En route, I am floating in the air headed to my roots. I feel like I am heading home after a long journey of craziness.

I can’t explain.

The fires have finally burned out at home. The hard healing and the exasperating repairs have begun as we find ourselves entering the third leg of our tour, back in the lovely homeland of Espana. I am forced to reboot my thinking, my dreams, my approach – my cappuccino. I have no plan but to ramble through the City of Valencia and give myself time to heal from my traveling aching feet and aspirations. The constant movement of consent movements stops for a moment to recoil and re-release. I want to feel that. That moment.

 

I listen to the music, the tapes from years ago… again and again. Then starting to piece together what meaning they may carry – what information from my past.

I hear occasional weak harmonies and missed notes from a scale. I hear a melodic run. And sometimes it runs amuck.

I hear a riff that rings like clinking glass, a tone that rings. And there may be nothing to gain at all – really, as time has changed all things and distorted all perspectives.

Like a cubist painting or a blurred Monet – all things are bleeding into one another. There is no distinction.

 

 

Molecules of motion so tightly wound drifting through space. Through Valencia, through Espana, through us all.

 

And yet I listen. I hope to hear some shred of a thought, a song idea worth re-sculpting. Something that moves me and maybe someone else. And that is how I view this work.

This vacay, this use of time. Between sunsets, and olives, and Tempranillo wines from Rioja. I listen. I listen closely. I listen for the lion.

And so they come to me like waves over and over. Washing over me as the lyrics echo and tear.

 

 

 

They take on new meanings… the words mean something else at this juncture. Like this old one:

“Now that we’ve been through stormy weather

Clouds are clearing from my head…

Gonna give myself the better, after all the pain that lead.

After all the strain we dread.

I’m gonna rise up into the sky, kiss the clouds up,

way up, way up high. Oh don’t you wonder why.

Oh the reason why. Why we even try”

 

“Maybe in those eyes, will find a way to see

Through our disguise, a better way to be

And maybe we’ll see ourselves a little more clearly

…or maybe we’ll try. Well baby you and I.

May be we’ll try…”

From the song Stormy Weather by Mark Millan

Copyright Ellie Mae Music 1974