A long, long day full of twists and turns, ups and downs at work. Also had a meeting with some old friends from BootlegTV days who run a well-known music distribution company -- a few of them have become fans and they are placing some SB Box Set songs into a number of national retail locations. I'm told to be listening for "Just What I Needed" in regular rotation at, among others, Eddie Bauer stores across the country during the month of Feburary.
Evening: an exceptional get together with Pat and Kristy Rodden and the Whidbey Island clan. Tonight's event, a 2nd annual dinner at Le Pichet and David Whyte presentation at Benaroya Hall. Pat and Kristy are good friends of David's -- what a treasure to ingest the physically emotional intelligence that pours from his hypnotic voice and the deep, multi-layered currents that flow through his poetry and prose.
The theme this evening: "The Three Marriages: Work, Self, & Other"
Some excerpts from David's work:
"Most of us must sustain three marriages in our lives: The marriage with our work and society, the marriage - official or not - with our partner, and the deeper marriage with our emerging selves. To choose between these relationships is to impoverish them all. Work-life balance means creating a real conversation, a live frontier between all three commitments that enriches each area of our lives, allowing it to be simultaneously troubled and emboldened by the others.""There is not work without struggle. But if your work is all struggle, then you’re actually damaging yourself, and probably your world and those around you that you love, too. We need a sense of the eternal in our labors, in our work, a sense of spaciousness where we’re not waking up into the great "to do" list of life, but we’re actually at some kind of spacious frontier where time is growing from your experience. It’s what Blake would have called "a moment of eternity." Blake also said there’s a moment in every day that Satan cannot find, and that’s your moment, that’s your moment where you feel like you belong, and you’re doing the right thing in the right way for the right people. And so, in order to garner that for yourself, you must have some form of courageous conversation running like a thread through your work. In order to break out from the imprisoning forces that are enormous around work, you must constantly and cyclically visit this frontier of courage in which you must make yourself visible, speak out, and through that conversation transform your arrangements, your life, your career, the people you work with, the organization you work for."
Reading this does not even come close to capturing the presence and gravity in his voice. For me, witnessing David speak is like going to church - inside his voice, within his words, I can feel a 'fire in the song.'
Last year, Pat and Kristy went on a retreat with David in Ireland that, as described, sounded very much like a Guitar Craft course. As I related to Pat this evening, I realize that there are three significant people I have known (each from the U.K.) who have deeply impacted my life with the power, poetry, and economy of their words. One of them was gracious and generous enough to accept me under his wing for a considerable portion of my youth. Another, has only recently made contact -- his voice and words were the energizing, motivating, non-sequitur soundtrack of my youth.
And David Whyte, very much like both of the others, has a clear connection to an exceptional world that, while always present, is not easily accessible from the noise and 'normalcy' of our average day to day state. David eloquently described this state this evening as 'being near the edge' --- another obvious and resonant connection to a work that, to this day, informs my musical sensibility: Close to the Edge.
So, coincidences and communications have me a bit sleepless and energized even amidst exhaustion from relentless juggling and groundshifting at work. Even within the groundshifting, I feel steady as a rock and, once again, like I have both prepared and waited all my life for this moment.
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