January 25, 2011 - Lovely time visiting my Mother in Carson City, Nevada. Also had a chance to see an old friend, Laura Mathews (McNeil). Time to catch up on life, reflect on the passage of the past few years and months, have fun hanging out with my Mom and her friends Mark, Susan, Jo and Mark and Susan's Nephew and Niece (and her beau). The trip across country was crazy. With tractor trailers strewn about the highway and temperatures dipping so low that even Alaska looked comfortable... Songs eluded me, but not contemplation - the soil from where songs are grown. Where seeds first find root. And so it has been this trip.
I do often wonder how things change, how they emerge. One day a thing is one way and then, when you look again, its something new. A line around the eye, a feeling, the worn step once sharp, the weathered wood, once fresh. A memory that might have bitten, softening. And closeness lost or distance covered. What we cherish now, something we did not imagine or perhaps even know two years before. And so we discover the real mystery of life: that we live in the present and not the past, that we are in a constant state of renewal, that we cannot know our future except to know that it is a consequence of how we choose to live our present and that, in the end, we have choice - the ability to choose which path we will walk upon. Nothing is preordained, nor inevitable.
I set out tomorrow for Philadelphia and join a private show at the Salon on the 30th, then see Keith Liles again on the 31st before returning to Anchorage for a few days. I leave the comfort of Carson City and dive back into Winter. I hunger for Spring.