gratitude...

Today I took a car drive through gentle rolling hills, brown dairy pastures and tall trees of pine to play music with my "brother from another mother." Not only do I cherish playing his music, but I love this guy. Sixty minutes each way in the Subaru gave me time to sort out some of my thoughts. One hundred and ninety minutes of making music gave me food to fill my soul for another week. I am so grateful. These are trying times: fearful, perplexing and discouraging. Simultaneously they are grace-filled and compassionate, too.

Another friend recently quoted Dickens to me noting: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. When our music stopped today and I was loading up my various basses for home, my friend said, "You can almost smell the mud. Spring is just around the corner." Yes, totally true - and so much more as well. Yesterday, my lover gave to me a small book of poetry for Valentine's Day. In one poem, "Doubt," Jennifer Wallace gets it right when she writes:

I look at it this way: either you exist or you don't. I don't think -
in your case - that there's an in-between, a "sort of" God. And the
point seems to be not to think about it or to reason about it. But
here's the thing: If I am to believe in what others say (these others
being agents of yours), then I was made by you in your image. And
since I am predisposed by nature to questions everything, it would
see you wanted it this way. That you are also "this way." That you
sewed into me a weak thread that you hoped would unravel. . .
setting me off-course with respect to you. It's an odd strategy. But
the same one who invented oxygen invented doubt and I guress
that sort of variety keeps things moving, which you are a fan of.
No doubt about that.

The more I thought about it, I realized that the music we played today spoke of a world where threads unravel, personally and socially, and where beauty awakens the possibilities of healing, too. It is also where tender mercies are all we truly have to share. There were sweetly crafted original compositions mixed with a few covers. Here's one new to me. It gives shape and form to what I feel in my heart. I am so grateful.