This is a love song...

The smell - that nearly rotten brackish smell - twists through the stray wisps of my hair as I peddle my Schwinn down passed the large water-front homes and through the tall trees to the edge of the peninsula.  

Now I see the water logged stars and breakers go about their usual business.  Fishermen still sit with their polls beside them though time nears mid-day and the chances of making a good catch slim rapidly.  They hesitate to leave lest the perfect fish should pass and never return.  

A blue heron shoots a suspicious eye in my direction and launches in, to safer and quieter ground.  This native celebrity has no tolerance for interruptions.  You will never find her sunning at the community pool nor venturing out to the super market.  No, she keeps to herself and considers it an offense when others do not as well.  

In the distance cloudy-white patches of fabric rise from barely visible ships beneath them and labor to pull their vessels against the tide.  

I was born out of this river.  My hem eternally pinned to its shores by the warning lights that spear deep into its body along every inlet.  I am tied to its docks.  I am forever bound by this place for it holds captive the root of my peace - an unbreakable chain and the origin of its lock unknown to me to this day.

Whenever I leave, I feel as though I am a ghost, a breathless and inadequate print of my true self.  Always the sweet melodies of the Severn call me home.  And when I return my heart beat slows and steadies as the water against docked boats in the harbor.  

For truly my wholeness is here - my heaven.

If you'd like to know where I get the photos for my blog please visit www.andrewvache.com and see for yourself.  Trust me.  You'll love it.

Just a little green

There is this great Joni Mitchell song...ok, ok.  Bare with me here.  I have a point.

Anyway, there is this great Joni Mitchell song.  In it she says, "Just a little green, like the color when the spring is born".  Can't you see it!  Oh!

Today, the little green is here and it hasn't been easy.  As I look out upon the barely new leaves I can't help thinking how hard it must be for them to even get to this point.  "when the spring is born".  

Birth isn't easy.  For anyone.  Let's just settle that once and forever.

Strangely enough our longing for spring's arrival hinders our understanding of the inner workings of this particular season.  "It just happened.  Spring came over night." Like magic.  Right?  We fail to realize how much energy it takes to push a single leaf out of a stem or branch.  The ruff core hides the hardworking flesh beneath. But in the end it's worth all the labor because the leaf provides the plant with energy.  It's survival.

I've been writing a song recently that has me stuck (hence the blog) mostly because I know how important it is going to be for me to write and complete.  Songwriting is so cathartic for me that I often feel selfish. 

Who needs therapy?  Just write songs!  

It's survival.

I've been pushing and working, losing sleep, walking around like a zombie, feeling bare branched and frustrated.  I'm willing to go through the pain of labor just to have the product.

And I know that birth is inevitable.  It has to come.  Soon?  Please!  

Here's to birth!  Here's to spring!

the problem with binoculars

You've seen it.  You know exactly what I'm talking about.  

You're sitting down with a friend and you notice that they are not really paying attention to what you're saying.  "mhmm."  they say.  Some how you can't ever get them to listen to you. 

 They're just not there.  It's like they're focused on something completely different than the words coming out of your mouth.

 

Or there's the relationship you're in.  "When we're _____ (fill in the blank), then we'll be happy".  At some point in the future you'll be happy the only problem with that being that you're not happy currently.

Maybe it's your career.  "Ok, well right now I'm working a job I hate but in a couple years I'll get a promotion to a job I hate less".  

"I can't do that!  What if I fail!"  What if....

Everyone has glasses ...even if they have 20/20 vision.  Some people call this a world view.  I call it survival.

Just to get through life we pick up pairs of glasses.  We have bifocals for comparing the past and present and special glasses so that you can examine your current life situation more accurately with precision and wisdom.  You may have even heard of seeing life through rose-colored glasses...same thing.

The only problem with this is that we sometimes forget to take the glasses off and we keep piling them on the end of our nose until we have some sort of weird twisted binoculars teetering back and forth on our faces.  And this isn't just uncomfortable.  It's bad.  Really bad.  

When you're looking through binoculars all the time, you only really see a small portion of the scenery far away.  We begin to make judgements about our current lives based on the narrow perspective of what may or may not be our future.  

Maybe you've met someone like this - who can only think about the future and forgets to live their present.  Musicians have a an acutely difficult time avoiding this.  They want to succeed so much that they forget to enjoy music.  

The problem with binoculars is that you trip a lot more when you wear them.  Glasses are fine... but let's save ourselves from some serious pain and keep it to one pair.  

blisters

Blisters...stupid blisters

People always say that mistakes help you to learn or struggle makes you stronger.  I have a 

question for all of those people...when?

I recently had a voyage, and I call it a voyage mostly because the length was longer than I was expecting.  Yes, it was a voyage and one that I was insufficiently prepared for.  I brought no jacket and I wore high heels.  

It all started like this:  I was born... and twenty five years later my friends decided to buy me a drink to celebrate the event.  "How wonderful!", you might think or "What wonderful friends!".  I would not argue with you at this point of the story nor would I blame the outcome on these two lovely individuals.  

We decided to walk and we also decided to take the pretty way, which always means longer. Early on in my epic adventure my friend said, "Do you need to change your shoes?".

"No", I said, "these shoes are miraculous.  I could wear them all day."

My pompous claims soon came tumbling down and I began to feel an extraordinarily sower pain in my right heal...then my left.  

If at this point I had said something to my friends they would have insisted that we turn around and go back but I could hardly be expected to admit that I was a fool and did not in fact have miracle shoes.  Repentance fails to be one of my strengths.  

So my unseen blisters grew and grew and my pride fell.  

I now sit with flip flops on, having worn them for the last three days despite the 30 degree weather, simply because I could not fit shoes over my circular shame tattoos.  

This reminds me of my own life experience.  I often talk up my own choices (like choosing a thankless and penniless career) only to recognize that other people's choices are valid too.  I love taking the pretty way but my vanity often inhibits my enjoyment.  

So I have blisters.  I've made a ton of stupid mistakes but I feel more weak than strong.  Yes, weak in the light of self-understanding.  When does the blister heal?  When do you become stronger because of your poor choices or your failure to see passed your own experience?

I suppose I have learned one thing.  If you have a long way to go...leave your vanity behind.  You'll be better off without it.

Candles in the middle of the day

Why do you have candles lit in the middle of the day?

Are you nuts?

  

Or possibly just a self-employed musician with writer's block.  

People always ask me if I get writer's block.  I'm often tempted to glaring at them with one of those long open-mouthed stares.  

"Are you kidding me?!"  

"When do I not have writer's block?"  

Truly, with every single song or idea, even the ones that appear to be genius and possibly flawless, I've found that within days or even hours my once brilliant lightbulb will have shorted out and I'm left in darkness to figure out if the bulb was faulty or whether I simply tripped on the cord.  Yes, groping in the dark for an easy solution or for something that's broken and useless.

This is my process:

sitting down on the couch, in traffic, waiting for the train ;) , playing scrabble, running and it hits me.  Bam!  Maybe a line or a melody or even just a concept.  

I stop whatever I'm doing and feverishly try to find something to write it down on - a paper, receipt, my hand, or just miming the words in the air.  Anything to preserve my rare moments of unfiltered muse.  I go back to what I was doing with ease knowing that the following day I will return to complete my idea.  

The beginning always comes easy but then you have to give the song a structure and a progression as well as making it bad-ass and on top of that it has to be original.   This is the point in the process when you might happen upon an artist or writer or musician who is blankly starring at a white piece of paper with remnants of every junk food snack scattered in a circle around them and numerous used coffee mugs stacked on each other.  

Good intentions don't last long especially with every other activity you have going on.  Priorities are difficult to keep straight.  So at this point avoidance kicks in with gusto.  But avoidance can be one of an artist's greatest strengths.  If you try with everything else going on to stay away from your project but still end up having dreams about it or seeing it in the last bits of ketchup on your plate, it probably means that it's a good idea.  

So now comes the real crunch.  You've realized that your idea has potential - real potential - so you make a pot of coffee, you lock yourself in a room, and most likely lose a few useful parts of your brain having to do with social skills until you emerge victorious or at least close enough. 

So why do you have candles lit in the middle of the day?

I'm at the avoidance stage just trying to shed a little light on my malfunctioning lightbulb. And when I tell you I have new song to play for you...you'll be thankful I'm such a weirdo.

by the train

Most people find their muse in a person or a in a beautiful setting.  Maybe they are inspired by poetry or riding their bike.  For me...it's the Baltimore Light Rail.

Being from Annapolis, Maryland, the former Capital of the US and a small town in it's own right, the wonders of public transportation rarely found their way into my daily commute. 

Here everyone gets out their bike or their golf cart or their beamer or their boat to get where they need to go.  Some might argue that the Annapolitan's preference of private transportation has forever handicapped its ability to develop a reliable public system.  Chicken or the Egg - the situation is just bad.

After college I started working in Baltimore and decided that instead of paying for parking, which no Annapolis native will do in their right mind, I would take the Baltimore Light Rail into work.  So early each morning I would rise and go to Cromwell station to wait for the good old four car white stallion.  And every morning it would squeak in, rattling,  as if every bolt needed to be screw down and sodded. 

 

This hunk of metal was anything but faithful.  The power would go out at random and we would be stuck squirming in our seats (if you had a seat) for up to an hour.  The electric power lines would freeze and break on the coldest day of the year leaving hundreds of commuters out in the cold swearing just to keep their lips moving or a shooting on the north end of the track would shut down the rail entirely.  

Needless to say I got used to waiting and it was in this seemingly frustrating time of my day that I began to write.  It was here, at the convergence of every kind of humanity (poor or rich, snobby or kind, homeless and helpless) that music started to flow from my spirit into physical being.  

You see, waiting, though aggravating and inconvenient, provides us with a much needed pause, a rest, a break, to breath and observe.  It requires us to stop and just be (provided we don't have our iphones).  And this space gives us room to grow.

It was on the Baltimore Light Rail that I began my love affair with writing - a place to observe humanity and understand my own - but more so a place to slow myself down and truly see beauty everywhere even on the Light Rail.