|  In
this issue:
•
"FREE
DHC" this weekend!
Free Outdoor concert at The Pinehills "Jazz &
Blues on the Green" in Plymouth, MA - Sun. Sept.
13 at 4pm
•
FREE
DHC "Blues Jukebox"
for folks who can't make it to the free live show, you
can listen to Blues on line (Oh ... OK, you folks
who are coming to the show can listen, too) .
If the jukebox doesn't work from your email, then click
here to see this e-newsletter on line.
•
Reveling
on the Road --
an exercise in focus leads to
signs of wonder - my rambling reveries in this month's
newsletter
•
Coming
Attractions &
Player's Query: Seattle and New Hampshire
shows in October, and a call-out to players & singers
for suggestions on what music titles I should publish
next!
Dear
Friends,
I'm
geared up for an afternoon of FREE Blues and
Jazz this weekend but two weeks ago I was headed
to Maine for my yearly performance intensive -- and
little did I know, the drive itself would be
such a surprise. Read on to find out how ...
Can't
make it to the show in Plymouth? OK, I made you
a little Blues jukebox with a variety of Blues and Blues-inspired
tunes from some of my CDs - you can listen to it right
on your computer. Click
here for the Jukebox
Read
on to hear about my experiences focusing on the road....
Reveling
on the Road ...
Freedom and Focus - a sign of my times.
Dear
Friends --
It
took me all day to pack my 1991 Previa with two concert
harps, five electric lever harps, two lap harps, a sound
system, a box of hand percussion, my traveling office,
my clothes and a ukulele. I was headed to Maine
for my yearly performance intensive.
I was so behind, I was packing by moonlight the night
before I left, and when I finally got on the road Monday
morning, I discovered I must have blown a fuse.
Everything worked except the cigarette lighter, the
clock and the indicator lights for the gears.
This was disaster!
I
stopped at a service station for help, but the mechanic
was on an important phone call with his girlfriend,
and finally I gave up and hit the road. It
wasn't that I was worried about the car. I was
worried about my mind. I'd been counting
on that cigarette lighter to run the radio adapter for
my iPod. A road trip with no audio diversion --
my attention span would be road kill!
"Oh,
come on, Deborah! Three hours alone in a car -
you can live with it."
No
... really, I can't - and it's almost four hours.
But
here's the thing: I'd just been reading my notes from
a previous workshop -- reaaaally previous -- like 15
or 20 years ago, when I was the student, not the teacher.
According to my notes, my teacher, Tony, said
that Chinese performers developed focus by staring at
the moon for 8 hours straight! That seemed
so important to me I'd written it down. Now I
couldn't bear the thought of 3 or 4 hours driving some
of the loveliest roads in the Northeast. What a wimp. So
I determined to focus on the road and see what
would come of it.
I
started focusing on the signs, noticed they basically
come in a few colors -- mostly I saw white on blue (geographic
information) and black on yellowish (cautionary road
conditions). It all made sense. There
was a pattern, a logic, almost like a simple language.
Right. Sign language. And then - boom -- out of
left field (actually out of a small field on the right)
I saw something that made me cry out in surprise (no
joke). A brown sign!
It
felt nothing less than revelatory. This
is how focused I was on the signs. Two more brown
signs down the road, I figured out they're for points-of-interest
like national seashores, or historical buildings.
Ahh... my vocabulary of awareness was increasing.
Yellow sign, blue sign, yellow sign, blue sign, brown
sign, yellow sign, blue sign -- another hour passes
and suddenly - boom! Suddenly I noticed something
so fundamental and obvious I hadn't seen it:
it wasn't just color, words and images that were giving
me messages on the signs.
For
really important signs, the shape is different.
And always different in a similar way.
Really important, potentially life-protecting signs
are shifted or angled differently. Square signs
are turned 45 degrees to become diamonds; yield signs
are triangular - and, stop signs -- well, I don't need
to tell you about stop signs. How could I not
have noticed this profound communication of
shape?
So
here I am writing to you about road signs and I keep
asking myself "Why am I telling them about
road signs?? The week that followed
that drive was full of revelations and passion and insight
- what's so important to me about these stupid road
signs?? So here's what's important to me:
We
think we're seeing but we're not. We think we
know what's there, but we don't.
Even the simplest thing can be fascinating if we focus
on it, if we learn more about it -- even if we just
look at it more. And when we focus on it, it unfolds
for us - it shows us more and more about itself.
And
that's important to me because I play the harp.
When I first saw a harp, I had the same preconceptions
most people have about it. I thought it was just a large,
pretty instrument with strings that made heavenly 'harp
music' -- yet time and again - often when I'm not expecting
it, I suddenly see it differently -- I see a part of
it I hadn't observed before, even though it was always
there. And that expansion of awareness
leads me into whole new areas of music.
Like those little levers they have on harps to change
the tuning, to shift keys? I just thought they
were a necessary evil, a limitation of the instrument,
a way to try to make up for the fact that we have half
as many notes as a piano. Then one day I realized you
could use them to bend the notes. You could play the
Blues. And suddenly the instrument was waaaay more interesting
than I had thought.
It's
that kind of revelation that makes this instrument so
compelling.
So
if you live in New England, please come watch me bend
some notes this weekend at the Pinehills
"Jazz and Blues on the Green" festival
in Plymouth, MA with my special musical guests Zoë
Lewis (if you haven't seen her live, or heard her
albums, you've heard her "Small is Tremendous"
in Pringle's potato-chip commercials) and Roxanne
Layton (if you're a "Mannheim Steamroller"
fan, maybe you seen her playing with them.). If
you can't make it to this weekend's show, enjoy my Blues
Jukebox (an e-newsletter exclusive), and whether
you're driving to Pinehills or biking to the store --
check out the road signs. I bet you'll see a lot of
things I missed.
Hope
to see you soon --
p.s.
Speaking of road signs I missed ... heading down to
Cape Cod yesterday to rehearse with Zoë
and Roxanne, a scant two weeks after my Road Sign Revelation,
I got on the highway and noticed ... that most of the
signs were GREEN! Yikes!! Did I mis-read the color
of the signs in Maine? Is there such a thing as Blue-Green
colorblindness? Am I losing my mind?? Wait!
I said -- it's not important if I got that detail right
or wrong. What's great is being involved, intrigued,
and truly interested -- that something boring and barely-worth-notice
is now fascinating -- that I'm even asking myself if
they'd been blue or green. Hmm... what are the
road signs like where you live? |
