Over the Rainbow was my rep. for a recent gig, a "wink-wink" surprise finale for a VIP reception. I fulfilled another life dream by singing a Judy Garland song in red shoes.
Try listening to Dorothy's song now, while you watch post-hurricane storm images. It resonates in a completely new key. The music opens the heart, making space for gratitude and empathy...
Gratitude: for health and healing and those who make it possible and available. So I was like, "Uh, Yaaaaassss!" honored to be asked to sing the "Red Slipper" song recently. Thanks to the fabulous Kim Blair for inviting me to the party celebrating the launch of Carilion's new Taubman Cancer Center.
This was an "excitement in the air" occasion I won't forget. It helped lift me out of a dark period. "As time goes by," I keep trying to be more intentionally grateful, more often.
CoVID-era solitude and space have been conducive for "time to think" exercises in finding out what you feel by listening to what you say. To experience gratitude and positivity not only as a central practice, but to experience them, like grief, as a process.
My process requires that I manifest an abundance of talk-to-yourself out loud sessions.
PS: Two thumbs, up: standing next to Carilion's beaming CEO, Nancy Agee.
Artist Gratitude: anyone who knows me knows my favorite regional spot for art therapy is Roanoke's Taubman Museum of Art. How breathtaking Betty Branch's "Dancer," is, arcing like a mountain, flowing like a river, bending like a tree in a storm, offering a sensually creative view of our historic and singular town.
Personal: Life smacks me with a sobering pause as I look up to see an open calendar with no work on the horizon. Just writing that sears new awareness of my privilege into what is admittedly a thick skull. "Scott, you oblivious, self-absorbed schmuck! What do you want?!? You've had an amazing career already!" [RuPaul's voice]: "Hello, Pity party for one, your table is ready!" Self-deprecating humor can be helpful when not a deflection. Thank you, Scott Beard, for that life-lesson I'm still working on. We miss you.
PS: (revisit S. Chandler's "owner/victim choice" podcast...)
Jewish Prayer: I give thanks for all the periods of uncertainty, past, present, and future: they deepen my gratitude for every privilege, every time of plenty I've taken for granted.
PS: Ah, Sunflower! One of nature's surprises fell across the sidewalk, uprooted post-storm. It's standing upright in the yard now, as if it had bloomed there for years...
Dramaturgical Digression: Below is William Blake's engraving from a page of his Songs of Innocence and Experience. "Ah, Sun-flower!" is among his beloved poems. It captures his counterpoint of humanism, lyricism and the visionary, the natural world and the metaphysical.
Two centuries later, an 85-yr. Ralph Vaughan Williams anchored his collection of 10 Blake Songs with an aspiring, spiraling Sunflower... (Gratitude: Mark Gallagher for asking me to join you and your gold-toned clarinet for these wonderfully compact duets. Can't wait to record them with you!)
The sun is shining here following another deadly tropical storm. A rainbow is somewhere over there, even when the happy bluebirds fly elsewhere.
If we could, would we? Why, o why not try?
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