Good morning, dear friends, and Pádraig, what a lovely gift to arrive at this prompt on a Sunday morning, wren song and all. I am slow to wake this morning after a weekend of gigs. Last night, a sunset concert with my old band, Hippie Tendencies, with whom I haven't sung in quite some time. Revisiting the songs I wrote just after that midlife point led to the most luminous evening (I’ll leave a photo in my notes) and had us all questioning why we aren't still writing together. The answer is artistic evolution, each of us reaching, but perhaps it is time for a revisit.
I just turned 60 in May, so by these measures, midlife would have been 30. I had just moved to Italy following a man who was not good for me. I didn’t yet speak the language, and I was floundering, trying to decide what direction my creative path would take. It was a moment of reckoning with a difficult childhood and the slow, terrible recognition that I was recreating the same stifling atmosphere I had grown up in.
It took a few more years, but the epiphany came when my brother visited and said that next time he would stay in a hotel because he could not bear to watch how I was being treated. That same night, I understood: any home where my favorite person on the planet cannot stay is no home I want to build. bell hooks had already been whispering this to me. "All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way." I left.
My companions in that period were mostly musical, as I was building a band. Ani DiFranco, in particular, was instrumental in the steady expansion of my own badassness. (One of the few covers we played last night was her "Buildings and Bridges”!!) And it was in that same period that I discovered bell hooks, whose Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood expanded my everything and handed me back a sense of self. She wrote, "To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality." That sentence became a compass.
I am still building on what she gave me. I look forward to reading you all, though I may be slow this week, still feeling the beautiful work of the last three nights.
