Please vote for my partners idea...it will be a wonderful adventure for both of us and a great way to document the life of an indie artist out there on the road!! It only takes a minute and requires you to confirm your email address but the happiness you will bring us will be priceless :-) Thank you for your support!!

I had one of those 'brain racing' too much nights last night where I barely slept. It wasn't even so much that my brain was going over any one thing...it was just awake. I ended up on FaceBook and chatted with a mate from my churchie days in Australia. We haven't spoken for probably 8 years and at the time she was living in Perth as an out and proud minister at a church there and was an inspiration to me because of that. I know her journey hasn't been an easy one, but she continues to be herself, in all her glory.

We were talking about a mutual 'friend' (and I say that very lightly)...someone who has turned out to be a nasty piece of person. A closeted homophobe who is angry beyond belief and unbelievably unhappy with her choices but hides behind a veneer of 'happy christian' while being a nasty human along the way. She yells with the voice of 'I can be this way because I AM RIGHT and you are wrong and btw..... you are going to hell anyway'. Some of the stories I have heard of the things she has said and done use to make me really sad because she was the exact opposite of that when I knew her over 20 years ago. I use to spend time trying to work out how she became the way she is, how she chose it.

It also made me shudder to think what my life might have been like if I had've ended up with her or like her. But it mostly made me shudder because its just what the world needs; another unhappy Christian hiding who they really are behind a wall of happy clappy and arrogance, spewing hate in the name of Jesus.

I just finished reading an interview by Suze Orman in the latest HRC Equality magazine that made me cry a few times. I want to just repeat the whole thing here because it goes in line with what I believe SOOOO much. A fav part is "when you live a life of being who you really are, there really is no choice but to have power exude from you. Because you have no hidden agendas. You just are who you are. There are no veils. There are no curtains. There is nothing in front of you. You are just you.'

I ABSOLUTELY believe that and strive to live that way and to encourage and help nurture the confidence to 'be' in the people that I love and come in contact with. I want that message to always come out in my music, in my person, in my stories and adventures.

'So no matter what you do, no matter how you do it, no matter where you do it, as long as you do it with faith, integrity and courage, anything and everything is possible'.

Amen Suze Orman....

Xxm

[taken from http://www.martinelocke.com/blog/blog.html - updated daily!]

I cried when I first read this quote.....those straight from your heart and out your eyes kind of tears.

2008 has been such a big year in the life and heart of this little Aussie and I believe I have been grappling with the lesson this quote is trying to share with us. I think 2008 broke me in ways I haven't been broken before..deep, personal, life altering kinda ways...but it also rebuilt me in ways I have wished for in the past and wondered how to achieve. (footnote to self...be careful what you wish for).

My year in a nutshell went something like this:

- moved into a new place in Emeryville, CA
- finished recording my new cd
- missed my family like crazy
- went to Australia for a month to visit family and do shows
- lost my luggage for 6 days whilst there
- came back to the US and left my home and community of 8 years and moved to Chicago
- got involved with a pathological liar who somehow got under my radar and stomped my heart hard (although not so much under the radar of mates that met her along the way)
- learned I probably need to listen to my mates a little more
- understood for a moment the concept of hating
- and then understood how destructive to self that hate can be
- learned about boundaries and when to put them up and hold them up real tight
- I learned how to bounce someones emails
- started to listen to my own intuition more
- built a new website
- released my new amazing cd
- experienced living in some version of snow for the first time ever
- built my first snow kangaroo
- experienced anxiety attacks for the first time
- stopped eating because of aforementioned anxiety attacks
- took anti anxiety medication (all 20 of them) (not at once of course) for the first time and felt better
- stopped having anxiety attacks and stopped taking it
- played some great shows...festivals and house concerts
- played with some great people
- got fit
- hung out with great mates
- created a garden
- toured through some new towns
- got to know some old friends again
- made a new community and was enveloped in the beautiful arms of my existing one
- felt truly blessed by the people that found me
- found my love of cycling again
- wrote a shit load of poems
- released my first poetry chapbook
- played shows with more passion, energy, vulnerability and truth than ever before
- wrote some great new tunes
- met new, wonderful people
- watched audience turn out increase around the country
- learnt me better
- had my heart and soul swept away by an amazing, beautiful, honest woman
- fell madly in love with her
- stood by my love as she tragically lost her beautiful little brother
- had my heart broken as I mourned the loss of a man I didn't know and now will never know
- fell in love some more
- moved back to California to be with her
- said 'yes' but 'ask me again' in a few months
- made new friends in LA and re-established relationships with old, very dear, ones
- started recording a new cd
- got creative in a whole pile of new and interesting ways
- learned about trusting again
- got to spend another year doing what I love, being connected with the people I love, by the songs and stories that I love

In all honesty, there are a few things I would change about this year if I could..but I also know that all those things combined have brought me to where I am and made me who I am this year...so...if I truly believe things happen for a reason then, even if I don't fully understand it all, I have to also believe that everything had to happen in its time to bring me here.

And for that...and for your support, friendship, belief and love....

I am thankful.

Wishing you love, honesty, peace, creativity and another year of journey and this thing we call life.

xxM

Go here to get da deals : www.martinelocke.com

So...here I try to do 'my bit'.....if you haven't registered to vote...please...take responsibility and do so....go here:

http://www.rockthevote.com

If you are registered...please read up on who you are going to vote for and know why.

This is a really important right that you have been given...please don't fuck it up. (lol).

And for those who are interested...there are a lot of 'open' letters being sent out about Sarah Palin and the damage that she has and could do. Here is a very powerful one from the wonderful Eve Ensler.

So...go...register, read, choose to be a part of change you wish to see....

xxM

Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008