My Swimming with Swans project.
Imagine a single sunflower blossom, filling the mind-canvas in O’Keefe fashion.
The center, filled with potential protein tidbits to be harvested after the bloom has died, is the current focus of my Swimming with Swans project. It is the source from which all else emanates.
It’s All About The Music.
Prose, dance/animation, fiber art and documentary infuse individual project-petals emerging from that sunflower center.
My Swimming with Swans project-petals emerging from its music-center
It’s All About The Music.
Recently, I awoke with that O’Keefe-esque visual imprint in my mind’s eye. Often, the Lord speaks to me through such visuals.
It’s All About The Music.
How that basic fact escaped me during the early days of organizing
Swimming with Swans: vignettes of our three-year journey between homes can be understood in the reading of its working title. In reigning in the scope of my
Swimming with Swans project, first steps were found in the
Kevin Powers article I read and wrote about sometime last year. Still, it only addressed the written aspect of my project.
It’s All About The Music.
From the very start of our Between Homes journey and on through to the bittersweet end, music was my calling card. Wherever the work sent us, whatever job opportunity hubby pursued – performing opened doors, initiated relationships and provided supplementary income. The Music also served as a precious tether connection with my true self amidst the current Reality we were navigating.
Early on, a colleague jokingly spoke of our Between Homes lifestyle as my personal sabbatical. While I was certainly immersed in composing, playing, performing and practicing, the circumstance of our journey was not something I’d label as a sabbatical.*
But truly, output gleaned from that Between Homes time resulted in a large body of work. A large body of quality work, some of which has been presented in bits and pieces on this blog in the form of ‘individual prose-project-petals’ as re-edited vignettes, reflections of re-entry into the mainstream, photos of fiber art created as a result of that experience, and the desire to Give Voice to the experiences of others in similar situations across the country.
All to the exclusion of its core element: The Music.
It’s All About The Music.
To be fair,** the sharing of musical projects on a blog is not easily achieved. Posting mp3 audio snippets or pdf score excerpts of works in progress is problematic on many fronts. Copyright protection just doesn’t seem to count for much of anything in this digital age. Aside from that, there is this old timey view of discussing current projects and ideas that I hold as truth. Any creative (he)artist knows what I’m talking about: the dreaded speak it, talk it, discuss it, and it will disappear! In other words, don’t share all the details of a current project or idea during the creating of it or the energy will just vaporize; just do it!
And that’s exactly what I have been doing since the beginning of the New Year…
It’s All About The Music.
Swans on a Misty Lake, by Alex Saberi
With
the music in its proper place,
Swimming with Swans is fleshing out naturally. It is beginning to glide effortlessly across the lake of completion with strokes of fluid motion, like the swans themselves.
*
Definitely something worth writing about more deeply in another post/vignette.
**and in the spirit of full disclosure: the last few months of our three year journey, I walked away from the deepest part of my self-the music- which took longer to heal after our reentry. That time to the beginning of this year represents a period of restoration and reconciliation that is relevant but not appropriate to recount in this post. Possibly open to dialogue further in another one, though.
“I am a northern guy. I have lived the whole of my life in the north west of England. I feel northern. It is in my accent. It is in my attitude. It is in my preferences: my favorite season is winter…”
