After thinking about this over the last week, it seems I’m more excited about writing what’s in the present tense (or near-past), than I am about going back--as in excavating the journal from my trip last month.  And it might be of more benefit to me, than to you the reader, to transcribe and post them; to find what’s there. I had hoped to post them at a faster pace, but too often what’s happening in the present moment trumps what went on in a hotel room or club four weeks ago. I'll keep on with it, but for now, a diversion from the tour-blog path:

I just came in from working on the front garden. My hands are sticky from grabbing the rosemary, cutting it back so it doesn’t completely take over, elbowing out the sage and whatever else it wants to cover. The skinny weakling, dill, is an easy target. It’s the first time I’ve trimmed anything back significantly since getting home from out west.  Abundance, I suppose, is the charitable word for what’s happening there . . . two tomato plants (though they deserve to be called bushes at this point) going nuts--lots of vine, and fruit now, but not many turning red very quickly. The two in the backyard are in more orderly shape, but aren’t producing much--I re-staked them last week. Basil, oregano, thyme, a bell pepper plant that’s hanging on, but not producing fruit yet. Orange mint, another aggressor, and my excuse for buying bourbon last summer--so I could make a few of those mint juleps. Yum. Cilantro bit the dust while I was gone.

I’ve enjoyed these long days that are as quiet as I want them to be, though the dogs ensure that the peace comes in limited quantity.  (One is barking at the back door right now.) I think I’ve been seeing this in the wrong way, though: I have a bad habit of treating (relative) silence as emptiness, a void, when it can just as easily be seen as abundance. Time there for the taking--a blessing that I too often misuse, or neglect. I’m getting better--asking myself often, when in the middle of a task, “what are you doing? right now? is this a good use of your time?”, etc. Too often, it’s not, but maybe I’m getting a little better at being more self-aware, by cultivating the habit of asking those questions.

In music, too, seeing silence as a positive thing seems so important--often the more courageous move when in the middle of a performance is to NOT play--let a measure or so go by, then play something you feel, instead of feeling like you have to spit out notes to cover the time.  My favorite soloists have that ability to breathe, to let silence participate in what they are playing: Miles Davis, B.B. King, so many others. It’s a hard thing to learn, at least for me--too often the lack of silence in my solos means that anxiety has won out over music.  Every night I keep trying to leave some air in there.

I’m re-reading Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor right now. Slowly. She writes character descriptions like no one else--very visual, but somehow always toned with that wry sense of humor: “Mrs. Watts’s grin was as curved and sharp as the blade of a sickle.” Or this one:  “Enoch had on a yellowish white suit and a pinkish white shirt and his tie was the color of green peas. He was smiling. He looked like a friendly hound dog with light mange.”  A fun read, but a heavy one. So much going on there, like she’s debating ideas concerning religious faith within herself (a devout Catholic), by how she moves the characters around. And meanwhile, tells a hell of a good story.