home sweet new home

If you have begun to wonder where I have been — I return to you today. My winter has been scattered with work and play, both of these have required a certain type of brain energy that leaves me very tired by midday. My November was twenty days away from home as I embarked on a songwriter tour from Alberta to British Columbia and back through. I saw the mountainside before and after an avalanche, I listened to the prairie wind howl, the sky-like space that rolls between each ocean wave, I sang for my supper, I sang for strangers, some of whom became friends. I visited nightly the notes between my lungs and guitar as if every broken moment was meant to lead me here. If you asked me of the hardest hill to climb in doing such a thing, I would speak of how I missed the early morning coffees at home and the way thoughts have time to gather and conclude when you're not on the road. As you ride the highway, you think often, but you don't have the hours free to make much sense. You know as the wheels roll, you are on your way to a new town with new faces but you don't yet know what they will think of you and what you will be thinking when you fall to your pillow at night.

You go on singing into the shining lights in a room you've never stood in before and it gives rise to both an uneasy and beautiful feeling like nothing else I have ever known. When I was young, I only dreamed but it seems lately these dreams have come true and I am required to pinch myself in order to believe this reality of mine. Sometimes, I feel like I am just singing into a jewelry box and one day when the lights go dim, somebody will jump out at me and say "wake up, you're still only dreaming.."

At the beginning of the tour — a very small tragedy occurred. I suddenly fainted and busted my right ankle until it looked like the size of a watermelon. I was certain at this point that my belief in the world not being entirely cruel was thoughtless and wrong. It hurt like being stung by a hive of angry bees. I was suddenly without my ability to walk, to move, to survive the way I have been taught to. When something happens to the body, it happens to the mind too, and I was feeling lower than a broken berry from a branch. There was no time for rest, the shows followed the moon and I knew it would be far more miserable for me to quit only to stay in bed as my foot healed, so I took up hopping like a bunny on one foot. My tour mates helped me to the stages where I sat with my baseball bat of a guitar. At times, it was heavy on my mind how much my foot was hurting but other times I was just glad to be alive and singing.

More than the road or the songs and the singing, what has kept me from you is mostly due to our move into a new house. After ten years in the same one, with the same walls and the same distance to get to where the coyotes spook the air, we have found a new home and it has been emotionally rewarding but also exhaustive — moving cardboard box after box, learning to let go and beginning again. It is a strange thing - when your living in the middle of a day or a life, waiting for things to happen as things are happening. I am not quite sure where to put my thoughts or what to do in a day. December has yet to see snow but I haven't had any time to notice.

Tomorrow is my birthday and the candles will be counted as twenty five. I have an album to finish, a new house to behold and sentences to write here all while continuing to live as one does in the midst of the beauty and chaos that makes up a world.

I will return to you.

Until then.