Introduce a harp...

http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/thesoundexchange/the_orchestra/instruments/harp/

The Philharmonia orchestra has a great little sight introducing various instruments. The link for harp is above.

Time to upgrade the tech... and the technique

I'm looking at amplifying my harp better. Next stop is playing with a guitar preamp, see if I can boost the upper register and not have so much bass while keeping a good warm sound.

Regarding technique, I've got two things in mind - making an albums' worth of material to finished polished standard and solving the next weird RH problem. Something odd with the bend and straighten in Mr Stump. Hoom.

One very busy month and a huge wodge of change...

Between now and the 8th Oct, I have moved twice house, done a years tax accounts, fixed my car, started a new job and been bridesmaid to my best mate. It's been epic. Very little time for imagination. Still, at least I know I can graft like a bastard. Like all really horrid times it's been useful in a clarifying kind of way.

**NB. Wedding was not horrid but lovely & excellent**

Somehow I'm almost out the other side - I got properly bored tonight and had a bit of time to reflect. Tired and bored and grumpy go hand in hand for me but thankfully often bear useful fruit. In this case I learnt how to use twitter a bit more (requirement for new job), skimmed fRoots and realised I should listen to Martyn Bennett. I also realised that my whinge on this blog about working on my own back in the summer has now been fulfilled.

The new job brings me work colleagues: hurray! We're not exactly in the same office (remotely working: first skype conference call on Monday) but we are working together. I'm enjoying having colleagues to go heeeeelllpppp!! to or just giggle about our work. It's so much more fun to work with other people.

It's also a completely different kind of work to get my head around. I wasn't ready to get on with album-y stuff and was a bit bored with what I did have to work on. It's funny how the right amount of busy-ness can bring you extra focus. Perhaps it's the right amount of excitedness.

In other chunks of change, the new house is quiet, clean, warm, tidy, with nice friendly house mates and basic working facilities like cookers and washing machines (lacking in my previous establishment). There's a garden and I can park easily. My lungs don't hate me and housemates are out in the day so there's plenty of noise making time. I think long term housemates will probably be fun. I can teach. There are a lot of upsides.

The downside is I miss my noisy, dirty, smelly, barely see anyone room above a pub that was right in the centre of town and full of people and music. I might never have got a good nights sleep but I was never bored. I miss cooking dinner with people playing jazz underneath me, or watching the world go by out of my front window. I miss the sound of college bells in the evening and the "terrace" - sitting half in half out of my window ledge and leaning into the courtyard. I miss all my neighbours and the sense of being connected up with a city. I miss the park out the back with the river.

Where I lived was pretty damn close to an artsy commune. We ran a ceilidh in the courtyard out the back in summer and had to stop every now and then to let cars go past. I knew my housemates before I moved in so the fact I am a loud disorganised enthusiastic curious messy happy changeable person was obvious and had space to exist and didn't impinge on anyone or need to be quashed.

Right now I live in silence and neatness and that careful careful exploration of space shared with other adults. I hope I discover I live in a space where it's ok to be pretty silly: invent a song about your dinner being a fish and make someone else laugh rather than wince. I briefly lived in a housesit this month and found that I could indeed make up fish songs and make the owner laugh. That was a good day.

As my musical life is not going to happen beneath my feet I want to invest more time going out to play with other musicians. This used to just happen but now I'm going to have to do the far scarier thing of going out and finding new spaces and introducing myself. To be fair though I wanted to do this before but had no incentive and no energy. Hopefully a quiet sleeping space means more fun time long term. I need to re-jig my working week though - I have too many nights taken up away from home. I'm not sure how that is going to happen. Time to look at priorities anew...

... and on with the next adventure.

Brendan Breathnach

Brendán Breathnach was an Irish piper and a music collector. I first got interested in him after hearing another harper had found nice, simple tunes in his collections. I like the older sounding, slightly more stark Irish tunes and his collections sounded like a possible source. His collections are called Ceol Rince na hÉireann vols 1-5.

Wikipedia has a nice article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breand%C3%A1n_Breathnach

Also by TG4 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9AG2AC7LdE

Someone doing some indexing work using Brendán's collections and interfacing it with an ABC search:
http://msikio.online.fr/Breathnach/bbcode.htm
A nice detail from the video link below is that Brendán included name and location of each tune in his index allowing him to build up a "map" of where each tune was played. I don't know if he ever publishing this as a map - I'd love to see it. Might work incredibly well as an online thing - you type in a tune name and the bits of the map flash green where that tune was known.

Long interesting biogrpahic article from the Journal of Music:
http://journalofmusic.com/article/301

JStor has links to another article:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/20522525

Lilting on the Comhaltas site

http://comhaltas.ie/music/tag/Lilting

Comhaltas tag system makes stuff really easy to pull out. Hooray.

Irish lilting of tunes: video and audio.

Musical identity can be a hard thing to find

It's taken me a long time to learn what I like like playing.

It's taken the inclings of a stylistic position on all this folk stuff - or rather deciding that such a position is pretty pointless as what I find valuble is making my music fun and engaging. Instead of thinking "I like English and Irish tunes" I'm prefering "I like this kind of phrasing by this player in this tune here". It would be nice if it coalesced into some kind recognisable style, it's a lot easier to find an audience!

But as this stuff has to be memorised and evolved and if I'm doing it for myself then I have to really like the stuff, really like all the qualities of the stuff I'm creating. Otherwise why I do want to live it, to burn it into me?

I decided that I'm happy with my music as long as it is well developed, distinct, possesses a certain clarity and it has a little bit of magic. That's how I like the music I choose to listen to, and the people I interact with too. More importantly, that is the music that I see audiences react best to. It doesn't matter what it is - it has to have a very clear "ness".

If you fall outside of a tradition then you have to realise you're playing a popularity game of some degree. It's been pretty obvious that the desire to make stuff my own way is a bit too strong for me to exist only as a "Classical Harpist" or "Irish Harper" or perhaps any stylistic tradition. I still value them hugely both for their aesthetic appeal and the extreme skill involved in each. I will still play music from those traditions, but if I tried to place my identity inside them I would feel false.

I hate working on my own. I'm going to have to design a working life where I'm not.

Right now I can't quite see how that's going to happen. So on with the research...

Hunting nessie....

immersion - incubation - illumination - verification

http://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/doing-research/

In 1945, Jacques Hadamard published a book called The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field. The above four words are his theory: that there are four phases of thought involved in solving a mathematical puzzle. I think this is a pretty good description for solving any problem. Doesn't mean that you know when to stop or start each one, more that you might find the landscape more familiar and less annoying.

Woods and trees

I'm grateful for all the non-musicians I get to play for. So often musicians can't see the woods for the trees - all that detail is too close. Those who don't spend their lives obsessing over sounds give you a much better impression of the world you are actually crating with your music, which is after all the point.

Something Triona Marshall said to classical harpists learning to play Irish music - you have to go for the energy. The vibe, the feel, the energy does not come out of the details. Go for the the woods first, you can focus on the trees later.

Love the internet...

Thank you phydeaux3 for your very handy tag cloud and the very clear instructions. Here's the link.

Handy sites to have...

http://www.creativeboom.co.uk/

Must look this up again...

They are currently hosting a link to Grayson Perry's article on creativity. Discussion anyone?

http://www.creativeboom.co.uk/london/blog/grayson-perry-on-creativity-imagination/

Shooting Roots

So pleased to be part of this...

http://shootingroots.org/

Shooting Roots is an organisation run by and for young people, offering creative and participatory folk workshops at festivals and other events. In a nutshell it’s all about generating opportunities for young people to perform, develop friendships and access the folk arts.

New settings for classical music

I live somewhere amazing, above a pub that does things like get classical musicians playing Messian's Quartet for the end of time on a Tuesday. That was courtesey of a bunch of musicians known as Pindrop. I particularly spoke to Lisa & Kate I think. I can't find a suitable online thing about them - grr.

Instead I found this: www.pindropclub.co.uk
These guys look pretty cool too, I partiuclarly love the acoustic only aesthetic and the chance that they will be playong instruments they built themselves...!

Making something.... a cycle of inspire - explore - create - inspire...?

I was fed with this stuck on my wall. Better in pictures than words. Go figure for yourself. Not sure about Plato. That suggests something fixed.

Injury, soft tissue changes, fuzz

As part of ongoing hand rehab, I've been seeing a chiropractor who specialises in a physical therapy called Active Release Technique. Very very handy stuff, all soft tissue based, really amazing results. I didn't know you could do that with muscles.

As a result I'm really interested in soft tissue injuries. I think a lot of musicians overuse injuries are soft tissue or connective tissue based. Maybe there is a pattern of varied movement that keeps everything in good working order and when that is disturbed, stuff starts to go wrong.

There's a youtube video about the "fuzz" that can build up - I need to go hunt this.

Library trip 1: mouth music & spiro

This week's library cds (from Oxfordshire County Library):

Spiro - Lightbox (just because I saw it)

THERE IS A MAN UPON THE FARM - Working Men & Women In Song
RANTING & REELING - Dance Music of the North of England
YOU LAZY LOT OF BONE SHAKERS - Songs & Dance Tunes of Seasonal Events
TROUBLES THEY ARE BUT FEW - Dance Tunes & Ditties
- all from the Voice of the People Series out on Topic records

I was hunting mouth music, dancing songs and diddling. I lightly checked through each and the closest I found to what I wanted was Phil Tanner on Troubles they are but few, diddling very finely his four-hand reel.

I am going to have to look at these again and read the liner notes very carefully. I think I need to set aside a couple of hours to do this, maybe in the library. Must find out if they have listening facilities there or if I can take a CD player in. Troubles also referenced another couple of CDs in the series: Rig-a-jig-jig, which I've heard and Irish Dance Music, which I've not.

Spiro sounds like folkie Phillip Glass to me, but more melodically driven. Really didn't think I would get into it and then bang, I did. Hurray.

Other things on my mouth music hunt - I want to find out more from Jigjaw, and I want to go to C#s. I need to know what I'm looking for first...

Irish harp gets going in London...

This article at the Irish World tells you what I've been working on all year. Lots of effort but really good results. Hooray.

Common place books

Milton had a common place book, i.e. a notebook with headings that he could jot things down as they occured to him and easily find them again. With the tag function instead of headings, this is my common place book.

Study into how the brain adapts post-amputation

The Nuffield Trust's Oxford Centre for Enablement (OCE) and Researchers at the University of Oxford are involved in a major study which it is hoped will shed new light on how the brain adapts following hand amputation. Key people - Dr Tamar Makin and Dr David Henderson Slater.

I'm fascinated by this as I've had to relearn how to function many times. I've gradually acquired the perception that unless you can easily tangibly do something, at least for a while, you don't really develop an intuitive way of thinking about the thing you could do with it. This really changed my view point of musicianship - did funny things to it. I think I've got round it by playing all sorts of instruments with right and left hand - built up a picture of the lands beyond my limitations by shifting where the limitations are placed.

The study:
http://www.noc.nhs.uk/aboutus/news/article.aspx?id=190

cultures are structures

I'm sitting on my doorstep using my computer watching the rain. if I everyone did this more often we'd all know our neighbours.

You might even describe it as a doorstep culture.

Classical music is an aural tradition too

I met an excellent harpist who pointed out that even classical music is an aural tradition: you cannot notate phrasing completely, there is always something lacking. Phrasing and what you can do with it must be passed down ear to ear. Suddenly that music feels interesting to me again.

I think about the intellectual work of the world, and I wonder if it doesn't just distance us from what it means to be alive rather than connects us to it. I feel that trad music has something very special to offer: a demonstration of the viserceral, the physical, the engagement over the intellectual.

I feel a magic infinity in the connection with the body, as if there is as much here to be learnt about what it means to be alive as there is within scholarship. This does not mean I disapprove of study, thorough research and passionate argument, quite the opposite. It's just I feel they cannot capture all of life.

I feel that life itself is not necesarrily that intellectually interesting as a commidity but it is engaged, lived, experienced, connected, magical. It is the unbounded unknown, even if it does not carry satisfaction in the way that the vast glaciers of intellect do. But what is anything if it does not serve to connect to the further reaches of the world? What is beyond us is the only interesting thing.

That doesn't mean that I don't get pissed off that I can't absorb and manage information as well as I want. Oh no. that pisses me off totally.

Keys, operations, intersections, bendy notes in tunes

This is also what I vaguely remember from Ros.

Something about...
Take a scale. do something to it. compare it with your first scale. what's interesting?

Also something like:
Take a 10 note cycle of fifths. take 2 out. Then there's something interesting left over.

Also something observed:
the above somehow relate to where keys are most bendy chromatic runs in baselines under predominantly diatonic or modal music - backing trad.

Most bendy places are:
3rds, 6ths, 7ths, 9ths or 2nds,

e.g. in G:
Bb, B, Eb, E, F, F#, Ab, A

Organised by fifths: A, E, B, F or 9ths/2nds, 6ths, 3rds, 7ths

Steph note: within the four common modes that get used in trad, these are the points in the key that give it it's emotional colour. The notes that do not bend include 1, 4, 5 and create the structure.

** Compare this with where a blues scale gets bent ??

Meta structures

One of my favourite things...
Something Ros said in the car about...

a structure turning up in quantum physics, in linguistics, in music - the organisation of tones within a key, in maths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantale

Other idea to look up - look at Euler's theory relating vertices to sides of a shape.

Hurdy finger patterns

Steph geeks out:

Let's start diatonically.

Easy things:

two notes
2nds, 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, (any wider is stretch)

3 notes: any pattern up within a sixth
noteable shapes include
3 note scale
triads (sandwich shapes)
squashed sandwiches (1-2-4, 1-3-4)
inversions
squashed inversions (probably fingered something like little-ring-index or little-middle-index)

4 notes: any pattern within a sixth

Notable exceptions - arpeggios! scales longer than 4 notes

Articulation aids:
ornamentation above
the clack of the keys
allowing the note to drop back to a bass note - think pipes
vibrato (time to change fingers?

Fingering patterns on all keyboard-ish instruments

So fingering patterns - I've just been thinking about this, prompted by the hurdy and by playing the piano in the pub a little more, also the prospect of playing (and ornamenting) piano accordions. I've also realised I probably want to play concertina.

I never really understood piano finger patterns intuitively as a classical pianist, they seemed just arbitrary and far too rule-like. However as with all music as soon as I try to understand something away from score it begins to click into place.

Fingering patterns for each keyboard like instrument are about getting the most efficient and relaxed hand movements and the using the natural flows or stops of the instrument to articulate the music really well.

It took me 3 years to properly grok how to communicate how it worked on harp. Hopefully the next instruments will take less time. I want patterns for piano and hurdy gurdy (and probably concertina). To be fair, I want meta-patterns.

So I'm going to start by looking for:

• naturally fitting patterns under the hands
• shapes in the music I'm playing that I need to acheive time and time again
• solutions to the awkward things

Like all aural traditions the craft, the art is the composition of something complex from relatively few small chunks. If you go in with that expectation then it makes it a lot easier to analyse. Trouble is the frequency of thoe chunks changes for each group of repertoire, like syllables in a language. For the hurdy music I'll pick English tunes and the few French and Breton tunes I know, for piano it's got to be Irish and English, with the added excitement that I'm adapting for different right and left hands.

Fingering patterns part 2

Other fingering treatises:

Couperin: L'Art de toucher le Clavecin (The Art of Touching the Harpsichord) pub. 1716 and revised in 1717
Online at IMSLP

Maria Boxall wrote treatises within the past 40 years, as did Tom Nevell.

There are lots of useful articles at http://www.harpsichord.org.uk/EH/ehm.htm, interesting beyond just fingering.

Robert Kelley also includes a list of clavichord treatises - http://www.robertkelleyphd.com/clavichd.htm#ClavTechnique


There will be still more....

Hurdy-gurdys and renaissance fingering

I've been lent a hurdy-gurdy, this is exciting. It's a noisy instrument of French origin (also called vielle à roue) thought to date from 11th C in western Europe or the Middle East.

I've got a very few days access to get as far into hurdy-ness as I can before I have to hand it back so it's hunting for fingering patterns time.

You can't easily use your thumb in fingering, this means that for more than 4 notes in any direction you have to either do a long finger crossing, jump or slide. This is similar-ish to renaissance keyboard music, for which there are fingering treatises based around 4 fingers and no thumb.

So on a brief first scan I have found...

The work of Girolam Diruta, organist (c. 1554 – after 1610)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo_Diruta / http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Girolamo_Diruta

Claudio Di Veroli (alive now)
http://finger.braybaroque.ie/

Claudio brought a book out in 2008 called Baroque Keyboard Fingering: A Method. In his online introduction there are a couple of clues - that the four finger method makes for better articulation (certainly of Baroque music), that the left hand and right are not symmetrical.#

A brief search for hurdy gurdy fingering has turned up relatively little, the only guide that I've found thus far is that smaller jumps take less time (shock!) so the aim is to plan your fingering around that.

I'm sure there's got to be more stuff than this is to go on, I just haven't found it.

My own experiments lead me to think that the angle at which you hold your hand to the keyboard changes things, that accidentals make a big difference to how easily you can cross fingers, that I'm not interested if I can't find something fairly elegant, which I can't yet. Grr.

Learning about arrangement

I've twigged I want to know more about arrangement, specifically with harps, but also any music where it's devised by ear. I could pick a few tracks and analyse them exactly, but I don't think that's going to very helpful. The stuff that would ping out first is the stuff I already know, and that's not the stuff I want. Also a lot of what is played on harps is very simple but somehow something in the way it is played makes it magic - to analyse the notes misses the point.

Instead I'm going to listen and try and pick out the kinds of things that change - ideas, features, as and when they turn up, giving my attention to anything that catches my ear. It's going to get collated and updated here. My plan is to allow what I really like experiencing within music to ping out to me and let that feed back into what I create.

Emilie and Voltaire

I've just picked up a book and it's the most exciting thing ever. It's about Emilie and Voltaire and what they achieve together. It's a lovely read and really exciting to see ideas coalesce and form, the slow patient revealing of how the world might work. It's academic work and it's much more exciting than any music I've listened to recently. I wonder if I'm in the wrong job.

To seek to understand, to be more at ease with their world, to have a deeper connection. To find new things, to feel like me. Surely I can find a way to do this through musical work too.

Confidence

I feel confident with a certain skill or body of information when I can feel the edges of that information - I know there is nothing missing and it makes a clear and coherent whole. That sense of completeness is essential.

I also feel confident with skills that you cannot do that with through peer review - I can tell I'm on a level with my peers and I have their good opinion.

I suppose both these approaches are about the pressures of competition - if you know you're going to win and can defend yourself, then it's all ok.

Harp played by ear was the first instrument I felt I could "get a handle on" - the first instrument I felt I could feel all the edges of. Such a relief.

Preparation

The point of prep is so if you are so ill / tired / hungover you can't think straight, you have something to fall back on, a script. This makes prep make sense to me in the context of music making and teaching - something that is so very dependant on how the people in front of you are today.

Noise - the social structures of music

One of my favourite books is Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali published in the 1970s. It was mentioned in one of my university lectures, I loved the ideas and chased a copy down two years later.

Attali relates the development of music and the social structures around the function, consumption and creation of music to the social history. He thinks that the social and economic structures regarding music foretell the coming social structures and the form that society will take. Importantly he feels that changes in the way we make music precede changes in the way society works.

He thinks there are four different sections to the role music takes within our society -

• ritual - music as part of the Church and state, musicians are servants
• spectacle - the "star" rises - both the composers and performers feted in their own right (think Beethoven and opera singers compared to the servitude of Baroque church composers)
• repetition - the music industry, music as a commodity, the ability to stockpile so much music it really doesn't matter anymore (how many hours of music do you have on your ipod?)
  
• composition - a swing back towards doing things just because you want to, just because of the experience
  

I feel he is onto something, and more and more I see music as a social phenomenon as much as anything else. Also, I feel we are beginning to see a sea-change with regard to fairly passive consumption - more opportunities to keep learning new things rather than just go shopping, the green movement clearly part of this. Within music there is now such a diy emphasis - myspace, open mic nights, easy access to recording equiptment are all part of this. Roll on the new era....

Teaching harp in an Irish music school

I started teaching harp within an established Irish music school in 2008 and have really enjoyed it. It's great to work alongside another trad music teacher and to see the kids take to this instrument and try and play their music on it. It's put the harp in a context - so important. The harp was a second instrument for each child so they already had a mental stock of tunes from which we could draw. This is definitely a bonus - there's so much going on if the harp is your first instrument - perhaps too much.

I also found it so lovely to be amongst such a nice group of folk - there's a real sense of a community and a relaxedness that is going along with it. It's also been great to hear the tunes on other instruments that kids have been learning and I've really enjoyed hearing the way Colette plays and teaches, firm but with a real sense of fun. You're often stuck inside your own little box as a music teacher, especially as a harpist, opportunities to share and learn are few and far between.

This project has continued, and thanks to the hard work of the folk at that school we have funding for weekly lessons this year and are able to take in a new year of pupils. Hurray! With our new intake we've been doing a diet of tiny pieces and small songs to start, nice and slow. The second years have all been learning a song with a left hand to go with it, some are going onto dances tunes - lots of fun. From my point of view a tried and tested syllabus is gradually coming into focus, so now I have to keep adding to it.

This is one adventure I really want to continue.

Folk versus classical - top down versus bottom up

With classical music my experience has been that you learn a new piece from the bottom up - ensuring each tiny section is very secure before moving on. With trad I've often found the tune enters your ear first, and then you attempt to make it happen. Each time you try to make it happen is slightly imperfect in a different way - the imperfections become an important part of the music.

Now I do also work make my way through each tiny movement slowly but given the improvisatory nature (the ornaments should always be improvised) then you're always reaching for something that's not quite secure.

I had an excellent conversation with a conductor recently. I asked if he improvised, he said "of coruse". Not improvisation as I know it (change of pitch and duration content) but improvisation with guiding a group - maybe this time that section will shine, or this soloist needs a little support ...etc. Each time he performs a piece it comes out differently. I never expected that of classical music... good to have my assumptions shattered.

Musical problems...

"There are no musical problems, only social ones."

This quote about the delights of working in a band came to me via Pete Oxley (jazzer and bow maker). Someone gave it to him... I've lost the name!

Play the music not the instrument...

Harps are such funny little instruments and often they live within a repertoire all of their own. This is kinda cool in a way and part of what "being a harpist" is all about - you're own private magic music, only to be made by other harpists. The problem is that it leaves you isolated and without links to other musicians (except other harpists). So you have to take the harp to other musics and in doing so you can take the harp into other scenes and settings.

The harp doesn't work like any other instruments and you and your fellow music makers have to be very careful to leave space for each other. There are somethings it naturally does brilliantly and some that it does very badly indeed! The challenge is to figure out what you can do with what you've got.

My favourite people who are the playing the music, not the harp, are...

Mary McMaster & Donald Hay with their recent cd
Uschi Laar - amazing jazz compositions
Michael Rooney - Irish traditional music excellence
CatrionaMcKay - in anyone of her ensembles but mostly Starfish

All tbese people transcend their harpiness and step into a bigger realm. Often the harps aren't so clear to hear because of the other instruments present and so harpists per se are not necessarily so enamoured. But all of these folk exist in a bigger setting beyond the harp world, get to share their music more, get to be beyond themselves just a little more. That sounds like an excellent place to be.

I want...

...amazingly healthy arm and hand muscles.

I want my muscles to...
relax easily
do sustained bouts of playing
repair itself easily
move fluidly
ideally not to hurt!

Things that can help with this:
good food
rest
good posture
exercise that counters the oddness of doing one thing so much
good exercise (fluid) *** think this is really important and needs to be explored more

There are more or more subtle / specific distinctions to be made here... this is to be added too.

Happy thumbs...

All the effort in a thumb goes into mantaining it's weird shape and that is what exerts pressure on the string. Thunbs have to be upright and I think easiest if kept slightly curved - think how bridges work and what an excellent weight bearing shape that is.

Thumbs nearly always have a drier sound as well. They are higher on the string, the digit pad is aimed at a different angle and the different positioning compared to the string all make a difference. You can put more thumb pad on to counteract this.

The most important bit about thumbs is keeping that useful little c shape between thumb and hand - gives your thumb space to move, stops it cramping, keeps it within normal joint range so it doesn't lock, prevents you from bringing it too far back (can do weird tension things in lower palm of hand).

Oh yeah - cut your nails...!

Proof

Sometimes you need to have that piece of paper - not to know how good you are, but to know what other people think is good enough.

...much flow and little stop...

I trust... through sleep and dreams that a new direction will show itself to me.

I have to but listen carefully and quietly - allow the shapes of the world to form around me so I can see the new steps forward...

... onwards to a place with much flow and little stop.

...much flow and little stop....
...much flow and little stop....
...much flow and little stop....
...much flow and little stop....