October 28
Boulder,
Colorado, I’m looking out the hotel window at a snowstorm coming over
the Flatirons, slowly enveloping the buildings of the Naropa Institute….
Our
show in Glendale was magical, many LA friends came out and all were
excited by the music. Ben Harper (two of whose songs the Holmes
Brothers recorded on “Speaking in Tongues”) was there, as was Satnam
Ramgotra, a great tabla player I met in Las Vegas while working with
Cheap Trick. Satnam sat in with us on St. Teresa, the tabla gave the
song a sinewy, percolating groove it has never had before. What a
great night….
Of
course, just when you think you are special the universe will remind
you that we are all humble. The next morning we left the hotel early
and boarded a flight to Tucson. The flight was first delayed, then
cancelled, so our amazing tour manager Marya wrangled us onto later
flights connecting through San Francisco. My daughter and I took a
joyride on the wrong escalator at the SF airport and wound up in a
restricted area where a security guard was not amused by the fact that
my ID and boarding pass were in my carryon “just over there!” 40
minutes later, after getting my ID and boarding pass delivered and
going back through security with a cranky child who REALLY didn’t want
her stuffed pig to go through the X-ray machine, my daughter finally
exploded into a screaming, crying tantrum…we arrived at the venue in
Tucson exhausted and disheveled, with our night’s work still ahead of
us. I’d like to say that the show was amazing despite all that, but I
really don’t think it was. Hope you enjoyed it anyway, Tucson….
October 30
Durango, CO
Went
to Trimble Hot Springs on our day off yesterday, had a massage and a
long soak in the hot mineral pools. The water was fantastic, but my
favorite part was sharing the pool with about a dozen strangers, all of
us quiet. Steam hung over the pools, the moon was out and grew
brighter as the sky grew darker, the mountains were covered in fresh
snow, and the silence profoundly increased my awareness of the beauty.
It wasn’t the quiet of being alone in nature, but of sharing the moment
with others without having to reduce it to words. It reminded me of
being with my daughter before she could speak, how the pretend words
she babbled so emphatically seemed full of infinite shades of meaning,
beyond what language could quantify.
Last
week in Monterey we drove past a convent, and my friend told me that
the nuns there had taken a vow of silence. Some in their 90s had been
silent since they were teenagers…imagine what would come to you if you
weren’t always concerned with talking and defining your experience, if
you just accepted it as it unfolded instead of wrestling it into
language…