Band update

It's been ages since I've been here. But that doesn't mean I can't start again. Right?

Writing projects are in the works. I shall post some here later.

Our band is in its infantile stages but if you're open to it, check out our bandcamp page

Also, my solo work is being included on soundcloud.

ciao for now

Chris Cornell "Nothing Compares 2 U" Prince Cover Live @ SiriusXM // Lit...

Thinking of both incredible artists who were lost way too early.  This song is so true.

Happenings

It has been a long while since I have posted. 

The paperback and kindle versions of my book, "The View from Willow Hill" are available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com. Check it out.

Also, the audio version of my book is in production! I am narrating the story myself. I've been working with a local sound engineer and we hope to wrap up the project this fall/winter. I hope to have the audio book ready for sale on Amazon in early 2016! 

The Milwaukee Public Library is reviewing my book to add to its collection. I hope to receive the news that it will be available in early 2016.  



I am also working on a new writing project -- a poetry book. This will be the next item to produce after the audio book project is done. So, stay tuned for more information on that soon. 

I am also excited to say that my music is progressing. I am giving the drums a rest for a bit and concentrating on my electric guitar and songwriting. My fiance is playing bass. We will continue to write music and will find a drummer soon! 

That's all for now. Thanks to family and friends who have been so supportive.

Make it a positive day! 

He proposed. I said yes. My heart is  bursting right now!!!

An Afternoon in February's Sunshine

"Lovers alone wear sunlight" -- E.E. Cummings

P.S. I love you, Raven

Epic

Just imagine, lovers in the 16th century had to wait months or perhaps years for their messages. I think an epic is in the works.

To the artist I am missing right now

Tableau 

The voice of your words creates a Color Field painting
decorating that quiet gallery of private works
to blush in the monochromatic.
Longing adorns the white space.
Never to question your designs,
how they gently sketch vignettes to be remembered.      
Golden rose and lemon light warm the space, leaping
from the depths of your deepest palette.
I am happily drawn into your canvas,
enveloped within your lustful blue seascapes with no horizon.
It is like dancing outside the lines in surreal shades of amethyst.
It is the riptide pull of a dream from which I wish not to wake.
What part of me brushes across your landscape?
I wish never to be a watercolor in the rain.
Like the Ming, that which brings together sun and moon,
your abstract brings ancient questions of intent
and how far reaching its pathos
but never does the artist nor subject ask why.

-Julia Rose

Together and centered as one

I salute the light within your eyes where the whole universe dwells. For when you are at that center within you and I am that place within me, we shall be one.
- Crazy Horse, Oglala Lakota Sioux (circa 1840-1877)

P.S. I love you, Raven

Wisconsin Winter Twilight

Wisconsin Winter Twilight

Scope of stark sable space,

enfolds the night sky above the horizon.

The deepening stillness is a landscape of forgotten echoes

just the shattering of ice crystals underfoot

Sheets of frosted brilliance,

gulp every sigh of the bristling biting wind.

Lily-cream moonlight under a frozen river of stars,

spotlights my humbled measure.

Remaining relentless in wide-open greatness,

Earth’s window devours me as a mere fraction.

In a field of lightly falling snow,

my small footprints fade.

And I remember buried colors of verve

waiting to be forgiven by a sage sun

The book is done!

I finally did it. After many years of hiding it away, I published my first novel. It is both scary and surreal.

The paperback version of The View from Willow Hill is available to order at the following Create Space link:

https://www.createspace.com/4468129

It's also on Amazon.

There will be a Kindle version also available soon.

As readers, send me your comments and suggestions for how you prefer to read your books and anything else that comes to mind concerning my book. Let me know if you would be more inclined to read a downloadable PDF version of the book from this blog.

Thanks to anyone who comes here to this blog to read my words and listen to the music I love.    

A Case of You

Just before our love got lost you said
I am as constant as a northern star
And I said, constant in the darkness
Where's that at?
If you want me I'll be in the bar

On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh Canada
And your face sketched on it twice

Oh you are in my blood like holy wine
Oh you taste so bitter but you taste so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you
I could drink a case of you darling
And I would still be on my feet
Oh I'd still be on my feet

Oh I am a lonely painter
I live in a box of paints
I'm frightened by the devil
And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid
I remember that time that you told me, you said
Love is touching souls
Surely you touched mine
Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time

Oh you are in my blood like holy wine
And you taste so bitter but you taste so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you
I could drink a case of you darling
Still I'd be on my feet
And still be on my feet

I met a woman
She had a mouth like yours
She knew your life
She knew your devils and your deeds
And she said
go to him, stay with him if you can
but be prepared to bleed
Oh but you are in my blood you're my holy wine
Oh and you taste so bitter, bitter and so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you darling
Still I'd be on my feet
I'd still be on my feet

-Joni Mitchell


Have a listen

Ain't a man in this world who can pull me down from my dark star, dark star i will remain there...
it’s done me good so far

When the heart is with someone, and it mates for life, nothing and no one else matters quite as much...

Being ageless when it comes to your dreams

You can be ageless. The good news is the best is yet to be. It is a fact that Julia Child wrote her first best-seller at 49; Harry Truman was first elected to the Senate at 50; Paul Cezanne didn't have a major exhibition until he was 65; and Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa at 75.

It's never too late so you can't make that excuse. These people didn't and it's not that they were better than anyone else, they just DID IT:

35 yrs old - American sprinter Evelyn Ashford won her final Olympic gold medal at age 35, old for a sprinter.
36 yrs old - German chemist Friedrich August Kekule discovered the ring structure of the benzene molecule in a dream.
37 yrs old - Jersey Joe Walcott became the oldest man ever to win the world’s heavyweight boxing title.
38 yrs old - Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon.
39 yrs old - Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanization and led the way to the effective use of rubber.
40 yrs old - Joan Ganz Cooney founded Children’s Television Workshop and became the mastermind behind “Sesame Street.”
41 yrs old - Rudyard Kipling became the youngest Nobel Laureate in literature.
42 yrs old - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar became the oldest NBA regular player.
43 yrs old - John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the youngest man elected to the United States presidency.
44 yrs old - Assistant cashier Jim Priceman returned an envelope containing $37.1 million in negotiable bearer certificates found outside 110 Wall Street.
45 yrs old - George Foreman recaptured the heavyweight championship with a 10th round knockout, becoming the oldest person ever to win the heavyweight championship.
46 yrs old - A Scottish surgeon, James Baird, discovered hypnosis.
47 yrs old - Edward Jenner, an English doctor, pioneered the use of vaccination against smallpox.
48 yrs old - George Blanda played his last year of NFL football.
49 yrs old -Well known author Julia Child published her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
50 yrs old - Barbra Streisand won a 10-year film and recording contract estimated at $60 million.
51 yrs old - The Marquis de Sade, imprisoned for much of his life, wrote the novel Justine.
52 yrs old - Francis Chichester sailed around the world alone in a 53-foot boat normally manned by a crew of six.
53 yrs old - Inventor Walter Hunt patented the safety pin.
54 yrs old - Annie Jump Cannon, the dean of women astronomers, became the first person to systematically classify the stars according to spectral type.
55 yrs old - Richard Daniel Bass reached the summit of Mount Everest.
56 yrs old - Mao Zedong founded the Peoples’ Republic of China.
57 yrs old – Betty Ford was frank about her cancer surgery, in an effort to alert other women to the danger of breast cancer.
58 yrs old - Sony chairman Akio Morita introduced the Sony Walkman, even though nobody seemed to like the idea prior to its release.
59 yrs old - Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross.
60 yrs old - Playwright and essayist George Bernard Shaw completed a play, “Heartbreak House,” regarded by some as his masterpiece.
61 yrs old - Richard Milhouse Nixon resigned in disgrace, the first U.S. President ever to quit office.
62 yrs old - J.R.R. Tolkien published the first volume of his fantasy series, Lord of the Rings.
63 yrs old - Countess Rosa Branicka, a wealthy Polish noble, performed breast cancer surgery on herself and lived to be 82.
70 yrs old - Benjamin Franklin helped draft the Declaration of Independence.
75 yrs old - Warren Buffett set up a $30 billion contribution to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for use in various world-wide charitable causes. + Cancer survivor Barbara Hillary became one of the oldest people, and the first black woman, to reach the north pole.
80 yrs old – Jessica Tandy became the oldest Oscar recipient for her work in Driving Miss Daisy.
85 yrs old - At 85, “Coco” Chanel was the head of a fashion design firm.
90 yrs old - Pablo Picasso was still producing drawings and engravings.
95 yrs old - Nola Ochs became the oldest person to receive a college diploma, a degree in general studies with an emphasis on history.
100+ yrs old - Alice Porlock of Great Britain published her first book, Portrait of My Victorian Youth, when she was 102 years old.

I have seen things

In your arms

Every river that you try to cross

Some clear joy is coming

I choose  happiness today

I will breathe again

Today I took a day for me.  Sage will cleanse my space and I am going to heal the heart chakra.

I am hitting the reset button on my life. This means there will be a plethora of days I will take for myself in the future, because I am worth the time and worth the peace.
 

to someone careless...

Climbed up on a hilltop baby, see what I could see.

I heard this while driving in the mountains of New Mexico... so fitting at the moment.

"Pull myself together, put on a new face yeah,
Climb down off the hilltop baby,
Gonna get back in the race.
Cause I got dreams, I got my dreams
To remember, 

And I shall leave, like a thief in the night
to get
on a
Jet Plane.

no title needed

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt weakened in a broth.
What you held in your hand,
What you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before your learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.


Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
Like a shadow or a friend.

Lost in the Light

All the hard things we gotta do...

We'll make 'em turn their heads every place we go.

Listening to the rain...

Shimmering on the ends of my memories

I had to repost this gem. 



I've been seeing you
In this house of mine
Got your arms away
From my strange disguise
All the things that you believe
Are still in me
As though you please

And they shimmer
On the ends of my memories
I could feel your ghost
In the breeze

I'm telling you this
So you won't have anything
But this to know
Our colours fade
All this remains

And they shimmer
On the ends of my memories
I could feel your ghost
In the breeze

It's not so much
That you should say
You had a love
Turn out this way
It covers your ears
And stops your heart
And holds you near

The shimmer
On the ends of my memories
I could feel your ghost
In the breeze

New Moon Solar Eclipse May 9

Time for this girl to turn the page!

 

This is an excerpt from 

www.mysticmamma.com/new-moon-solar-eclipse-in-taurus-may-9th-10th-2013/ 

After an intense two weeks of deep awareness and letting go of old patterns since the last Full Moon/ Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio,  we arrive at this Solar Eclipse and powerful New Moon in Taurus, ready to shed it off and begin again!  We have gathered deep insight and now strengthened from our experience, we can ground  down and take time to seed our intentions and let out our soul call!  Here are the Astral Insights for this cosmic window opening for us…

First from the wonderful Cathy Pagano and her Wisdom of Astrology:

“Eclipses mark times of cosmic redirection and energy shifts…Something we’ve imagined and dreamed about begins to manifest at a solar eclipse.”

“This Taurus solar eclipse on May 9-10^th marks a new beginning, an especially fertile new beginning as it takes place in the astrological sign of manifestation.  Taurus is the most earthy of earth signs, marking a season of fertility and growth, of beauty and sensuality.   It is the energy of building and making, of new possibilities and passions. “

“Solar eclipses mark the end of a 19-year cycle relating to the activities relevant to each astrological sign.  A Taurus solar eclipse brings up issues of self-worth and values.  Since this eclipse is near the South Node of the Moon, we might have to examine old value systems that no longer serve our lives.  Do you honor the talents you have? Do you know what values stand at the center of your life?  Take time to dig deep in the soils of Taurus and weed out any old negative behavior patterns entrenched there.  Prepare the soil for new growth.”

“When we know our own worth, we can also access to the archetypal realm of Beauty, Desire and Fertility which is ruled by Venus/Aphrodite.   Know what you value in this precious life we have, because why build something you don’t value?  …Plant the seed of that new desire during this potent New Moon.”

“Venus/Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, Beauty, Wisdom, Sexuality and Wholeness rules Taurus.  Just hours before the solar eclipse, Venus leaves her home in Taurus and moves into Gemini, the sign of the Mind….”

“What beliefs about your feminine Self need to die so that a new vision of Feminine Spirit can arise and live through you?”

“…It can be a time of healing, when you realize that your loneliness and isolation was an incubation, a time of preparation.  Be willing to ‘lose your familiar self for the promise of a greater, more encompassing reality’ where you can use your feminine gifts to change the world.”

“Transmutation occurs from the inside out.  Let the light of your inner feminine Being shine into the world in conscious and conscientious ways.  ’Transmutation forces us to serve who we are becoming, beyond who we’ve been: ‘trans (beyond) mutate (change)’. Become intimate with yourself, so that you can be intimate with others.”

“This Venus-ruled solar eclipse asks us to look to the future: ‘personal power results from mastering the illusion of our fear through open-heartedness.’  When we open to our original blessings, we discover that the feminine values of Love, Wisdom and Beauty can help us through the darkest times.  Stop doing for a while and let your being shine through.”

The wind in my back

That's how I play

I'm going to New York City!

Happy Birthday to me. 

It's just an hour or two by airplane

saw this performed live.

sweeeet





This town surrounds another town we live beside
The highway exit change at random and the road divides
If you lose your way just ask a stranger they'll let you know
There's no way back to that house you knew so long ago

It has to go right this time.
It has to go right this time.
It has to go right this time.
It's got to go right .

A voice mail I received once

I've felt the coldness of my winter
I never thought it would ever go. I cursed the gloom that set upon us...
But I know that I love you so

A man from Birmingham

"I love all of you, each and every one of ya, to my death, but I swear you've all gone fucking mad!"
-Ozzy Osbourne

(he wanted to be a Beatle. Yeah, and I love him.)