make your living at it – unless you really want to. You can learn guitar so you can sit in your own damn living room and play music for your cat and the dust-bunnies and be completely satisfied.
But if I know you, and I think I do, you have a deep desire to serve, to heal, to bring out the best in people. To be a light against the darkness. I want you to think about your talent as the essential piece of a healing puzzle that Source has given Humanity to solve. Your piece is of critical importance to solving this puzzle; without it, none of the other pieces in your entire section of puzzle can be put together, nothing makes sense, and so the puzzle is sitting there with it’s edges put together and nothing else. But if you allow your piece to light up and snuggle down into place, the whole picture can come together.
That, my love, is exactly how it is.
Feeling a little pressure? Well, you might . . . It’s a terrifying prospect, knowing that you matter. It’s a huge risk, of course. But dear one, please think about the risk of never becoming what you were born to be. Of going to your grave desperately longing for the kind of fulfillment that can only come through selfless service to Humanity.
So what I want you to do is google your talent with the words “therapeutic” or “healing” and see what you find. You will probably find a lot of pure garbage, but there may be some nuggets in there. Any kind of art, except maybe casting bronze statues or stone carving, can be done by non-experts quite satisfyingly. Art therapy is a real thing, people go to college for it. Music therapy, too. If your jam is working in a clinical setting with lots of protocols to follow, then get thee to a University and go for it. If you are more interested in joy, then look for ways that you can provide a service doing what you love in a non-clinical setting. Brush and Barrel. Ukulele club. Drum circle. Writers or songwriters group. Poetry huddle. Stitch’n’bitch. Ooh, a group of bead lovers that gets together and has someone read novels to them – Bead’n’Read. A knitting club that solves murders on the side – Knittery’n’Mystery.
It really doesn’t take much organization to make something happen, and once it’s off and running it gathers momentum and whoosh, you’re having the time of your life while knowing that you created this thing that is helping so many people find happiness.
Great stuff Alma – love the Bead and Read, Knittery’n’Mystery, and Stitch and Bitch – I can just see it! 🙂 Following your heart can be hard, and not everyone understands your own path.
Truth! I feel incredibly lucky that my path was so clearly lit up by spotlights and good signage!