notes from the kelp

…listen
…about the music

Waiting to find out.

And the little kelp clump is thinking, “someday I’ll grow up to be just like THAT!”

Reality is just perception. Keep the dream alive.

…listen
…about the music

Happily-ever-aftering in camelid.

At some point in this bloglet’s existence, I suppose I’m going to run out of animals to post, but that time has not yet come. Actually, I had really wanted to show you the two adorable young raccoons who have become regular visitors to my studio doorstep each evening this week. But my nighttime photography skills are not good, and to make things even more challenging, I’d have to shoot through the closed glass door since I’m guessing that raccoons running loose in my office could cause just a bit of chaos. Might inspire an interesting piece, though.

The blogosphere has long enjoyed a Friday tradition in which otherwise serious contributors post cute photos of their cats. Despite having never been terribly serious to begin with, I’ve participated in this ritual on many occasions, as my kelp-flogged readers know. Yes, second only to porn and viagra ads, I’m pretty sure that the net is clogged with an over-abundance of kitty pics. But today, instead I offer up for your amusement other incredibly adorable creatures: alpacas.

I would bet that anyone who doesn’t know this island would be surprised to learn that it’s home to several alpaca farms. The animals do very well in the moderate climate, and so do their caretakers, breeding and shearing them to grace the rest of us with clothing even more luxurious than cashmere. If you like the ultra-soft warmth of alpaca fur, you’re in for a treat. At least I’ve heard. I’ve never been able to hold onto these large animals for very long, much less sling one around my shoulders, but I’m told that people just love wearing alpaca.

…listen
…about the music

Grounded.

A signature of this island is the impressive amount of driftwood that wanders to its shores. Not just small branches, flung by a few gusts afar to become suddenly afloat, but entire trees blown over and out to sea from violent storms, and very large logs that tumble from barges while en route to a less sandy substrate. Our beaches are a repository for the thousands of stories these wooden immigrants might tell.

My own story becomes a happier one with each ring I add around my trunk (figuratively, not literally, otherwise my figure would be literally disfigured after 46 such rings and I’d need larger jeans). I spent much of my twenties and thirties adrift on seas of uncertainty. I worked ardently, but sometimes at cross purposes with my true self. Yet something clicked in my later thirties. An inner compass pulled by an invisible magnetic force took hold, and steered me to joy. Love, music, friendship, personhood, all became easier. I have no idea why, but I am grateful.

I’ve arrived to these shores, right alongside of the driftwood. All of us, no longer at sea, no longer adrift. Home.

…listen
…about the music

There is no citrus at Lime Kiln.

Lime Kiln State Park is one of this island’s living postcards. One of the most photographed spots, it seems impossible to resist snapping one’s own pix of the lighthouse across from B.C.’s Southern Gulf Islands, even though the tourist shops offer plenty of far better ones on the cheap. My inner shutterbug bites often.

My outer loquacious self yaps often, too, and this interview just came out yesterday. Anything but a postcard, it is long enough to put you back to sleep during your morning coffee, I promise. The webzine’s side bar even contains an earlier interview with me from a year and a half ago, plus a review of this blog’s eponymous disc. Plenty of music-related fodder, for those in need of additional reading material the nature of which is not usually found in these kelp-infested pixels.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, whaddya think the going rate is for a thousand words?

…listen
…about the music

Neither fish nor… foul.

Out of town business trips can be a little tiring, and I seem to be flown somewhere to do something every month these days. Since each voyage involves music and friends on the touchdown end of the plane trip, and since I limit my travel the rest of the month, I have a great time. But I always look for things that make the tedium of the to- and fro- segments amusing and productive.

For the latter, my laptop and Treo are invaluable. Email and web access anywhere, any time, are fun fun fun! There’s always something to read or answer… always always always! And, I like having the chance to keep working (or work at all, if I’ve been putting it off) on essays coming due, or the arc and scope of a new piece that’s in the gestation stage. I sometimes write my compositions by literally writing about them. What I want the music to do. Where a certain section will lead. How a particular passage could be developed.

Adjectives and adverbs and occasional wildly scribbled drawings, too, are all used to move a piece forward to the next step, and when I get back to my studio, I’ve got a nifty map of what I’m doing. That is, until I do it and the music itself chooses to do something entirely different. This actually happens a lot. I often compare composing a piece with walking a border collie on a leash: you think you’re going one way, but the dog thinks otherwise. A kind owner will sometimes allow the dog to choose its own direction and not rein it in too tightly. I try to be kind to my music. Most of the time I think it has me on a leash.

One of the constants on my desk is a stack of CDs received from colleagues, all waiting to be heard with my full attention (I marvel at people who can have music on in the background and still function at other things). It’s often hard to carve out time during a week to sit a listen to a disc, no matter how wonderful, when there’s so much to be done. And many times at home when I’m in the deepest throes of composing, I just can’t listen to other pieces at all because the constant music in my head leaves little room for anything else. I wish the solution for catching up on my list was to take discs or MP3s with me for long trips. But alas, listening to music on a plane is pointless; the jet engine drone devours all the low and mid-range frequencies that the music does. Given the choice, I’ll go with the engine drone, since the lack of one would put an effective stop to any need to listen to those CDs at all.

Last week, instead of taking the 9-seat puddle jumper to Seattle and droning Boeing 737 points beyond, I spent an hour and a half on the ferry from Friday Harbor to Anacortes, a small town on yet another island named Fidalgo that’s connected to the mainland by a bridge. I had left on the 6am boat and my ride east was accompanied by a sunrise that gradually revealed all the islands we passed. From Anacortes, it’s about 2 hours east and south to Seattle. The first third of the drive rolls past farmland framed by snow capped mountain ranges to the south and the east. Glorious.

My trip down was filled with wildlife, right up to take-off. In an open field on the right, thousands upon thousands of snow geese had gathered. The bright white was nearly blinding against the green pasture. A few minutes later on my left, I passed another field with even larger, even whiter migrating birds: trumpeter swans. Hundreds of them. To cap it off, as we neared a Douglas fir by the roadside, my van driver pointed to a full sized adult bald eagle perched only about twenty feet up. What a sight. All of this. A nice morning commute, indeed.

Yet, inspiring as all these birds were, nothing could compare to what I saw from Alaska airlines, above, as my Delta flight taxied to the runway. The Oscars should hand out Best Art Direction awards for aeronautics. I’ve always seen the potential for planes as mural canvasses. Now my dream has come true, at least on a few metal tubes. After wild salmon, can grizzly bears and moose be far behind? The thought of all these animals flinging themselves through the air with the rest of us from one coast to the other makes me smile. In my search for productivity, I am almost always amused.

…listen
…about the music

A trio for this trio.

Moses (in silhouette); Smudge (in attack mode); and Bambi (in fine dining attire).
This trio amuses me on a regular basis. Most of the time, Smudge doesn’t seem to care about these weird looking dogs that come round the studio to bogart the birds’ sunflower seeds. But on occasion, he feels the need to defend his territory, and jumps at the glass door in a noble, if pathetic, attempt to scare off the antlered interlopers.
It’s of no use.

I gleefully await the spring, with its new shoots and buds, already becoming visible. And: the promise of a few very non-indigenous sunflowers popping up here and there in the woods, courtesy of the potent combination of my largess, and the digestive systems of the local venison.

I’m off at the crack o’ dawn to NYC; more blogging when I return home at week’s end. Have a lovely week, my sweets.

…listen
…about the music

Waltzing across the sky.

What? You gotta problem with this gorgeous photo of tonight’s lunar eclipse? Huh? You can’t tell that’s what… What? Oh… what this is? Really?

Hey, those clear, glowing astronomy pix are everywhere. Look in any newspaper, there ya go, Perfect Eclipse Photo. Anyone can post a professional quality eclipse photo these days. But here in Kelpville, I provide my readers with something a little more… uh… unique.
Artistic, even.
The Interpretive Dance of the Eclipse,
(as seen through the hands of a composer who should cut down on her caffeine intake)
waltzing with the star Regulus (dressed in blue)
and that faaaaabulous ringed orb, Saturn (lower left, in a demure buttercup yellow).

My camera doesn’t have a tripod. We dun need no steenkin’ tripod! It has a… bipod. Two legs. Human. Guess that makes it a biped. Actually, I think that I took tonight’s particular ever-hopeful-idiot-newbie shot while resting the camera on the top of Charles’s very nice head as we sat in the middle of a spectacular open expanse on the south end of the island. We looked rather like something out of Cirque du Soleil but with noticeably more clothes. This was the same spot from which I took that Baker pic below. I would describe it as a place with a 360 degree view, but frankly, I could say that about my bathroom if I spun around in it, so maybe that’s not as impressive a statement as I intended.

If I told you where this spot was, I’d have to shoot you. Rather, my neighbors would shoot me, ‘cos they all want to keep the magic of this island a big secret. And who can blame them? They like it that mainlanders think we have the crap weather of Seattle and a tough time procuring even the most basic medical supplies like aspirin (for when you’ve spun in your bathroom too long). Yup, it’s all true. Oh, and indoor plumbing and electricity are hard to come by. But who needs power when you can light up the sky with interpretive dance!
For some reason I am reminded of the etymology for lunacy…

On a clear day, you CAN see forever. Almost. To balance that lovely view of the Olympics in my last post, here’s another gift: the Cascades, directly to the east, framing Lopez, Decatur and Blakely Islands. I gaze at this sight and a sense of absolute serenity overtakes me. I have no idea why. There’s something about the combination of wind-whipped water, tree-blanketed islands and snow-covered mountains that just makes everything instantly wonderful. Add an 11,000 foot volcano to the mix and wow, what a sight.

Then, add a zoom lens, and even with a little haze in the air, suddenly something that’s 300 miles away looks so close you could walk to it. I think I see people’s ski poles as they make their way down Mt. Baker:

…listen
…about the music

A dreamy vista, very 80’s but hey, these mountains are even older.

…listen
…about the music

Noble, a la 90’s TV.

Standing at South Beach (no, not the one in Miami), this is what you see looming over endless piles of driftwood when you turn your head to the left. Oh, having a zoom lens on your camera helps, too. I could stay here all day and try to capture the parade of colors that bounce off this snow-draped mountain range. The palette shifts depending on the slant of the sun and the mood of the clouds. Light is a paintbrush, and this is visual music.

…listen
…about the music

Missing something…..

The photo above was taken two stormy days ago at San Juan County Park. The waves were larger than you can tell, but the Canadian islands seen across the Haro Strait still beckoned like Sirens. My half-sister journeyed here for a wonderful three day visit, and I had a blast taking her all over this island, to every favorite spot and then some new ones we discovered together.

Our father used to refer to us as “his only two and his two onlies.” Lisa and I never lived together, yet thanks to the mysteries of DNA we’re remarkably similar in many ways and have always loved each other’s company. Lisa’s life is nearly polar opposite to mine: the mother of two terrific college-aged sons, she’s a very, very high ranking career Diplomat and economist with the State Department and has lived all over the world. This summer she moves to Brazil, where she becomes Deputy Chief of Mission for our three consulates there. Wow. Before that, it was the Dominican Republic, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Peru. It’s always a treat to see Lisa.

My apologies for being off the blog radar for a few days. Especially to Glenn, who as readers can see from his recent comments, was forced to find hidden poetry from my old posts (keeping this blog going in my absence, thus becoming a defacto Kelp blogger himself). Thanks, Glenn. I would give you a salary and put you on staff, were I able.

Yes, I went underground. Or I should admit, the left hemisphere of my brain did. Lisa’s visit was Good Reason #2; given our physical distances, I don’t see her more than once or twice a year, sometimes less, so when I do she’s got my full attention. Good Reason #1 prior to her visit involves the limitations of my cerebral cortex. There comes a point when in the final throes of certain pieces (not all), I just can’t cope well with non-music things, language and administrative tasks being among them. Yes, of course, urgent items get done, because they must. But most things are not urgent, even if they masquerade as such, glaring at me in my ever-fattening Inbox. The older I get, the more I realize that the earth will indeed continue to spin on its axis if I don’t participate in external activities for a moment. So much of what I do is external: daily communications with people around the world, writing, public speaking, filling orders, etc. Yet my internal life keeps me even busier.

Case in point: I finished the band piece. Hooray! Now the abilities of my left brain are called upon as I finalize the printed score. The music in one’s head and the music on the page are examples of the two cerebral hemispheres, and they really are entirely different animals. The first is the True Inspiration and the latter is how the True Inspiration can be translated into something musicians can actually play and people can actually hear. Left brain, right brain. Maybe they’ll take a picnic together sometime.

…listen
…about the music

Changing chakras.

Above is one in a series of spectacular views as I floated back to Friday Harbor on the ferry on Sunday afternoon. The snow had only just stopped and the sunlight pushed against blue skies. If you don’t like the weather, just wait ten minutes. That’s our motto.

My beloved snow has melted.

White has been replaced by the vibrant green it temporarily shrouded. Very pretty. And almost warm. The winds have picked up this evening and a moment ago it was just invigorating, not cold, being outside wrestling with a too-large pile of recycling that awaits a trip to the “transfer station” north of town. Others call such destinations “the dump,” but on an island, everything gets shipped over to the mainland. What those mainlanders do with our rinsed, flattened and squished items is anyone’s guess, but I keep high, imaginary hopes for the endless re-uses of all those cardboard boxes and happily emptied wine bottles.

Transferring one existence, to another: moving boxes morph from tree to container, and travel from there to here; grapes morph from fruit to beverage, and travel from bottle to belly. Snow melts, and I ferry back and forth at will. Life, in all its forms, is in constant transit.

…listen
…about the music

Tweet tweet.

It’s not uncommon for islanders to head south for the winter months and join the other snowbirds, even though the season here is very temperate. Most days are in the low to mid forties, dipping into the 30’s at night. There isn’t the bitter cold of the Minnesotan or New York winters that Charles and I grew up enduring. The air here is crisp and fresh and pure and invigorating, and tromping around outside to chop wood or spread birdseed is a joy. This dark-eyed junco is especially pleased that I feel this way. It rarely snows and when it does, the powdery fluff is gone within hours, melted into a memory.

But yesterday as I was headed home from Seattle, it did indeed snow on San Juan Island– and the snow stuck! A couple of very pretty inches that have turned everything in view into a work of art. I’m loving all phases of winter here and can’t imagine why others flee for Arizona, Florida, the Caribbean, Mexico, Hawaii and Central America. Ok, well, I can– but I’m so completely at home in this, that staying here seems like a vacation in and of itself. The weather here is so much better than where I grew up. Is there a word for feeling even more at home than where your original home was?