Ready for action! Photo by Dick Daniels (Creative Commons)
The turn of the season is a great time to realign with our intentions. Especially so this year, as the Solstice corresponds with Mars – the planet of action, energy, will and desire – returning to direct motion after being retrograde since March. Continue reading
(This post is copied from my Patreon page.)
I was journaling about “just getting started” this morning, and then a few minutes ago I saw AfroDJMac’s post on the topic.
I’m usually working on 3-4 projects simultaneously. I think – being a moody Pisces – this usually works for me. When I get stuck or burned out on one song I can just move over to another one. It’s like creative cross-fertilization or crop rotation.
BUT I realized one reason I procrastinate with music stuff is that I get stuck ruminating on “Which project should I work on today?”
Subconsciously I’m weighing it up as this huge investment. Like, I’d better choose the right project or I’ll have wasted my day. In reality I’m wasting my day by not “just getting started”.
I gave myself permission to dump that old story today by saying: just pick one and set a timer for 5 minutes. If it feels like the wrong one when the timer dings, pick another one…
(I had about 40 minutes music time today. I spent 35 of them totally rockin’ out and making big progress on a live performance technique I’ve been trying to figure out! That was five hours ago and I’m still mildly buzzing from it 😆)
I’ve read – and written – quite a bit about the “just get started” thing, but I had never thought of it in terms of inertia and momentum. Whether you’re a musician or not, I think you’ll find AfroDJMac’s inertia/momentum angle helpful too.
In this recent post on voluntarily embracing limits as a way of increasing creative output, I talk about the limits I used to record a live looping version of Traffic’s Dear Mr. Fantasy.
I also made a video – mainly because I know some of my readers prefer to listen to music on YouTube. The video took me about two hours to make. (Obviously, I have no ambitions of being the next Stanley Kubrick.) I limited myself to using: Continue reading
Haven’t had much time to sit down and write a grammatically-correct, well-structured blog post about the creative process lately. (1)
Between a big freelance project I started three weeks ago and the sometimes frustrating levels of fatigue that seem to be affecting so many of us during this Mars Retrograde, time for unpaid creative work has been in short supply. (Mars, the energy and drive planet, has been retro since March 25. He goes direct on June 29. We should see a noticeable bounce by early July.)
I can’t tell you too many details about the project I’ve been working on. It involves a couple of mega-corporations in which people are using technology to change the way people work. (I’ll share the video once it comes out.) Continue reading
I really like this one, not because it’s perfect – but because it came from a moment of being absolutely in the moment, with full permission to experiment and make mistakes. Continue reading
If you want to follow along:
Got to thank Lauren, my girlfriend-for-a-minute from Detroit many years ago, for turning me on to this one. Lauren taught me a lot in a short amount of time. She took me to my very first sweat lodge. And told me, in a 7-Eleven parking lot on the way home, “You’re a blamer.” God, I was so mad at her in that moment. But it didn’t take long to realize she was right. (Usually when I’m really angry about an accusation that has been thrown at me, it’s because there’s a grain of truth underneath the other person’s hurt or anger that my ego doesn’t want to have to acknowledge.) Continue reading
Photo by Jamain – Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0,
When companies intentionally misclassify employees as “independent contractors” to avoid paying taxes on these workers, guess who ends up paying?
You do – to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Continue reading
David Bowie’s passing affected me much more deeply than I would have expected. If you had asked me in December to list my 10 favorite bands of all time, I don’t think I would have even considered putting Bowie on the list.
Yet, for some odd reason, his death on January 10 hit me hard, harder than just about any celebrity I can remember. I was still a brainwashed fundamentalist Christian kid in 1980 when John Lennon was shot. I probably still thought the Beatles’ music was ‘satanic’. When Jerry Garcia died, it felt more like a relief than a loss in some ways. The last Dead show I saw, at the Palace outside of Detroit, you could almost feel Jerry’s suffering ripple up from the stage.
The more I explored my feelings about Bowie, the curiouser I became. And in talking with other diehard music fans (not all of them diehard Bowie fanatics), I realized Bowie had affected us much more powerfully than I had ever acknowledged. And that is probably exactly how he planned it.
Bowie had two of what are called “alien patterns” in his natal horoscope. These energies affect the native – and those the native relates to – in very distinct ways. Which I explore in Episode 4 of the Naked Songwriter pod.
afrose poetry busking. Photo (c) James Curtis 2015
In Episode 2 of the Naked Songwriter, DK interviews poet afrose fatima ahmed on taking the plunge and doing what you love, writing intimate poetry for strangers on the street, love, loss, and giving yourself permission to just be you.
“I find that every time I take the risk and I put out the thing that feels too edgy, people respond really well to it. They’re really grateful that I chose not to just wrap it up in puppies and rainbows. They want that rawness. They’re hungry for it. Because we’re all experiencing it every single day but we often don’t find spaces in which we can acknowledge it openly…”
Last week I came down with a strong case of the Kundalini Fever. Or the Ascension Flu. Whatever you want to call it, it was gnarly. Migraines, nausea, bizarre hot flashes, no sleep, nothing but sleep, dropping things, verbal part of brain shutting down mid-sentence and refusing to come back online. Am I cracking up? Or cracking open? Continue reading