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  Orit Shimoni

First UK Tour: stole my heart

7/5/2019

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The other night, in Inverness, my third last gig of the tour, gathered outside at the cobblestoned court-yard a man said to me, “thank you for reminding us who we are,” which is perhaps the finest compliment a songwriter can receive. I was already moved and emotion-filled when another man, an older man-of-drink of the wise and poetic variety, began to speak deep and soulful truths to me. “But you already know all this,” he said, and the very last thing he said to me was, “but when you can laugh and cry at the same time, that’s when you know you are in a deep state of truth.” 
And then the very next night, standing at the sunset beach of Nairn, the northern most point of the tour, (where it doesn’t get dark all the way at night this time of year,) after a campfire and good company, I stood to look at the water and both cried and laughed. How does one hold on to eternity? How does one hold on to immense experience of intense encounters? One can’t. At least not all of it and not forever. I can continue to attempt to put everything into song, but I can’t hold all of it. And then I too will be gone one day. And perhaps ALL of this will be too. To face time like that, it made me both laugh and cry.
Right then. How do you sum up something so incredible? The word EPIC comes to mind, and though it’s used way too often, which renders it less potent a word, it really is the best word for it, three weeks of a very unique adventure journey that felt worthy of Homerian verse, with mythical-seeming characters, ancient landscapes and castles, and of course, a chariot/caravan/camper called The Moose.
One thing I didn’t expect going into this UK tour was being reminded of a huge part of my identity’s origins. My birthplace was Oxford, England, and I lived there until I was three, so maybe that has something to do with the profound feeling of a homecoming, in the details of certain sights, smells and flavours, (biscuits, Ribena, and cucumber face lotion from Boots to name a few), or maybe it’s just the fact that touring my music in the UK has been something I’ve wanted to do for so long and now I finally did - there is deep satisfaction in that, to be sure. But I think it has more to do with a way-deeper-than-I-realised cultural inheritance I’ve been walking around with this whole time, only to have it awoken and invoked into a more heightened consciousness. From Shakespeare, to Monty Python, to Scottish comedians I’ve liked, to the ubiquity of good black tea, to the folk songs I’ve loved and known through phases of my musical soul-searching (Rob mentioned that the heathers start to bloom later in August, and my brain immediately sang “All around the blooming heather, will you go lassie go,”; My friend put “Caledonia” on a mix-tape for me when I first left home at seventeen and it still makes me cry whenever I hear it, and one of my most significant relationships, which also shaped my musical tastes profoundly, introduced me to Dick Gaughan,) maybe it’s the connection to the war, which everyone in the UK still talks about, and the ancientness of the stones here, which reminds me of the ancientness of Jerusalem where I also have roots. All I know is that I can’t remember feeling this kind of profound internal reshuffling caused by external landscapes and sounds and accents and smiling faces, enhanced by the very warm reception me and my songs have received here. Add to that the ridiculous amount of side-splitting laugher I have gotten to share with Rob Ellen and Hamish Roberts in the caravan, this was a indeed an adventure of epic proportions.
You have got me by the heart and soul, UK, new friends and landscapes. I don’t know how to come down from this except for to continue in my work and make sure I return again. So for now, I wish you all great love and give you my most heartfelt thanks. Rob Ellen, you are a legend and a delight of a music-loving man, Hamish Roberts, you are an exquisite and humble talent, a good friend and a keen, intelligent, and sensitive human being. I feel blessed beyond words. Thank you for sharing yourselves and this chapter of road with me.
And if any of you are in Montreal, I am playing a show at Grumpy’s Bar tonight.
With so much love for all of you, dear friends, 
Orit 
#MyRoadLife
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Just "to be" in Jerusalem

4/24/2019

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Long before I had any political or historical awareness of the categories I was born into quite by accident, I lived and played here, learned to read and write, sang songs, climbed trees, rode my little tricycle, loved my family. Then we moved to Canada. 
I returned after high school to study at the university, became a teacher, attempted domestic love, dreamed of a family of my own, watched the rise of violence and hatred and the demise of hope unfold in ugly and terrifying chaos.
I visited a few times after leaving, tearful, traumatised, apologetic in a thousand directions, understanding with desperation that I was inevitably connected, bound and sentimental.
But sometimes, just sometimes, maybe it's ok to allow ourselves to just take a break from the categories and implications and just be.
A week in Jerusalem, a warm visit with family. Permission to get neither literary nor political about it, I granted to myself, most likely out of "intensity- fatigue"... it wasn't all that conscious a decision.
If we have a conscience in this world, given its current state, we're in for a strenuous and emotional ride, hard social work, and exhausting evaluation and criticism. 
For once, I took a break, in the most intense place I know. I learned that I could and I should, at least once, give myself that permission, and yes, I am privileged to have been able to. I am aware.
Jerusalem, you complicated beast of a city, through a lens of gentle simplicity, you have quite a modest beauty. I cherished this visit in ways only my former self can truly understand. On some very important level, our human trivialities and tragedies mean nothing to your hills and valleys. Eternity is a non judgmental witness through which we all pass very fleetingly.
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Detachment and Perfectionism

10/10/2018

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​I saw a quick video presentation about some type of meditation, the name of which I can’t recall, but it had to do with observing how stimulus affects our bodily sensations, to become aware of the sensations, that we react in stress not to the stimulus itself but to the sensations that it causes in our body.  Interesting.  As someone who has moderate to severe physical reactions to or manifestations of anxiety, this was immediately compelling.  If I can observe and “control” my bodily sensations, can I react less stressfully to what I witness and experience?

The idea is to observe ourselves. That, I do plenty, but somehow, even after at least 36 years of intense self-awareness, (and self judgment, sometimes good sometimes bad), it appears that there are layers I am still uncovering, ever new insights, or deeper continuations of previous ones, or ones that are tangentially connected to previous ones, and I have much to learn still about myself, or at least put into action.  This is both daunting and rewarding, rewarding because that means there is still hope for improvement, and daunting because I feel so far from my goal of inner-balance, and with ever-less time to achieve it.  The problem isn’t just my reaction to external stress-causing stimulus. The problem is inner conflict.

A lot of what I’m observing has to do with fluctuating self-esteem, or perhaps self-love versus self-loathing.  I am almost always aware of myself and though this has benefits, it is also somehow exhausting, because it is always awareness that comes with judgment, or at least self-doubt.  When I hear myself speak, see myself move, my loveableness, for lack of a better term, seems to always be in a state of question.   I never last too long in a state of self-admiration without it quickly being usurped or at least overlapped by shame, shame for the self-admiration.  When I am excited about my accomplishments, or have a surge of confidence, there is some kind of fear involved in it, as if I am catching myself talking too loudly, or that I know it’s not going to last very long.  And when I’m not in a state of self-admiration, then I’m feeling the shame of low self worth. And then I am both ashamed of my low worth, and ashamed of feeling unworthy because rationally I know I am not and therefore either side, worthy or unworthy, is self-indulgent.  What I would like to be, for the most part, is neutral.

 I think this is where the word detachment comes in, though in the video about meditation it had more to do with detachment from external stimulus, moving through life remembering it is possible to be less affected.  But what concerns me equally, is not just detachment from disturbing (and I suppose, in turn, pleasing) stimulus, but also from judgment.  I doubt the possibility of this, since I am so concerned with ethics.  How can we be good if we can’t judge ourselves (and others) in the quest to determine what is good?  How can we be both detached and good?  How can we be both detached and meaningful, effective, inspiring?   Is detachment just a space we have to visit in between bouts of meaning?

Today I had a memory of receiving a doll for what must have been my fourth birthday.  It was a plastic baby, with curly golden synthetic hair, eyes with eyelids that closed when the doll was horizontal, and opened when it was upright, and when a button, the only button on it, was pressed, it would make the following sound: “Mama. Mama.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaah. Mama.”   The “Aaaaaaaaah” rose in pitch until it peaked in the middle of its duration and then lowered again, almost an arpeggio, but plastic, nasal, muffled, and with the creepiness of all sound-producing mechanical toys, though the creepiness I am only attaching in retrospect. In the moment, I loved it. I was astounded by it.  I couldn’t believe I got a baby that actually cried for my birthday. I loved babies, I loved pretending I was a Mama, and I loved babies that cried because I loved soothing them.  Even by four years old I was told I was good with babies.  Real ones.  But to have my own, a plastic one would have to suffice, so the more “realistic” the better.
I remember turning the doll over and lifting the shirt to examine the back, wanting to figure out how it made sound.  I discovered the battery hatch, and tried opening it.  It blew my little-kid mind that this thing could make noise.   It felt like magic but I knew it wasn’t and I was determined to understand the mechanism.

And I distinctly remember that as I gazed down with intent at the plastic back, I heard my father remark to my mother with pride and a smile you could discern from hearing, that wasn’t it amazing how curious I was, and look how concentrated my expression was, and isn’t it neat the way I like to figure stuff out.  I can distinctly remember swelling with a kind of pride at the compliment, and staying an extra few minutes longer on fiddling with the mechanism because now I knew that doing so made me appear smart, and good somehow.  I have shame over the pride I felt back then, or if shame is too strong a word, a definite discomfort in the sensations that the awareness of praise made me feel.  I had done something naturally, but now, it having been praised, it could no longer ever be purely natural.  This is of definite current interest to me as it may well pertain to the surges of discomfort I have developed as a performer after receiving very positive public reviews.  What was naturally good about me now had to be maintained and began to feel fraudulent, though it wasn’t.  Is this imposter syndrome?

Perhaps that is my first distinct memory of being observed, noticed, and praised.  This was different than being told the picture I drew was nice, or that I sang a song well, or said something smart.  This was an overhearing.  Maybe the point I was digesting was that even when I’m not told I’m good, I might still be observed and commented upon.  Others whose judgment mattered to me might talk about me.  Again, as a public performer, this has now become a known fact. They do.

I can honestly say that pretty much since then, four years old examining a talking doll, when I am not alone, or just with a friend I can lose myself with, when there are others present, I have conducted myself with a keen sense that I am making an impression on whoever sees or hears me, and I always want it to be good.    I suspect that we are all like that.  We are all keenly aware that our gestures and utterances, our appearance and actions are being observed, possibly commented on, and judged.   And if I am uncomfortable when I think I have made a clumsy impression, I have to confess that I am equally uncomfortable when I think I have been good or special and it has gone unnoticed.

This seems bottomless.  No matter how many times I have “proven” that I am smart, beautiful, and kind, or talented, I want to keep making that impression, because I am never sure for long that it’s true and there are other, countering, nagging notions of self that either tell me the opposite, or perhaps even worse, tell me that none of it matters anyway.

This is ego.  This is self esteem coupled with existential angst. This is learning to accept that others’ judgments are a legitimate factor to it because it is others’ values that shape our own sense of what kind of self we want to be, and that, therefore, caring what other people think is not a character flaw.  I do not have to feel ashamed about caring about others’ opinions of me.  We are constantly told not to be bothered with what other people think, but what other people think is a major contributor, the most significant contributor to our sense of self and what’s good, bad, right and wrong.   Therefore, it is discerning whose judgments are worthy and of interest to us that is perhaps where the emphasis should lie.   And in order to discern this, we must, paradoxically almost, make up our own set of values by picking and choosing the values around us that resonate with us the most.  For this, perhaps, temporary, periodic detachment is necessary.

It is easier said than done.  Even when we know and repeatedly articulate our moral and functional and aesthetic aspirations, which we have gradually narrowed down from all the voices that society hoists on us, it is never fully possibly to shake off the voices we already know we don’t agree with.  They cause us doubt.  They cause us inner-conflict.  Maybe some people have more certainty than I do, and maybe I have more than I think, as it is obvious by my life actions and decisions that certain values don’t actually interest me, (materialism, fashionableness, keeping up with technology, for example,) and there is some traceable line of behaviour that could dictate a reasonable biography of my moral, functional and aesthetic existence that maybe on the outside doesn’t look as chaotic as it feels on the inside.

Alignment, is what I seek. Consistency of character. Consistency of behaviour that is in line, aligned with my moral and aesthetic articulations and aspirations. I want to be the person I want to be.  (That there are conflicting notions within me about what that looks like has certainly been a consistent challenge). And I would like to at least shed the sense of shame I feel in the moments of pride when I have accomplished exactly this.  And I would like to hold on to my knowing for longer than I seem to be able to before casting everything into doubt again and weighing it against countering voices.  Moral vigilance through constant questioning is, I think, a virtue. But being in tune with a knowing self, an intuitive centre, and a bold and brave pursuer of action based on this knowing is also a virtue.

 Whose voices are within me that make me cower or feel guilt over being good? Is there a force, outside or within me, that is making me less than I can be because it is making me afraid of self actualisation?  Was it former bullies or abusive partnerships that cut me down when I did well?  And whose standards of perfection am I striving for?  I am not at my full potential, that much I know.  But am I actually good?  And can I find a balance between accepting with humble and unashamed pride that I am good and worthy, and still identify my shortcomings so that I can aspire to do and be better?  And where does detachment fit into this?  Is it simply the giving myself breaks from concern over my worth? Is neutrality of existence possible, and is it even something to strive for when the world needs and begs for righteousness?  Does one have to choose when and from what to be detached, and when and to what to be attached to, (knowing of course, we are mortal beings and it all ends in dust).

I looked up the word perfectionism yesterday and found two totally different streams.  One was from philosophy, the other, psychology.  The psychology is only of interest (to me)  in as far as it points out the reasons for neurotic and somatic (bodily) discomfort that such a state-of-being might produce.  The philosophy is, of course, more exciting to read about and identify with.   The philosophy of perfectionism doesn’t have a down-side.   It only differentiates between the various definitions of perfection and whether it is intrinsic or extrinsic.

So where to from here?

Perfectionism and Detachment.   Is it like trying to figure out what you want but not caring if you get it? Is detachment passive and perfectionism active? Is it trying to succeed in life based on the inherited and gradually selected standards of others, but not caring if they perceive your success, or about what you and “they” might think if you fail to achieve it?

Have I articulated my moral, aesthetic and functional wants, hopes, dreams, and needs?   How close have I come to achieving those which I have articulated?  Where have I failed, and how, and why? How much was in my control? Who are the people whose judgment matters to me, and why?  Perhaps these are the key questions I must venture to answer, for these are the questions and answers of carving and pursuing DIRECTION.  And though I fully understand that one’s intended direction is more linear than the path that ends up being traveled, (mostly because of obstacles, internal and external, or surprises that tweak or change the goal,) perhaps it is still important to answer those questions, check in with them from time to time.  For even though one could trace a path with moral, aesthetic and functional markers of personal consistency, I have been feeling rather haphazard, conflicted, and aimless.  It feels like most of what I have accomplished has been equal part my own work and some external force, like inspiration and fate.

How do I feel about who I am, who I have become, what I have said and done?  How close have I come to my original goals of selfhood and what are my goals now?  Are my goals now based on my genuine value-selection or are they still cluttered with the wrong people’s expectations?   Whose approval do I seek, what does it matter if I get it or don’t get it, and what processes have I put in place or still need to, in order to come closer to actualise my intended self?
​
Surely, neutrality is not a preferred state of being, for I do not believe in asceticism and detachment as a goal within itself – how can we contribute to the world around us from such a state?  But we need to seek neutrality still, as a space we need to have within our reach, a sphere of silence, so that we can shake loose the confusion of the wrong voices around and within us, and re-emerge not neutral at all, but with the life-force of our authentic selves, reaching, aspiring, in action.
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On Sharing Hard Truths

7/23/2018

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Last week at gig, I performed the hardest song I’ve ever performed in my life and didn’t think I’d make it through the song, or the rest of my show, for that matter.   I had been debating for a long time whether I should sing it in front of people or not, and I chose that night to do it because there were friends of mine there who have known me from the beginning of my music life, some of whom I thought would appreciate the song for its content, and some who know my work well enough to see that I had ‘attempted’ something bolder.    I wrote it sometime last year because something, a conversation, had triggered it and I couldn’t carry it without expressing it, at least on to a piece of paper at first, if nothing else.
I wrote it, and it’s gruesome, but the events it is about were.  I didn’t add or remove any truth.  I wrote it because it happened.  And I didn’t know if it made any sense at all to share it as a song, but I felt compelled to in order to humanise, to personalise, to bring to light the stories that are personal within the otherwise political or social.  To cry out.
I get nervous before a lot of my shows anyway, and sometimes for the first few songs, until I get into the right ‘space’ I am still managing the adrenaline in me, which means a pounding heart and shaking legs, and I’ve been that way for long enough to know I just have to keep going until I’m comfortable.  So, the other night, after some deep exhalations, I did one song, felt steady enough through it and went right into this song.  I said, “I’m just going to get this over with now,” and my friend Suzanne who was in audience said she knew it was going to be an intense one.
I have never felt my body do what it did when I was singing it. It was so forceful I thought I would collapse when the song was through.  My hands shook, my arms shook, my legs shook, my heart pounded, my body got hot, a hundred times more than any nervousness I have ever felt before on stage.   I have learned that you can put 100% of the emotion of the lyrics into a performance, but that for my own survival as a constant performer, I don’t always do this.   But with this song, there is no way not to.  There is no way to sing it and not feel every single feeling that comes with it.
The song is the conflation of two true stories about terrorist attacks. The song is about the tragedy of it but also the trauma of witnessing.   You can rationalise the statistical improbability of violence happening to you, and you certainly should, but there are too many people on this planet walking around with deep trauma, and as much as there is love and friendship and generosity and hospitality out there, there is, it seems to me, a growing dread and fear of more and more explosively violent events.  It is right to try to manage this fear through reason.  But it is also right, I think, to admit that it’s there.
I share this for all the victims of violence out there, with love and the understanding that you can analyse social and political ills all you want, but the human experience that is unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, goes far beyond these analyses. 
May we do our best to overcome fear and choose compassion in as far-reaching a way as possible.

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The Ol' Blue Greyhound and Me

7/15/2018

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Picture
  
When people have asked me where I live, I used to joke “on the Greyhound.”   The first time I heard, “Kathy, I said as we boarded the Greyhound in Pittsburgh,” from Simon & Garfunkel’s “America,”  I thought the Greyhound was cool.   The only time I rode it as a child was with my two sisters, from Calgary to Vancouver and back, when we went to visit my grandparents.   On the way back there was an avalanche in Revelstoke, which created a five-hour detour.  When my parents came to the station in Calgary to pick us up and we weren’t there, they went to the counter and asked if there was any information. Apparently, the woman at the counter suggested that we had probably just run away from home.  My poor mother said we weren’t those kinds of kids, and the woman said that all parents think that.  Customer service has never been the strong-point of the Ol’ Blue Chariot, but even at thirteen years old I remember the special feeling I got reading my book in the wee hours of the night, riding through the Rockies in the darkness with my overhead light on.  A soldier across the aisle had asked me what I was reading.  It felt like an adventure.  They even gave out granola bars and juice boxes in those days and showed movies.  That was before they introduced Wi-Fi and everyone had their own device.

I recently found a pencil drawing I made at about seventeen years old.  It was at one of a few art-therapy sessions I was sent to because, well, let’s just say, I was feeling a bit more distraught than usual for a while.  The drawing was faint, but it was of a girl leaning her head against a bus window, with a somewhat blank stare.  I remember the therapist asking me where the girl was going.  “I don’t know,” I said. “She just likes the ride.”  If there is foreshadowing in life, that was surely a moment of it.

Years later, when I decided to go full-time with my music, I confided in a fellow singer-songwriter whom I had met in Toronto.  He laughed and said there was no way I could be a Canadian touring artist without a car and a driver’s license.   That Greyhound Discovery Pass was like the universe saying, “Oh yeah? Watch her!”

Indeed, the best thing that happened to me, as far as I was concerned, was discovering “The Discovery Pass.”   Greyhound used to issue it as an option instead of individual tickets, and I would pay $600 for two months of unlimited Greyhound travel in any direction.   This included the States, but without a proper work-permit to go play shows there, I never did, and I had enough to do in Canada anyway.  This was my ticket, no pun intended, to a full-time music career without an agent, manager and publicist.  All I needed were a handful of guaranty gigs (meaning, agreed-upon pay regardless of turn-out), and the rest could be filled with pass-the-hat or ticket gigs which I could afford to risk because I didn’t have to pay any extra money to travel to them.  I was couch-surfing while touring anyway, and getting pretty hefty favours as far as recordings prices went, so really, those six hundred dollars were my only expense other than pressing CDs, the odd bar of soap and toothpaste, tampons, and the food and drink which, at least once a day, if it was a gig-day, I often didn’t have to pay for anyway.

God, I rode that bus everywhere.  Toronto to Thunder Bay, (21 hours), sometimes with a stop in Sault St. Marie, Thunder Bay to Winnipeg or Saskatoon, from there to Calgary, or Edmonton, and through the various towns of the Okanogan and British Columbia, to Vancouver, to Vancouver Island, and back again.   I became acquainted with the tiniest of stops, the fifty-cent second hand, terrible romance novels in the Wawa corner store pit-stop, the vending machines in North Bay where there was a one-hour wait at five in the morning with nobody working there, the graffiti at the Red Deer station that said “Have no Fear, Have Music,” the convenience store at the stop between Toronto and Ottawa that reeked so badly of moth balls, whatever food you bought there tasted like them too, and the cowboy saloon-style convenience store in the middle of the Rockies on the way to Nelson, that advertised, “now selling Samosas.”

I once had a 24-hour ride that popped me out in Brandon, Manitoba, to play a bar-gig until 1.a.m., only to get on again at 2.am. to head to Alberta, another 24-hour ride.  I once had a four-hour wait between the gig and the 6.am. departure from Golden, B.C., where the gas-station store worker drank vodka and “jammed” with me, playing a bucket as a drum while I sang some Johnny Cash song at his request.  I would play a gig in Peterborough, and then hop on at 4.am. and continue on to Toronto for a matinee show the next say.  I rolled around through the Okanogan, and had a six hour wait in Kelowna, even though I was only one hour away from Penticton where I needed to be.    I rode it to the States and back twice, (boarder patrol on a Greyhound is quite a circus, let me tell you).     Some have asked if I feel safe on it, especially after that horrific and infamous beheading, but I have lived in Jerusalem where, for a period, buses were blowing up or getting shot at every few days, so one freak occurrence in Canada wasn’t going to phase me.

I’ve seen sunrises and sunsets over mountains, prairies and forests, thunderstorms and blizzards, all through Greyhound bus windows.  I have heard snippets of hundreds of strange conversations about family feuds, prison, drugs, reunions and heartbreaks. I’ve heard people talking to their loved ones on their cell phones, and at annoying times, listening to their music too loudly through headphones. I’ve heard babies cry and get comforted, seen people be helpful or pretend to be sleeping so they wouldn’t have to give up the seat next to theirs.   I’ve stood and smoked cigarettes in pit-stop parking lots, in silence with the other smokers, or in smokers’ conversations where for six or seven minutes you share some life-story and then get back on the bus to your seats never to meet again    I’ve squatted over moving toilets after too much coffee and pumped liberal amounts of sanitising gel onto my hands, can conjure the smell of the cleaner all the buses use. The smell lives in some part of my brain like it’s as common as the smell of a rose. I’ve stepped over many pairs of legs of sleeping passengers who spread across the aisle for something akin to comfort, and I have heard the variations of dozens of bus-drivers giving their welcome-aboard spiel, some with good senses of humour, some with bad ones, and some with none at all.  One driver sang John Prine songs into the announcement microphone as we arrived into each stop.

The Greyhound may be crazy, but it was kind of my one consistent home.  For someone who travels pretty much full time, I still get anxious about each journey:  The packing, the prepping, the timing of getting to the station on time, the worry over whether they’ll let me bring the guitar on board rather than put it with the luggage, which, during winter means it’s in a freezing cold place for hours, on top of bouncing around with suitcases.  I was once told by a station official that I couldn’t bring it on board because it could potentially be used as a weapon.  I looked at her like it was obviously crazy and she said “if you don’t believe me I can show you the policy in writing.”  Those Greyhound workers in the stations can be awfully power-trippy and nonsensical.   I just got on the bus with the guitar anyway.  The Greyhound is one of the only places where I am actually defiant, though I’m smartly quiet about it.   I worry about whether my luggage is overweight and whether I’ll be charged for it, or if they’ll notice that I have one too many carry-ons.   And there is always some anxiety about shifting scenery, leaving whomever I’ve been staying with and arriving in the next place with the next set of people.  

But when I board the bus and nestle into my seat, (preferably a window seat so there is something to lean on, and preferably, two seats to myself which makes all the difference in the world to comfort), there is this incredible wave of relief. I’m on, I’m seated, and now I can just sit there and not worry about anything until the ride is over.  It’s out of my hands, and that is a surprisingly glorious feeling.  The letting go of control for a set number of hours has its own therapeutic value.

When I’m not on the Greyhound, except for the very rare times I am house-sitting alone, I am always around people, a guest in their space.  There is always conversation, and a lot of it.  These conversations are intense experiences of human encounter and they give me much to think about, to ponder and philosophise, and when I’m going from show to show and home to home, there is often not enough time to process it.    Tour-exhaustion has as much to do with this as it does with performance fatigue. Those several-hour stretches on the bus have been for me like a kind of sanctuary, where the turning wheels below me allow my mind to do the same without any interruption.   There ain’t nothing like staring out a window for hours with scenery rolling by to clear the mind.

The pattern is almost always the same. I put the guitar in the overhead compartment, placing my to-go mug of coffee on the seat, (and often spilling some, I’ve learned to bring napkins).  My carry-on goes by my feet, my purse as a kind of pillow.   I watch as other people board and let my mind invent little stories about each one.   I pray nobody sits beside me so I will have more room.  I settle in and get comfortable, and I use that term very loosely. Over time I have nearly perfected the as-close-to-comfortable-as-one-can-get techniques.  It is as though Greyhound seats were designed by a torture-specialist.  No matter how you try to position yourself for something akin to sleep, there is always, always something jabbing you somewhere.  I have a travel neck-pillow that I move from neck to back and even under my butt sometimes, all in the efforts to prevent pain in the various parts of my body that, over the years, have begun to complain more. And I always bring an extra two sweaters to try and soften the hard bits that dig into me, the arm-rest, or the window-sill.

I have also nearly perfected my bus snacks, which is no small feat when you’ve discovered, twenty years too late, that you have always had a wheat allergy.  It’s just as well, since the only stops for food the bus makes are in fast food joints, or Tim Horton's, (I won’t pretend I don’t miss the doughnuts, though). The only restaurants are the Husky station in Golden, B.C. and the diner in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where there’s a statue of Spock from Star Trek, and the greasiest food I’ve ever had in my life.   Sure, the odd treat is ok, but if you spend as much time on the Greyhound as I have, you don’t really want to partake in those indulgences lest you end up with premature heart disease.  Those who have seen me off to the station have likely seen me prepare my feast of a dozen rice-cake and peanut butter sandwiches.  Those things would survive an apocalypse.  Their only downside is that they leave you looking like you’ve been through some kind of Styrofoam explosion.

And so, as prepared as can be, I wait for the bus to start rolling.  I wait for the announcements to come and go, and then I lean my head against the window and fall into something like sleep.  It is not quite sleep. It is almost more like a meditation.  It feels very much like I enter some other layer of consciousness where the thoughts in my head sort themselves out without any direction from me.  It feels like a clearing of conversational debris, a sweeping, an unconscious synthesising. All the worries tumble around and, one by one, they leave and I come out of it feeling mentally refreshed and ready to think about something in a focused way.  When I come to, or wake up, I usually take out my little laptop. 

In the beginning there was never Wi-Fi on the buses, so I would either listen to tracks I was working on, or write long journal entries, poems and sometimes songs.  I would think about where I had been, I would plan what to say at my next show, I would daydream about my future and try to sort out what felt unresolved in my past.  I would try to find meaning in the short-term memories of where I had just been, and in the long-term memories that rose in me out of a subconscious suggestion of relevance.  Rolling along on the Trans Canada Highway seemed to be the perfect place to do this because it was like the concretisation of the metaphor of being on life’s journey.  I was on the road, but really, I was, in those moments and hours, on the actual road.

I had, long ago, on a bus from Ottawa to Montreal, written a spoken-word piece that never saw the light of day. The notebook it was in got lost and I was never quite able to remember it, but it went something like this:
 
“On the bus from North Bay to Alberta,
Or from Antwerp to Berlin,
I’m not in the place I’m going to
nor where I have just been,
The highway stretching out for miles
Just kind of sets me free,
Because I am just now,
But too, just was, and soon will be.
When I die, just spread my ashes where the cargo loads,
So I don’t have to choose a place, I’ll just stay on the roads.”

 
A few years ago, I went with my Discovery Pass to the counter in order to get my luggage tag.  The guy said, very nonchalantly, “oh we’re not doing those anymore after October.”   He had no idea who he was saying that too, and I had no idea what I was going to do.    It was around that time I found out that Via Rail had an on-board entertainment program, which meant if I got accepted, I could travel Toronto to Vancouver, or Montreal to Halifax, for free in exchange for performing for the passengers.  I have been a Via performer ever since, which has been an incredible experience but has also meant I don’t stop in as many towns along the way.   Thunder Bay, which was at least a once-a-year stop, or Brandon, or even Winnipeg, just don’t end up happening anymore.    But I’ve still been riding Ol’ Blue all over Alberta and British Columbia, still living the humble dream of sharing my songs and stories with the people of Canada, still able to afford it despite the measly income playing these shows provides.

And now I have read that come this October, the Greyhound will discontinue altogether from Saskatchewan Westward.    Even if I learn how to drive, I won’t realistically be able to go from never having driven to suddenly driving through the Rockies alone, and how will I be able to afford a car, and gas, and insurance?  I would have to make a lot more money doing what I do, for that scenario or for hiring a driver, and who in their right mind would come along on my never-ending tour?   At a time where venues are paying less if not closing down altogether, and people are paying for music less because they can download it illegally or stream it, riding the Greyhound was my answer to the dire financial reality of music-as-income.   With the bus gone, my touring survival remains to be seen.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way.  I’ve had many obstacles before and persevered, and so I am very curious to see what the next chapter brings.  But one thing is for sure.  The Greyhound is as imprinted on my ass as it is in my heart and mind.  This is the end of an era, and I shall look back on it with fond memories of hours and hours and years and years, during which my little determined self said, “Yes, I can do this. Yes, I WILL do this,” all while staring out a window, taking in that one-and-only smell of Greyhound disinfectant.  
 
 

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Home is Where the Stories Are

3/6/2018

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Gillian Snider’s home was not the first I entered in my travels, but its warmth and colours and the stories its walls told spoke so deeply to me, it was the first I sat down in to write about houses.   I had arrived that day by Greyhound bus on a cross-Canada tour, pulled my giant rolling suitcase, which I lived out of, over gravelly back-streets, with one wheel broken and my guitar case slung over my shoulder, along with my purse which was heavy with my laptop.  Gillian wouldn’t be home from work for another few hours. We had not yet met.  A bar owner in Thunder Bay named Sheila, who hosted several touring musicians, had told me that if I was going to Saskatoon I should ask Gillian if I could play a house concert.  I had followed up on her advice, and now here I was. 
Gillian had instructed me to let myself in and to say the dogs’ names, Dante and Clyde, so they might stop barking when I came through the door.  They did not bark at all, as it turned out.  They were gigantic and gorgeous, the one black and the other mottled.  I said hello to both of them and reached out my arm, low so as not to be threatening, so they could come and lick my hand.  Their friendly tail-wagging welcome made me glad.  It was uncomplicated, as far as weary arrivals go. No talking necessary.
I was relieved to close the door behind me and free myself from my coat and my luggage and boots.  I made myself a cup of tea with the red, old-fashioned kettle that was there on the stove.  The tea was easy to find in the white wooden cupboards, as were the mugs. I selected a dark ceramic one, noting that the choosing of a mug was always something I did with great consideration.  The fridge, where I looked for milk for my tea, was packed to the gills.   The kitchen floor was checkered and the whole room was charmingly unmodern.  Not too clean, not too dirty.  Just right.
The dogs settled in the living room, flopped down on the large, soft couches.  There were two cats, I was told, but they had not revealed themselves yet.  The room was dim and full of pet hair. There were dark, evocative paintings on the wall, and there was a blue rug beneath the old-fashioned trunk-turned-coffee table.  Plants with outstretched vines, a piano, guitar, accordion, and a music stand all stood perfectly positioned on the wooden floor.  It looked like a scene from a play that was about to begin, and was indeed, where I would be playing.
The adjacent dining room was brighter.  A big, oval wooden table stood at its centre, taking up most of the room, and there was a large book-case taking up most of the far wall, brimming over with books of all sorts, some new and some tattered and old, titles that beckoned me to stay longer than I could.   A window overlooked the back yard, and the wall that framed the kitchen doorway had photographs and children’s drawings, knick-knacks, and posters.   There was hardly an empty space to be found.
Everywhere my eyes looked, there was the cluttered accumulation of a family and music life lived.  Still alone, I could almost hear the echoes of children playing and growing, the clunking of dishes, the footsteps.  It was magical.  There was so much presence of life spilling from every saved object and item, and it occurred to me that it had not become this way all at once.  It sank in that many years of living had created this.
 I had not seen a house like this in quite some time.   Most of the places I had been staying in were apartments of students and musicians.  There’d been guitars and records and beer bottles but hardly any books, and certainly no children’s drawings.  This was a house I could relate to, though the ones I grew up in never accumulated quite as many artifacts.  My family had moved every few years and each of our homes gave glimpses only of various family chapters.   This was a house like the ones I used to babysit in when I was earning money in my teenage years.  This was a house like the ones I used to imagine having, the type of house I used to want before the road became my home.  This house was a home.  It evoked both comfort and a twinge of sorrow.
I took out my notebook to describe it because I realised it moved me to witness it in the midst of my transitory travels, and it wasn’t just personal, about what I used to imagine and never got.  It was about my fascination with these units of shelter where babies are raised thinking it is their whole universe, that children run in and out of with muddy shoes and gushing stories, between school and friends and activities, then teenagers, then adults returning for visits.   It was about the joys and sorrows that the walls contain over years.  It was about the structures that house the meaning of time itself.
After the show, where several people had gathered to listen to my songs, eat snacks from trays and plates and talk about life, when only Gillian and I were left in the kitchen, we began the great conversation, filling each other in on our lives.  We had interesting points of intersection that made us feel like the greatest of friends.  Such different backgrounds, and yet we had had similar experiences, similar losses, similar reactions and thoughts and reflections.  I talked about one day having a home and she talked about one day leaving the one we were standing in.
The shower upstairs, where I went to soothe my tired muscles before going to bed, had a selection of soaps and body washes, shampoos and conditioners and cleansers and razors and I thought about how all the bathrooms I see have different ones, and how people go out and buy these products with their various, coloured packaging and their many scents. I wondered how they made their choices, and how so many of us seldom finish one product before we buy another, wanting a change, but not wanting to let the old one go.  I stood under the hot water and opened a few to smell them, as if I could get to know about life itself if I did.  My senses were grateful for the fragrant information.
I missed my old bathroom collection.   I missed my old books.  I missed the idea that I would one day have a dog or a cat or maybe even children.  But I also knew how much I loved seeing so many homes, and loved that I would see so many more, that I would stand in other kitchens with other interesting people, getting to know myself better as they talked about themselves.  I thought about the fact that I did not want Gillian to leave one day, because I wanted this house to be here forever for me to keep visiting.  I knew it didn’t work that way.  I wondered if I would ever live somewhere again.
I’ve seen the inside of several other fridges since then.  I have spoken to many more people about their lives and mine, while sitting at their dining room table eating their food.  I have stood in many more showers smelling the soap in an effort to absorb who they are into my understanding.   I have pet many more dogs and cats, played with more babies, glanced with fascination at book titles on other people’s shelves, paintings on other people’s walls, and photographs, and drawings.  I have figured out ovens, and faucets, and coffee machines, found the kettle and tea and chosen mugs for myself to drink out of, found the light switches in the dark, fumbling.  I have slept on many beds and couches knowing my home is not a unit of shelter but hundreds of different ones belonging to others, spread over cities and countries and continents. I have left and returned to the same ones, and encountered new ones on each leg of my long journey, and I have been grateful beyond words for the privilege to visit in every single one.
This morning I read that Gillian’s house had a fire.  Thankfully, everyone, including the pets, was rescued. They were told, at first, that the house would have to be demolished, but as it turns out, they will be able to salvage the structure with some rebuilding.  It is too early to tell.  I can’t imagine any of the books survived, and it is heartbreaking to think of the children’s drawings gone, and all those records and plants.  Gillian remains the stoic and positive person I’ve known her to be, grateful that everyone is safe.
It was just today I was sifting through boxes of mine at my parents’ place, wondering why I’ve kept old university essays of mine, old letters and photographs. If I had a home, they might be out on display, but as it stands, they are just filed away.  For the first time in years it occurred to me that I know who I am without these old artifacts, that whatever traces of me I have clung to by hanging on to them, will be with me regardless, integrated into the very fabric of my soul.   
Gillian told me that the firefighters saved the musical instruments after they got all the pets out to safety.  I had offered her my accordion, which sits at a friend’s place in Berlin, in case hers hadn’t survived.  When I found out the instruments were rescued I was not only relieved, I thought it a marvellously poetic gesture on the part of the firefighters.
What matters most? That everyone is safe, yes, but that we can keep playing music, literally and figuratively, is what gives us that crucial vitality, our meaning. The songs we sing and the stories we tell keep every piece of evidence that we have lived lives and we are still thriving.  Artifacts are beautiful to hold and show, to hang on walls, but they disintegrate and fade, are vulnerable to the elements, just as our very bodies are, here for a time, then gone.   If the stories and songs of our lives and loves can survive and still be shared, we have not lost a thing. We are lucky. 
If this house doesn’t make it, I will be visiting Gillian wherever she creates her new home.  Perhaps, one day, she will visit me in mine.  Perhaps I will bring her a book as a gift, or some fragrant soap.  Perhaps we will draw new pictures.
 

 
 
 

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Folk Alliance, 2018

2/19/2018

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O

   On the third night of this music industry conference, at around 3 am, my legs felt like they were starting to burn, a sensation I am not unfamiliar with when I am under stress and fatigued. I was also having severe menstrual cramps and a bad reaction to the Advil I took for them, (this happens once a month on the road; you just kinda roll with it, with some extra moaning), and when I finally collapsed into my bed I did not fall asleep. The many thoughts, exchanges and events of the day played before me as the night view of Kansas City, Missouri sprawled outside my 28th floor hotel window.
The hallways of the hotel were swarming with conference attendees wearing name-tags, red for artists, orange for industry, green for presenters, yellow for media etc., which meant we all looked each other up and down as we walked past, because you might know who they are, or they might know who you are, or you might benefit from knowing them. That is the nature of a networking conference. Are you useful for someone’s career advancement, and is someone useful to yours?
Let me tell you, it is a special kind of exhausting to be walking through hallways both looking and being looked at that way. Eyes and hearts hungry for success, competing for attention in three floors of a hotel, a performance going on in each room, people walking in and out to both enjoy and evaluate, I’m not sure in which order. 
There are friends at this conference too, friends you haven’t seen in ages, from different places across the continent, from other continents, hugs and smiles and instruments everywhere, people in costumes including no-costume, which is still a costume, a giant range of go-get’ership, starting at enough to be attending the conference, you walk around both thrilled, scared and lost until you’re found in your own grounded identity, if you have one, to be lost and found again every few minutes, with each wave of people like twigs in a river of musicians flowing in all directions down hallways littered with posters and flyers and hand-bills and business cards. It is a circus of a spectacle. And it is hyper-focused and sleep-deprived and you know you are missing out on potential opportunities in every room you are not in. Your years of music business internet-research-and-outreach- overwhelm have come to life in the noisy form of flesh. And you’d better be leaving with something because it’s cost way too much money to get here and because your soul-work is on the line.
That day I had eaten lunch with a friend and talked about literary grants, had a fifteen-minute power-meeting with a marketing and development agency, gone to see four hours worth of twenty-minute sets, knowing that even in the audience, I was in my professional shell, authentically enjoying and evaluating, but self-aware that here too, I am seen.
And by the time the night showcases were done, which included my own performances, three or four songs self-selected in the hope of hopes that they are amazingly compelling enough to be of interest to anyone walking in from the hundreds of other songs delivered in the hundreds of other rooms.
No wonder I was exhausted.
This is *so* America. I thought, cowering crampy in leg-pain in my bed. This is disgusting.
There had been another school shooting over these days and we were running around trying to be noticed in the hopes of making our music careers feasible, viable, and maybe even good. Fair enough, but in context of big world matters, it made me feel a little queasy. 
I can’t help that I’ve been cynical about this machine. It is the only way to not develop delusional hopes. It is the only way to stay true to the original point of music-making, which contrary to many people’s take on it, is not about fame or riches.
But that is also why I am also totally not. Cynical, that is. Fatigue and body pain may highlight the dark side that lurks, but I never lose sight of the light.
Because I am totally blown away that 2500 delegates at this conference, hungry for their piece of survival or triumph as they may be, are 2500 human beings WHO HAVE NOT GIVEN UP ON MUSIC, and as a friend aptly pointed out when I said this to him, 2500 people WHOM MUSIC HAS NOT GIVEN UP ON. To see the frenzy was also to be reminded of this and moved by it.
Being one in 2500 people in a hotel that was on musical fire was, in fact, the OPPOSITE of alienating, was the OPPOSITE of depressing, it was supercharging, pride-inducing, fun-as-fuck, WE ARE MUSIC emanating from all of us, individually and collectively. It was triumphant. Music and its importance was everybody’s common language and it was loud.
And, yeah, I already knew we’re out there. I see your posters at the same venues I play at, I see your social media posts, us thousands of hard-working road-slogging musicians chugging away for not enough pay because we are stubborn and insistent upon the value of what we do and will do it come hell or high water. But to be under one roof for four days is a pretty powerful reminder that we’re pretty mighty, and the rather glorious feeling of belonging to this category of people is something I am taking away from Kansas City this year, (and took away last year). 
There are two particular, specific highlights for me.
Today, in the only explicitly creative aspect of the conference, (which is otherwise performance and business), at something called “Songwriter’s Breakfast,” I witnessed about twenty people performing a song they had written during the four days of the conference, based on a prompt they pulled from a jar at the information booth in the hotel lobby. Like last year, I participated as well (and will share the song with you eventually, I got one hell of a prompt). Witnessing the creative capacity, the human miracle of interacting with meaning, bringing the personal and seeking the universal – it is and was an incredible, important and moving thing. 
I also had the fortune of meeting an incredibly talented musician here. We were on the same flight arriving in Kansas. A decade younger than me, authentic as they come, songs as pure as gold, real, true, no bullshit, scruffy and transcendent. It was his first time at this conference (my second). We chatted a bit over the days, and talked about life, found much in common, and when he confided in me about some about his anxieties, I shared a tiny piece of insight from mine.
Tonight, I received a message from him that said:
“Orit. I️ just want to thank you for taking some time to talk to me. It meant a lot. I’ve been struggling with some stuff and the things you said really opened something up inside me. We go to these things with different expectations. But I had no idea a 15 minute conversation would impact me so much on this trip. Thank you so much.”
Folks, I mean it when I say that if I don’t get a single gig from this whole conference, I will, for this one message, be eternally glad that I came here.
Music is what brings me here, to the heart of connection. My songs have taken me far and wide and it is these conversations that make it all matter to me as much as it does. It’s what’s kept me on the road. Music is the vehicle I’ve traveled in to meet other hearts. Music is more than music. Music generates conversation.
And this is America too – in the metaphorical, song-idiom sense. This is humanity. We are all the ugly ego wanting to thrive among all the other ego reeds, but, we should certainly remember that we still have the power to connect deeply and creatively, authentically and profoundly, and I’ll make note of every time I get reminded. 
May we all keep on singing our songs, musicians or not.

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When Something Breaks

10/21/2017

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​ A long time ago, a few lifetimes ago I’d even say, I had a somewhat mean-spirited and oppressive boyfriend.  (Sure, he had good qualities too). In text-book manner of emotional abuse, he had a way of blaming me for everything that went wrong.   We had an argument, one of a thousand. I left the room upset, and slammed the door, and the mask that was hanging on it, a mask that had belonged to his late father, fell off the nail, hit me on the face, fell to the floor and broke.  I seem to remember having a nosebleed but it might have been brought on by crying. It was the kind of moment that split time into sharp awareness.
He told me it was my “energy” that had caused the mask to break, and was, of course, upset about it, because the mask had been his father’s, and therefore one of his treasured possessions.
I left that relationship with more ideas about energy than I had going in, and I believe in energy to this day, but my retrospective take on that incident is that it was his energy, or rather, the energy that his father had passed on to him, which was quite unkind to a supposedly beloved woman. I believe that, physics of doors slamming aside, it was that energy which caused it, because it was that energy that needed breaking.
Since then, other things have broken, and whether it’s been parts of my body that pulled or buckled, or objects around me, I have never lost the notion that when something breaks, a certain energy causes it, a certain tension.  I always stop to think about what it might be.
And of course, as a songwriter, it is my core belief that there is a metaphor in everything.
Recently, while on tour in Nova Scotia, my foot fell into a rabbit hole.  There was no white rabbit rushing me. It was just a careless misstep, and in one moment I was on level land, and the next, I was up to my knee in earth. My foot was caught, and I knew from a previous injury (to the other foot a few years before), that just because it didn’t feel hurt, didn’t mean it wasn’t.  I knelt on the other leg and put my hands on the ground, glad there hadn’t been anyone to see me, and I took a few breaths to recover from the shock of it before slowly freeing my foot. It was bleeding a bit and was sore, but it was pretty much fine.  I knew I could have easily hurt myself more and was grateful I didn’t.   It stayed swollen and sore enough for a while to remind me of it.   My metaphorical mind told me that something was going on in my life that I wasn’t being careful about.  Something about my footing.
And then, I broke my guitar in Newfoundland.  No airline to blame, it was just me, ready to head out to a gig, swinging the case over my shoulders, realising as the horrible crashing sound of the guitar against the hardwood floor filled the air, which seemed to happen faster than a second but also in slow motion, that I had forgotten to zip up the case.
I had forgotten, because in the middle of my usual, autopilot routine, I had to leave the room for a while and catch my breath.  In the room was a guest of the homeowner's I was staying with, who was horrifically offensive in the way he spoke about women.   I hadn't known how to deal with it, because I was a guest too.  I guess I never know how to deal with it.   It was the same week that the #metoo movement started. Just a few days earlier I saw my first hashtag, wondered what it was, and then began to see woman after woman friend of mine post it too.  As did I once I understood what it meant.  This guy, in that context, and without it, was unbearable.  When I came back to finish getting ready, I'd forgotten about the zipper.
The sound of the crash went right through me, and when I picked it up and saw the missing pieces where wood once was, it felt like it was my own body.  I was in shock. I must have said, “Oh my god,” loudly and repeatedly for about an hour.  My heart was pounding and I was full of adrenaline.  A big part of me knew it was fine, and I said so to my friends who were trying to figure out how to comfort me.  It’d get fixed or replaced, one way or another. Obviously, I need a working guitar.  And obviously, it is still just a thing.  I can be very rational and pragmatic, even when I'm panicking.  Another part of me admitted I never truly loved that guitar.  There had always been something kind of rigid about it.
When the guitar broke, I broke. The drama of the moment had me in shock.  It took a long time to calm down and I was worried, of course, that the electronics were busted and that I wouldn’t be able to plug it in and play it,  and the show was within the next couple of hours, and I had more shows coming.   
I was relieved, in soundcheck, that it still played.  In fact, it rang better than ever.
The guy who booked the room offered to take it for me so that he could drop it off at the music shop first thing in the morning, but I was reluctant.  I knew I didn’t have time for glue to set.  But more than that, there was a part of me that didn’t want to fix it.  I wanted to keep the hole.    As I played my set, there was something about it that felt right.  With the chunk of wood missing, it somehow felt more like me, more mine than it ever had before.  I finally felt the connection with my instrument that had been missing.
I have been expressing myself my whole life, more officially and steadily and publicly than most.  But the truth is, there is still more un-expressed, yet to be expressed, than I can even wrap my head around.
The hole in my guitar reminds me, with a combination of jaggedness and fragility, that tension leads to bursting.  It reminds me of the pride I have in my various wounds and scars, and of the serious amount of work that lies ahead of me.
And yes, one way or another, I will fix my guitar, but I am hoping to do it in a way that doesn’t hide or mask the damage done.   Because maybe when something breaks, the idea isn’t to fix it as though it had never been broken.  The breaking itself is a lesson worth preserving, remaining attentive to, honouring the rupture.

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The Beautiful Ugly

10/20/2017

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This essay was submitted to SEITIES photography magazine, on the theme of Portraits, and was titled Portraits: Mystery, Confrontation, and Identity.

They say, in Kabbalistic wisdom, that God is concealed and revealed simultaneously, never one without the other.  That is how I feel about portraits. Our faces are beckoning, moving mysteries of constant expression, layered with meaning that comes as much from without as within, and is just outside our cognitive reach.   What does it mean to take a portrait then? Can we capture someone’s essence? Their nature? What meaning does a portrait carry?  Why is it beautiful? And what is it about portraits that is somehow confrontational? Why do we stop and stare at portraits with a sense of being challenged, even, and perhaps especially, when they are of ourselves?
I have been staring at my own face since the first time I encountered my reflection and recognised it as my own as a toddler.  I should know by now what I look like, and yet, somehow, I don’t. I mean, I recognise myself, of course, in reflections and in pictures, but it is always with the sense of both surprise and reassurance, as if I had forgotten, or hadn’t been entirely sure.  I can, (and God knows I often did as a teenager), sit or stand still in front of a mirror, stare directly at myself, and still not be sufficiently sure. The question of what I look like is as much, ‘What do I look like to others?’ as it is, ‘What do I look like to myself?’
The question used to be, and to a large extent still is, Am I beautiful?  Am I pretty? I most certainly wanted to be. I played with expressions and angles in the mirror. In some I was hideous, in some, if I held just the right angle and made just the right expression, I was worthy of portraiture, black and white, preferably, classic.  But where had my template for beauty come from?   I know that when I looked like my mother, whom I have always thought of as beautiful, I felt reassurance.  The notion of family resemblance enchants me to this day.  But, every once in a while, when I figured I looked almost like a movie star, my ego would feel quite content.  ‘Could I be pretty enough to be a movie star?’, was as engaging a question to my young mind as, ‘What does falling into lava feel like?’ and ‘Are killer bees a real thing?’
I felt both hideous and beautiful most of my life, though the hideousness has somewhat dissipated over the last few years, due, to a large extent, to some crucial utterances I consider myself lucky to have heard. One was a sentence a friend spoke about a movie he’d seen: “The characters’ faces were so ugly they were beautiful,” he’d said, and I instantly knew what he meant, and loved it.  It made me consider how and why conventional ugliness can be exquisitely beautiful.   Another was a professor of mine, telling of her first meeting with her new dormitory roommate, whom she thought was very ugly upon first encounter.  They became good friends, and she said, “I’ll never forget the realisation that her wonderful personality and my love for her made me see her now as totally beautiful, as if a light had been turned on.”  I had had similar experiences with friends, and if love had something to do with beauty, it became clear to me that my sense of my own beauty and ugliness might have to do with the fluctuating levels of my love for myself.
My sense of my own ugliness had to do with two major forces.  I was bullied in school.  The mean girl flat-out told me I was ugly, and I believed her.  I was also a new kid from another country, did not have the brand name outfits, and my body was bigger than the average kid’s.   I was told I need braces when I smiled.  It didn’t help that I had freckles. It certainly didn’t help, a few years later, that I had pimples.  I felt bulky and awkward.  Puberty did not help my sense-of-beauty cause.  I had unwanted hair. It didn’t help that I was surrounded by a society in which most every other girl and woman shrieked, “oh my God, I look terrible,” upon seeing herself in a photograph. “I look fat.”  “I look stupid.”   It didn’t help that ugly people were called beautiful because they were popular.  They were the ugly beautiful, as opposed to the beautiful ugly.
 Pictures back then were not digital, and therefore, very few and far between.  If yours was an ugly photograph you were stuck with it until a better one was taken.   Sure, there were some redeeming mirror-moments in between, but the photograph was still a grim reminder you were ugly.  A roll of twenty-four, used on some family vacation or class trip, we’d wait until it was ready for pick-up at the store, eagerly flip through the sticky rectangles, and at most of them, we would cringe.  In these photos, I never looked like the pretty version of my reflection I had hoped would appear in them.  Only in a rare few was I pleasantly surprised.
The second force of my ugliness had to do with racism.  It never really occurred to me until my big nose was teased in a racial context in high school.  This was magnified when I moved to Montreal at twenty-four years old and was recognised by my neighbour for my race.  It scared me. She had not said it in a friendly way, and I became more self-conscious about the give-away aspects of my appearance. 
When I was younger, I imagined an older version of myself brimming with confidence. I never once thought I would be held back in life because I was too ugly, and I wasn’t.  I did think I might never have a boyfriend, but I ended up with quite a few.  And, when I wasn’t dwelling, or being made to dwell on my apparently flawed visage, when I was enjoying myself in play, in dance, in day-dream-filled solitude, immersed in my work, in the loving glow of my family, (who told me I was beautiful), or in the sensual embrace of a man, (who implied if not outright told me I was beautiful), I was able to feel beautiful. It came and went.
 I drew. I drew self portraits in notebooks. I made thick eyebrows, and a pointy nose, rounded shoulders, not-skinny thighs, and I tried to articulate myself into something I could see and understand visually.  I tried to draw my beautiful self. I tried to draw my ugly self too. 
I did other things too with my time, like graduate high school, leave home, attend university, work for my living, write and play songs, attempt grown-up love.
It wasn’t until I started singing professionally that being photographed became commonplace in my life, and photos began to appear of me where I was decidedly pleased with the presence of some beauty.  There had been the odd one in the past that was alright, and now with increasing number, I would treasure these good portraits of me as if they were my key to everything that was holy:  Proof I was pretty. In the photos of me singing I found the most elegance, the most timelessness, the most grace, and that is what made me see beauty.  And though that indeed sounds sublime, when asked by a photographer what made me like certain photos of myself as opposed to others, I had to admit, to myself, and then to her, an awful truth:  The photos in which I appeared, thin, white and western, were the ones I loved the most.  I was ashamed that I felt this way about myself when I did not in the least feel that way about others.
Something else became apparent.   Like young Narcissus at the water, I could not get enough.  As more photographs came in, I became fascinated with my own face.  Was it insecurity? Was it, indeed, narcissism? Or was it the fact that looking at my own portraits elicited a profoundly uneasy sense of question. Was it an acknowledgment of and discomfort with time itself, passing in incremental moments, possibly traceable from photograph to photograph? 
One way or another, the question that hits me each time is, Is that really me?   It is interesting that this question hits me more when I think they are beautiful portraits.  With the ugly photos, it is easy to self-identify. In the pretty ones, I almost feel underserving of the representation.  Or at least I used to.  It took awareness of the social importance of broadening beauty standards to begin to accept good portraits of my ugly self, as beautiful too.  It took seeing several beautiful portraits of others to love my own humanity.  And there have been some surprising aspects of my own face which I had somehow never seen. Hundreds of photos and still one can come along where I think, “I look like that?” I am grateful for that experience.
What is the magical quality that some portraits have, that turn them from a plain old picture to a mysterious marvel, a window of truth that commands attention?  A good portrait is a strong moment made still.  It is filled to the brim, almost bursting, with authentic human emotion. It is clear, and if it is blurry it is because blurriness is intentionally being depicted.  A portrait knows it is not the full picture, but it makes you want to see more and engage.  It is the precise space that hovers in between the now and the eternal.  It conceals, as well as reveals.  It tells us something we know, and yet brings us into a heightened state of question.  There is intense familiarity, yet at the same time there is a total sense of otherness.   The great philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that the encounter with a person’s face is the “event of ethics,” because it brings us outside of ourselves, in attentiveness to the ‘other.’   This seems to be the case even when we look at portraits of ourselves.  Portraits, then, demand ethics.
It is no wonder the digital age has unleashed a frothing sea of selfies. The phenomenon is sociologically and philosophically fascinating, and to me, quite understandable.   The great shame of them is that they reveal the ubiquity of sameness.  Few are ‘great portrait’ selfies.   A photographed face that demands to blend into a commonplace trope is not nearly as enchanting as a face that breathes its uniqueness through the truth and originality of its expression.  It is hard indeed to come up with an original costume, but the naked face is already original.  It is a profoundly unique culmination of specific genetics, language-formed musculature, experience, emotion, thought, confidence, and insecurity.  It demands to be identified as singular, and by doing so, it reminds us of what is common about our own humanity.  Pouty bathroom selfies never do this, because they are significantly unoriginal.   Good portraits make faces new again.
It is for this reason that the art of portraiture is crucial.  It is identity-building and challenging, and it asks us to break open our lazy sameness, our norms of beauty, by capturing that exact mysterious moment where the specific and the eternal meet. No matter how many faces and portraits there already are, a new one of value still surprises and engages us.  This in itself is as mysterious and miraculous as the fact that a sunset can take our breath away every single time anew.
 

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A Word on Words: an Interview About Songwriting

9/28/2017

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Picture
I was sitting in a cafe in Halifax. Cafe Cempoal, to be exact.  It is a cafe that feels like two living rooms of a house belonging to someone warm, eclectic and welcoming.   I felt comfortable immediately, and there was good music playing that made me dance around as I checked out the decor.   I wondered how my stuff would go over and how to best deliver it.   The audience was a meandering but listening type. I watched them order their coffees (respectfully quietly) as I sang, glad to see them not get the all too ubiquitous "to-go" cup. I saw their expression of curiosity as they walked into my sound, and the way they found a place to sit and take it in.   Each one gave off a lovely energy and spoke words of appreciation to me.   

In the end, it was the owner himself who took the time to sit the most with me, and we got to talking about songwriting.  He asked the kinds of questions I like, the kind that indicated he'd thought about this stuff before and the kind that indicated he had been listening, was connecting, or trying to connect.   I left feeling satisfied about the gentleness but meaningfulness of the exchange. A good musical experience, and a good afternoon in my books.

Later in the evening, I came across a youtube clip of a filmed radio interview I did in Holland a few years ago.  The show was called Music Magic, and took place in a town called Almere. I'd forgotten about it, watched a bit to jog my memory, and partway through, I realised I was talking about some of those same questions about my writing process that had come up in the cafe. 

I felt too awkward to send the owner a link to it, partly because it seemed egotistical, and partly because it's hard to hear what I'm saying and there's a lot of Dutch in between. I also look like an exhausted, mousy,  graduate student, and am speaking in my weird "I'm-in-Europe" accent, plus there's an hour or so of it, and only ten minutes pertained to our conversation.  It's also embarrassing to see just how much I talk once I get going. 

I decided to try to capture the relevant parts, and then figured why not share it with everyone who might be interested in my linguistics-philosophy-spirituality-of-creativity-nerdy-academic bent on the art of songwriting.  So here is the excerpt. I'll add the link too, if you want to sit through it, by all means:


INTERVIEWER:  Orit, I also read something I think it’s wonderful to read. “I am in love with words.” Can you explain that?  What is your love with words?

ME: First of all I’ve always loved languages.  I grew up speaking Hebrew and English, and, already, this is wonderful, having two languages from the start.  Knowing where the words come from and how they’re built… if you go to Germany and the word for “glove” is ‘hand-shoe”, this is fantastic, right? A shoe for your hand, of course it makes sense, and … if you learn the idioms from different languages, you learn about the people and the way they see the world, and this is such a beautiful way to get to know people.  So, already, I  have a fascination with language.
    As a writer, of course this is an obsession for me, because finding the right words for something, there’s knowledge that you have *before* you have the words for it.  It’s totally fascinating to me. That you know something but you have not yet found words for it is philosophically fascinating.   The process  that you have to go through in order to find the words, is actually the process of finding truth, right? You have to try different words until you feel that you’ve hit truth, and this is totally amazing to me.
    And the power that words have to move people to tears or to laughter, to make peace or make war, this is amazing, what power words have, so this is an obsession, for sure.
 
INTERVIEWER:   Ok, so the language itself, the words that you use in your lyrics, does poetry mean a lot to you? Do your lyrics, your texts have to be poetic or not at all, sometimes straight, down to earth?
 
ME:    I think to a large extent they are straight, down to earth, I’m not looking to be fancy at all, this is not my point. I don’t like poetry when it’s trying to be fancy, or when it’s trying to be unclear. I think *being* clear is the mission.   But... I’m trying to say as much as possible with as few words, because this is the point, I think, of writing a poem or a song.  We must make a million meanings with one simple phrase.
 
INTERVIEWER    and then contain it within a melody

ME :  Luckily for me, the melody comes together. 

INTERVIEWER:  So, as I understand it, the both come to you, the melody and the text.

ME:  Yes, usually.

INTERVIEWER:   and so, what drives you to write a song? Is it a feeling that you have, or maybe you’re sitting on top of a mountain looking to the far horizons, contemplating about life and the universe, or just love, or whatever?

ME:    The way I describe it is that I am somebody who is contemplating a lot by nature, so I’m always thinking words.  There are thoughts and thoughts and thoughts in my head.  And every so often, one phrase from all the other thoughts comes louder.  And when this happens, I go, “ah, this is a line.”  And when that happens, I noticed, usually I’m thinking about people, situations, fears, anxieties, loves, tragedies, joys, all of it, love is a big theme of course, also, and when I feel, "ah, this is a line,”  it’s because  “Oh, this is so *human*."  Of all my experiences, when something pops into my head as “ah, this is what being a human being is all about," that’s when I go to write it as a song, because it also means everyone else will know what I’m talking about, otherwise there’s no point.

INTERVIEWER:   I know what you mean, I can relate to this, because you can write a song about a lady across the street that doesn’t mean anything….

ME:    Well, you *can* if you do it in a way where you express exactly what you’re thinking and feeling in a way where people know they’ve felt it and thought it too.  You know what I mean? You can write a song about absolutely anything, but it’s what you do with it and why you’re writing it and what is the point of it that matters.  
 
INTERVIEWER:  So it has to have a point.

ME:    Yes, and this is what I was saying earlier when I was talking about looking for the truth.  I don’t know if I’m hearing you right when I hear you presenting your show, but you’re saying something like “the music is emotion,” Is that right?

INTERVIEWER: Yes, yes

ME:   And this is 100%  what it’s about for me. You have to ask, “what is the emotion?” and when you can find the honesty of emotion then you have a song.


****

   The link to the interview can be found here: 
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    Orit Shimoni, AKA Little Birdie, is a traveling writer, teacher and musician.

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