My Guitar and I

My guitar and I are working things out.  Truth be told, I’m not a fancy guitar player at all.  I don’t know the names of the chords, or any musical theory what so ever, but the guitar is more so a means of me connecting my creative loves of singing and songwriting.

Its true.  They came first. Music and singing have been a lifelong creative love.  Though it is not as though I discovered that love music at any specific point, it was just always there.  Songwriting, on the other  hand, came about when I first picked up a guitar at age 16 and wrote a song for a friend that was moving away, and it never really stopped.

When I picked up my guitar today to finally play it, i got chills down my spine and got a lil’ teary as I started to sing.  Its a different creative experience than photography.  Its as though music is a past lover and photography is my life partner.  Making music is the one that is so intense and powerful and got into the depths of who I am, but photogrpahy…its the one I know I’ll love for the rest of my life.

Songwriting is such a different creative process.  The way I experience it is similar to the way I hear writers explain their process.  Its as though we are vessels for art to manifest.  Songs have come to me whole, others take years to be finished.  Once I woke up from a dream and had a song about that dream come out in completion moments later.  Sometimes they are therapy, other times they feel like they are about something that hasn’t happened to me yet.

So, the return of my guitar from its case on the storage shelf back to a prime place of honor in my house came about this week when I made a decision I’ve been working up to for a very long time.

I’m going to squam. 

Now, for those of you who are visiting me here and are wondering what the heck squam is, go here…

I’ve wanted to go to squam, well, ever since I heard about it.  Though at that point I was feeling far more introverted and less confident than I am these days and the prospect of going to a retreat with some of the people who inspire me the most these days…was just all too much for me at the time.  So when this years registration came about, I proceeded to convince myself not to go.  Me, being on the west coast of one country and it being on the east coast of another was a great excuse for me not to go for a while.  Then there’s the money.  Yet another excuse.  What I realized recently was that what overpowered these reasons was actually that I was plain old scared to go and when I realized that, well, that meant that I really, truly, had to be there.

That realization got kicked into high gear last week when I saw that there was only one spot left in the Jonatha Brooke’s songwriting class.  It was in that moment that it felt like my love of songwriting had enough of my scaredy cat ways and demanded “I WANT TO GO TO SQUAAAM”.  Before I knew it, there I was signing up and paying. 

The other class I’d been wanting to go to all along was Andrea Jenkin’s TTV workshop.  I so admire her work and am very excited to take her class!  I was extra giddy a few days later when the Marisa Haedike and Christine Mason Miller class got announced and fit divinely into my schedule for the weekend.   

A mere month after all of that goodness is to occur I’m heading to another art retreat, this one being the Be Present Retreat on the Oregon coast (swoon).  I’m so very excited to take classes with the lovely lovely Andrea Scher, Kelly Rae Roberts and Liz Lamoureux.

I have to take a moment writing that to sigh and revel in how exciting a fall its going to be getting to take all these workshops.  If you happen to be going to either retreat please let me know!

Ever since I decided go I’ve felt so good about that decision.  The amount of energy that I had been putting into thinking about squam, fearing going, stressing about it, pondering how i’ll need to take a week off the internet in September to avoid the squam, squam, squamness. So thankful that a part of me finally got sick enough of the squam-drama in my head and just settled the score.

Its going to be soo good to have all my creative loves explored at these retreats, along with pushing me creatively to do more painting.

I can barely wait for fall, though by no means do i want to rush this summer by!

And in response to the lovely megg’s comment about sharing some music… i’m workin’ on it!