Getting Focused

If I don’t take the time to post this Sunday night, I may never blog again.  I have to give myself the message that there is always time to write, even when music rehearsals are taking center stage… (Sorry about the pun.  I couldn’t help it.  It’s late.)  I do have to get my performance schedule posted soon!  I mean… what’s going on here?

Journal entry from Wednesday, October 27th – somewhere up the steep climb along Romero Canyon Trail:

I’m on the other side of my move to Santa Barbara, and I’m in crisis.  I hiked this canyon for the first time, carrying my journal and camera.  I sat down where I could see the ocean between the hills… and just cried.  I’m really scared.  I just frickin’ jumped, and now I’ve landed in the land of Oz (Montecito), where the rich hobnob with eclectic expenditures. I’m not sensing my place here yet.  That’s part of the fear.  It’s like, “Now, what have I done?  Where am I?  Who am I?”  Mostly when I talk about this stuff, especially about the fear, people seem to always want to give advice, cause they don’t like the intensity of it.  Well, I don’t much like it either, and yet I know this is where I’m supposed to be.  If I’m not feeling it, where the hell is it going to go?… back in the addictions?  Don’t think I haven’t been tempted.  But no, I have to be intimate with what I’m feeling—all of it—because I’m the only common denominator here.  It is my process, and a necessary one in order to integrate into my new life.

Where I sat and wrote in my journal

On the other side of this fear a breeze will blow.  I’ll hear the sound of the wind through the Montecito hills, and I’ll know what I did took courage, and that I am not alone.

Coming down off the mountain

In conclusion, all I can say is: I guess I did what Grandpa Samuel Reaches (Ted Thin Elk) said Mr. Magoo should do in the movie Thunderheart, when he told Ray (Val Kilmer), “Mr. Magoo needs to go up the mountain and get focused.”  And maybe I’ll have to do this a few more times, at least for a while.