Gotta fly

I don't know exactly when the anniversary is, but at some point in the past few months, this website celebrated its third birthday. I do know that I've been banging away more or less weekly at this diary (it was never daily!) since June 11 of 2003. That makes it the longest journal I've ever kept.

It's been an interesting journey. I started out trying to chronicle my second kick at the can as a performing songwriter, and wound up considering the state of my own soul against the background of the stimulating and challenging new environments I was hurtling through. Self-reflection to the point of navel-gazing seems to have become my stock in trade, although I've earnestly tried to limit my posts to what I thought might be useful to others along their own very different paths. I thought of it as "growing out loud" and I hope it's been of some interest to my readers at least.

But I confess that it's no longer of much interest to me. I'm tired of writing "I", for one thing. I took on the first-person narrative partly in reaction to the third-person PR that a lot of us singer-songwriters make up about ourselves; I was seeking something a little more genuine, I suppose. Still, it seems to me now that's just a form of narcissism that disguises itself as modesty.

In any case, as I near the three-year anniversary of my first post, I find myself wanting to wrap up this chunk of time and all the reflections on it, stow it somewhere, and start fresh. That was then, this is now, right? And I'd really rather deal with "now," now!

I don't know where that takes me next. There's still the matter of the big bold word "diary" in my navigation bar, and I wouldn't mind it linking to something fresh and current. There are parts of this journey that continue to require working out in words, I think. Whether they're worth sharing, I don't know.

I'm awkwardly aware that this may sound like I'm feeling insecure about readership. I assure you that's not the case. In fact, knowing that people do read these words regularly makes me squeamish about making any changes; I hate to take a chance on disappointing supporters. At the same time, I've got a keen sense that the time has come to do it a little differently, and I've got to follow that feeling.

I'll let you know when I work it out. Gotta fly.

Prime location

I had my thirty-seventh birthday yesterday. It was a plain ordinary day in my life, and I don't think I could have enjoyed it more. I was woken up by a birthday call from my daughter, got to gaze around at my garden over coffee, worked online for most of the morning, ran a bunch of errands without fuss or furor, piled into a mighty Mexican supper with fond friends, and generally just had a decent day on planet Earth, comfortable in the skin I'm in.

Of course, I've been working on turning thirty-seven for about six months now, and not always gracefully. It's like practicing for a gig: if you do enough of the tough ugly stuff in advance, it happens pretty smoothly when the big moment rolls around. I do that with birthdays. It's just the way I am. But I'd been working on this one harder than usual, mostly because thirty-seven is a prime number.

You may wonder what possible difference that could make... and I sure can't prove the science of it... but it makes a difference to me. The fact that thirty-seven can't be divided by anything other than one and itself is important to me. It means my entire life to this point can be symbolically treated as a discrete chunk of time/experience/memory. And for that matter, based on best estimates, I've probably got about an equal chunk of time/experience/possibility ahead of me. So I'm primed for what's next!

I wasn't sure where that line of thinking would take me, but the effects have been pretty cool now that it's started to happen. For one thing, I've updated my own mental image of my life timeline. Until recently, I was sort of seeing myself hover over my early thirties; in fact, at every point in my life that I can remember, I've seen myself hovering over the numbers, except maybe when I was less than ten years old, and the numbers hovered over me.

As of yesterday - I'm serious about this by the way - I don't actually see the numbers unless I make the effort. I stand where I am. The past and the present extend from this moment, if I bother to follow the strands of energy all over the place, but I feel like I'm just here now. (When I DO look forward, I see fifty a lot more clearly than I ever did... but wow, my teens and twenties have been squished together behind my early thirties, like the folds of an accordion bellows!)

More importantly, for the first time I can ever recall, I feel like I'm just "I" now. As if the many potentialities of myself have, like the many temporalities of this moment, somehow coalesced. And critically, the observing self (I) feels quite at one with the existing self (me.) That's something unexpected and totally refreshing.

I don't expect this feeling to last, although it would be wonderful if it did. But even if I could perpetually sense the eternity of now, and perpetually experience the unity of I, I'm quite certain that wouldn't be enough.

While achieving this sense of 'I/me' unity is a good thing for me - it feels like a foundation of some kind - I still think 'I' has got to be the most selfish, arrogant word in the universe! I'm pretty sure that the true unity I would seek is not of self, but of all... which means the end of 'I'. And I'm pretty sure it's going to take the other chunk of my life to get to that stage.

Meanwhile, I'm here, I'm happy, and I feel right at home. After all, I am in a prime location...

I'll live with my shadow

I broke a mirror not long ago and was surprised to find myself feeling glad about it. As someone who is involuntarily superstitious, I'd never have done something like that on purpose, but I needed to be reminded to stay away from my reflection. In reflections, everything is backward, and all you can see is the surface.

Looking away from the mirror, the first thing I noticed was my shadow: the lightless void I create simply by being here and standing against the light. Unlike my reflection, my shadow doesn't wait for me to gaze upon it, and disappear when I stop paying attention. My shadow doggedly follows me everywhere I go; in fact when the sun is at my back, my shadow even walks before me.

We live in a world of light and darkness. It's tempting to see everything in those terms, and it's tempting to call the darkness "bad" and the light "good." My shadow is dark; isn't it therefore my own darkness I see in my shadow? And I see a lot of darkness: I have poisons in my blood, anger in my thoughts, sadness in my soul. Like my shadow these things lengthen in the low-lying sun of midwinter.

But I've noticed something interesting about shadows. They only disappear on three occasions: when the sun is directly overhead; when the sky is completely overcast and grey... and when the night is so dark and stormy you can't see anything at all.

In other words, if I want to lose my shadow, I need to either stand with the sun beating down on me relentlessly, or to live in a world stripped of contrast and colour, or plunge unseeing into unmitigated blackness.

I think I'll live with my shadow. Who knows, maybe some unseen ant or earthworm can use the shade.

Me, myself and I

I'll start this post by saying I'm aware of Freud's theory of the Ego, the Superego and the Id, but it's been a really long time since I've read it and I'm not drawing on it consciously here.

But I have been spending a lot of time figuring out me, myself and I. Lately I've come to believe that these are separate, if overlapping and interdependent parts of the person I am. It's a semantic challenge to talk about, but it goes like this:

Me is the plain human male, seeking the plain human things of this world - food, sex, warmth, heat, gasoline, Blue Rodeo albums, a digital camera, and something from Ikea to keep my shoes tidy. Me is dumb, but decent enough, mostly, and his motivations are clear. Yes, he thinks about women all the time. Yes, he barbeques inordinately often. Yes , he builds stuff compulsively and drives all over the place marking territory. But that's me.

Myself, on the other hand, is completely interior. I don't think anyone but me knows him, and me mostly hates him. Myself is like a dark echo, some kind of ghost in the machine that was generated when me became aware of me. That's typical of me, to go and invent a bogeyman and then not be able to get away from the little bastard. Stupid me for doing that; I get the sense it's my own fault myself is a jerk.

Then there's I. I can see me, watch me and even love me, for all my shortcomings. I can stay calm and silent in the face of all that distresses me. I even can give a stern lecture to myself, and it's occasionally pretty effective. I'm eternal. I'm at peace. I'm in tune.

Now, if only me and myself could quit the endless questing and questioning, I could get on with my life.

Being better

Anyone who's been following my recent posts knows that I've been shedding my skin. In fact, thinking about it now, I realize I've been writing about being in the midst of a big transition for probably a year or more.

So it hardly makes sense at this point to consider any new perspective I may come up with, the definitive word on where I'm headed. As a friend of mine once wisely pointed out, "Dave means what he says when he says it," and you can figure out the implications of that without my help.

But I will say this: I'm going to become a better person, I really am. It's actually becoming a huge priority for me right now. To quote Bruce Springsteen, "man, I'm just tired and bored with my self." The two biggest challenges in my musical endeavours: exhaustion, and my damned boring self.

When I hit the road again as a musician, I was almost laughably modest about it. I recorded Evergreen in front of about 11 people, and I spent just about the whole night with my eyes closed, shyly singing my songs and stringing them togther with heartfelt little true tales that I felt deeply about.

That was only the second solo show I'd done in five years. I took to the stage again at age 31 because I wanted to honour the gift of my songs, not to be a rock star. I wanted to make a contibution to the understanding of the Canadian experience, and indeed the human experience, on the basis of the richly varied life I've been so fortunate to enjoy. I wanted to let my own little light shine.

But not on myself! That was really important, and it needs to be number one again, because I'm worried I'm becoming all about me. And frankly, me doesn't deserve all the attention. See, in this business, even though I'm not particularly well-known, I've learned that I can still become a big jerk, because even if not many other people are thinking about me, I'm thinking about (and promoting) myself all the time - whether I'm making my new poster or picking the perfect t-shirt to wear on stage. Or writing in this publicly visible diary, for that matter.

Note to self: The world doesn't need another small-time guy who's all about himself. Sing your songs, tell your tales and your truth, and get on with being better.

The road and me, the road in me

I just got back from Winnipeg, where I had a great time feeling away and awake and alive and alone and all those things that make a road warrior road worthy.

I came back as I often do, wild and weak and weary and worn, dragging myself to the doorstep with nothing but blunt words and worthless sighs to share.

So much of my life has been spent in faraway places, on the brink of this or that, chasing epiphanies and scrambling after peak experiences, that I'm afraid I've ruined my ability to be at peace in one place anymore. My heart crosses the doorstep like a marathon runner breasting the tape to collapse in exhaustion on the other side.

These are the ugly edges of my selfish self. I've got a lot of work to do.

Winnipeg was wonderful. For a while there, so was I.

I listened to myself

Yesterday I did something I had been putting off doing for about 4 months: actually listening to the final master of "Roll Away" in its entirety, just one time for safety's sake before actually sending it out for production.

I put headphones on and laid down on the couch. Lightfoot the Cat came and sat on my chest. And I listened to the 16 tunes that took me a year and a half to record in four different old wooden buildings across Ontario and Nova Scotia - the ones that got picked for this final part of the journey. The sun set and the Christmas lights came on outside, and I listened to myself.

As a photographer, all my work was always about laying stuff bare. I learned to appreciate the lines in people's faces and the jagged edges of broken windows and the way that old paint peels.

That's what it's like to listen to myself now. I don't know why I am the way I am. But I have to accept that I'm like that, because I'm now 35 and there doesn't seem to be any going back.

I'm rough. I have jagged edges. I have lines in my face and I sometimes feel that I'm spending my life peeling away like old paint. And it seems the best my thinking self can do is to watch and to listen and to somehow appreciate what I'm doing when I do it without thinking.

My imperfection is my gift. It's an imperfect gift, but it's all I've got. I'm hoping that maybe by being honestly imperfect, I can somehow find a form of perfection that a human being can handle.

That's what I heard, when I listened to myself.

String art, Part 1

A portrait of the artist as a series of search strings: here are the top search queries that led people to my website in November of 2003. This is what I look like to a search engine. In a weird way, it's not far off what I look like to myself.





Top 20 of 68 Total Search Strings



david newland

chainsaw mill

bayberry bush

removing drywall

alaska chainsaw mill

Newland

bayberry bushes

chainsaw milling

drywall arch

hazelwood acoustic project

heaven only knows

newland

open mic toronto

NEWLAND

Suzanne de Bussac

alaska mill

chainsaw lumber milling

hazelwood acoustic

Aengus Finnan Lightfoot

Alaska Mill chainsaw

Only the self burns

I'm in one of those barren psychological/emotional/spiritual spaces that it seems I must inevitably enter from time to time. I've been thinking of something an artist I once met said about times like these: "you're just in the desert. Artists always end up wandering around in the desert. You'll come out of it." And I probably will.

I have a tendency when there is an apparent lack of meaning for miles around to try to find some in whatever I may have on hand, or stumble across at the time. This is a poor system because it unnaturally elevates whatever signs I may glean to the level of prophecy, but it's virtually impossible to resist the effort. The best I can manage is to filter it all through a thin sieve of ironic awareness, and hope that if what trickles through isn't the pure sustenance I may be searching for, at least it won't choke me.

Case in point: I've just finished reading Harold Bloom's massive and, in my view, mostly garrulous and exasperating book "Genius," which attempts to put a finger on the creative impetus of 100 great writers by examining the world-views they expound in their works. This is a huge effort that is mostly obscured, in my view, by the author apparently having written strictly to and for himself. I can't imagine any reader, however literate, besides the author, making relevant narrative sense of his constant self-references, his arcane use of the Hebrew Kaballah as a structuring device, his sometimes arbitrary choices of authors, his catty and repetitive political and social jabs, or his rampaging stream of literary, philosophical and theological terms.

However, in and among the froth of words there occasionally bob little gems, mostly passages and ideas extracted from the great works in question; occasionally, quotations from other writers and thinkers whom Bloom suggests may have helped set the stage for whoever is up for discussion at the moment, and rarely, but importantly, some of Bloom's own notions, which, when they are good, are really, really interesting. The idea, for example, that fictional characters can be as real as historical people, sometimes more so, is fascinating to me, and it's one I'll be exploring a lot. Then there's the idea of self-overhearing: that what makes a character like Hamlet so deep and rich is that we observe him beginning to listen to himself, and undergoing deep changes as a result. I probably should do more of that.

Meanwhile, though, there are six words that are still cooling my throat, a day after having finished this massive and confusing odyssey of a book, and I've been trying to savour them in the real hope that they may sustain me through the rest of this sandy wasteland, however long it may last. They're from the German mystic Meister Eckhart, who isn't even one of the book's 100 subjects, but here they are just the same:

"Only the self burns in hell," he says. And I suspect he's right.