Astride two worlds (and in between something else too)

If the non-grasping mind is something to be attained (though attained is a poor choice of word giving what I am attempting to describe, although I like the irony so I will keep it in...), if I were to spell out the meaning of where I am and what I should "strive" for (har har har!) - that would be just about it. Life is holding out beautiful promises, and yet it is asking me not to need them. It is asking me to look to what is going on now and love that instead. He is being rather tough and humorous, is God, and I love him for it.
I am trying. I let myself wriggle a bit in desire and expectation, but I try to laugh at myself as much as possible. These promises, these possible sunrises hint at gorgeous colours, but I know that last week I never saw the hint of them before and I was happy in greyness then. A very solid, tangible kind of happiness. You can own greyness. You can illuminate it. You can make moments by yourself and you can dream grey fantasies like forties movies. You can watch them again and again until they become part of you, part of your private fabric which you need never share with anyone.
But, if those New Thought people are to be believed, pure fantasy is a dangerous beast. Suddenly those mere details that you had meant to be alternate or purely Platonic, because you were happy in Limbo, start to materialise in shocking reality - in numbers, in faces, in words, in actions, in situations - and suddenly you have to react to them. You have suddenly created a language of signs which start to show up every where you go, on buses, in shop windows and they begin to promise...You begin to think you know what they mean.
Because of your movies, you are prepared for your role, you think, you know what to do next...and then some naughty God presses the pause button on everything and you think ( you are actually given the luxury of thinking) "Well, how will I feel if this doesn't come true?" or "How will I feel if it does?" and then "Ok, but what if it is slightly different?"
There are inklings of rightness and there are the reptiles and sometimes the reptiles wear movie star masks and vice versa and suddenly you are wanting, but you don't know what you are wanting, you are just wanting, because what was is not and cannot be again and what will be is not either and may never be...you don't know what will be, you have done what you can do, you have played your scenes.

Keep on walking with your eyes on the ground

I wish I could say "eyes on the horizon" but I have no idea what is on the horizon and I do not dare to imagine what that should consist of...I work hard on my various projects and chances come up, but I am too petrified to hope for any outcomes as I know by now that, in general, nothing comes of those chances. Still I dutifully follow up until I am told again that I am/what I do is not suitable.
I am not being negative here, I am simply speaking of past experience. I am refusing to believe that this will necessarily repeat itself, I am willing myself to have faith that something will come of all this, and I am committing myself to preparing myself for and following up on any opportunities that arise...
I am gonna try keep things as close to my own style as possible though, as that is the only way in which I can sustain interest and courage, and be willing to suffer losses where it wouldn't have worked for me anyway...I am getting good feedback but as they say, "Now show me the money!" Or at least a means of getting closer to making my own living.
I have so much to do right now, there do not seem to be enough hours in the day to do all that I ideally should be doing...there is organising the Club Night with Vincent and Lorena, there is practising my mixing, developing my mixing, practising my piano, practising using Logic and writing songs (not happening at all but at least my class is starting up soon), there is theatre book reading to enhance my classes, there is publicising my classes, organising my classes, there is meditation practice (which I have been sticking to quite faithfully), there is keeping a journal (which is disgracefully sporadic), there is reading for enjoyment (which I am loving at the moment), there is listening to new music for DJing (very difficult as my computer very mysteriously refuses to speak to my iPod and it's better for me to wait till I go to Glasgow to get it looked at...), there is keeping up with correspondence, there was going to be brushing up on my German and Russian (which hasn't happened at all!)
And I still like to see my good friends amidst all that....And of course there is sleeping, which for some reason is sheer heaven at the moment. Since getting my homeopathic remedy, and in a strange way, since enjoying the Vampire books so much, my dreams have been so vivid and I have been sleeping so well. My room is a little bit warmer and my bed so cosy!
So what's happening? Well there are the possibilities of a couple of DJ gigs here in Galway - though the scene is so cliquey and depressing and unfriendly and backwards - though you have to chase people with the ferocity of a pit-bull in order to get them to come back to you at all - though I am not sure if there is an outlet for the type of music I play, even though it is fashionable anywhere else in the world! All I can do is keep trying...maybe it would be almost better to wait till I get to Berlin, so I have no reason to get too attached to this place.
I've recorded a few sets - a bar one which is nice, but kinda specific to a bar so not exactly setting me on fire - and then another one called "Valhalla By Twilight" which is a very beautiful slow-building deep and brooding tech house into techno mix and which I think is the best thing I've ever done. It's been getting alot of comments on Music V2 - one guy said it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever heard, this London girl DJ said she'd love to mix with me sometime (really sweet but I am so slow to get my hopes up!) and another guy is putting it in a music review as he liked it so much.
Strangely enough, Lorena was a little disparaging of it, saying the mixing is perfect but it "doesn't have enough breaks" and "doesn't make her want to get on the dancefloor". I thought this was a bit odd, considering she was saying my other mixes "weren't progressive in style" and that it's clearly a chillout mix. Not all mixes are for dancing. I know she didn't mean it badly, it was just her Argentinian bluntness. but if she wants to hear a dancefloor mix she can go and record it herself instead of telling me what I should be doing.
I take it as an opportunity to gain independence from her opinion. As she was my first teacher, I relied on her opinion alot, now it's time to stand on my own two feet and not be held back. It was the first mix where I felt I was really finding my own style and I am very very proud of it. Nearly everyone else loved it too! Lewis said you could put any major DJs name on it and sell it as a commercial release...
Then there is the chance of being signed with a good agent in Scotland, I think they might possibly be the best. I was recommended to them by a director I had worked with and he told me that they were interested and to send my stuff to them. Unfortunately I don't have any headshots here in Ireland and I certainly need to get new ones done and I can't do that until my hair has grown out a couple more inches so it can be cut into a more classic bob. So I emailed them with my updated CV, an older headshot and a theatre still. It was just before Christmas so I didn't expect them to get it for a while and I waited till the start of January to call them.
When I did the lady seemed very polite although she was very busy. She said she had just got back to the office and hadn't got through all the email yet and to resend it and she would speak to me soon. I told her I was in Ireland just now but in between Galway and Glasgow and she seemed to think that was cool. She seemed to know who I was when I said and said she would call me. So about a week ago I re-emailed the stuff and left it for now. No word. Not that I am worried...I just am so used to everything being a dead end that I am not very optimistic. And I am not sure how to follow up. Surely if she was interested she'd call me? I guess she was interested when Zam spoke about me but when she saw my headshot she thought "I can't get this girl work"!!!
The classes are ok, I did flyering this week and though many of my old students are coming back, I am slower to get phone calls from new ones. Could be something to do with the ole recession I guess...
I'm not down about all this. I just hope things don't follow the previous dead-end fashion. I'm going to commit extra hard to follow things through just to encourage change from my end.

Will You Go?

I had a dream the other night and for the first time in my life I woke up and realised that this was not a dream, it was a vision. It seemed to come from beyond the mess of my subconscious, its content was so much bigger than me like something bigger than me was speaking through me.
I don't know where to begin with describing it, it was a synthesis of so many big things that made sense and yet when I woke up I knew exactly what was being said to me. It was a question being asked of me, a big question set so perfectly in the context of all that I have been preoccupied lately.
I'm not going to go into all the details, I'll just try to put the most important points. I wonder is it right of me to communicate a vision here, but maybe putting it into words will lead me into it again...
Before this part of the dream, I was dreaming normal dreams, there was something about the novel "War and Peace" and being stuck around two difficult men staying in my home who hated and were cruel to me and yet I was being forced (perhaps by my family or mum, I can't recall) to put up with them and suppress increasing violent rage...none of it really stuck out, it was one of those dreams that you knew was processing some emotion or other, I don't know and I don't know where the novel came in anyway...
It was a new sequence, the start of which is really really vague for me and makes no logical sense but yes has a kinaesthetic feeling of rightness. I was at the cinema watching one of the "Three Colours" movies, but there seemed to be some confusion about which one it was. The movie was over, but there seemed to be a bit at the end which I was compelled to stay on for. (Actually that is the case with that particular trilogy, a sequence at the end which ties together all three movies)
I was watching it, but suddenly I was in it...I was one of the extras and though the main female role was being played by Julie Delpy (the heroine of Three Colours White which is my favourite of the three) by the end of it, it was me.
I went through a post office to a garden where a man was waiting for something. (There had been something about a train station too which I couldn't recall.) He had been waiting there for some time and a crowd had joined him. I wasn't sure if the thing he was waiting for had already arrived and recurred on a regular basis or if it hadn't arrived yet.
It was night and we were waiting for the coming of something, we didn't know what it was and he didn't say what it was. He was an older man, like an older version of Jean-Marc Barr out of "The Big Blue", a man I think is really beautiful looking. He just played with children but he was waiting for the heroine too. She didn't know why she was there. It was an uneasy wait, people were jostling, someone fell into a pond and she fished them out. We were looking up into the sky. There was a sense of "What are we waiting for? Why are we here? Will it even come?"
The sky was grey with wispy clouds, the garden was dark. "Ah" I thought, wanting to make sense, wanting to know what I was expecting before it even came. "We are waiting for the dawn. Perhaps we are all waiting for the dawn to come so that we can see the new day together and realise how beautiful it is so we can all live new lives." This comforted me.
And then the dawn came and I was the heroine. Yes the dawn was beautiful, the sky illuminated with colour beyond anything that you can ordinarily conceive. Here I began to realise that this was coming from somewhere so far beyond me that it was so much BIGGER than what I had been expecting. And it was a terrible frightening beauty because suddenly the earth began to shake, things fell from the sky and the world as we knew it began to be destroyed.
The man drew me to him, he alone had known that this would happen, and that there was hope in this, it needed to be. As I drew close I lost my fear. "I have loved you forever and ever" he said to me (or something to that effect but MORE, the feeling was more than the words) "I have been waiting for you. Will you go?"
"Will you go?" I woke up with this question blazed at the forefront of my mind and a distinct certainty that "This is no mere dream."

A small postscript which could be my fancy and means nothing but strikes me as amusing and hindsightful...two days later I met an man who looked like an older Jean-Marc Barr!

Tales from Home

The last part of August was such a time of upheaval, illness and overall numbness that I couldn't bring myself to write at all. I guess I was in a state of dread at the prospect of a big move (I HATE packing!), a state of alternate futility and rebellion at my job where I seemed to get no financial return for the hours I was putting in, only rudeness from the higher level staff, and all this led to a state of panic about my finances and my energy levels. Blah Blah Blah. You can see why I didn't bother to write about it!!!
So now I am home. And while I am terribly sad to leave my lovely friends in Glasgow, some of whom mean a great deal to me, and while I was terribly touched by the way many of them turned up at such short notice for my leaving drinks at Bar 91, and while part of me is hurting at the thought of my boyfriend being sad at my leaving him and feeling a bit bad that I was so preoccupied and numb in the time running up to my departure, as if I couldn't be present to him in the time that he had left with me...I am feeling much better now. And everything seems to be confirming that this is the right decision.
Nature is everywhere here. And I have said it before but I do not realise how much I have been missing it until I come back into it again. I have had long walks by the sea every day since I have been back. Yesterday I walked for 90 minutes while my Mum had coffee with her friend and it was wonderful. On Thursday the weather was so lovely I even went for a swim in the sea at Blackrock. I haven't done that since I was a child! The water was freezing at first, so much so that I thought I was going to faint as soon as I immersed my body in it, but I quickly got accustomed and swam out to the raft and back twice. And when I got out of the water, my whole body was tingling deliciously and it was a pleasure to wrap myself up warm in my clothes again.
Mum and I have been cooking simple and healthy meals which I have been really enjoying - homemade vegetable soup with open soda bread sandwiches, peppered steak with salad and potatoes, quiche and salad, weetabix and banana. I know all of this is going to bring my energy levels back to the point where I will feel like I can really do things again.
We listened to the first cd of Carolyn Myss' "Entering the Castle" yesterday evening and enjoyed it greatly, I listened to most of the second cd while I walked the prom today. I love what she has to say. I think I will take up her suggestion and take up a private journal as I work through her cd. I definitely want to get the book too. This is a quiet, simple time for me, for rest and reflection, for catching up with myself and for simply letting things happen.
A solution has presented itself for my financial problems, so Mum and I are going to go into the bank on Monday to see if it is possible to implement. I think it will be and it will take all that pressure off. As regards an income, Mum has spoken to the convenience store just three minutes from where we live and it is a quiet area, and they may have some part time work for me, which would be perfect for the moment. So I will find out about that after the weekend.
Even musically things seem to be ironing out so far. First of all, I was pleasantly surprised to read in the paper that one of my favourite DJ/producers Sebastien Leger was to play in the GPO last night. I've wanted to see him for so long and never expected that he would play in Galway as he is quite a big name and we are quite a small city with a limited club scene (apparently). So my brother and his friend Marie came with me last night and we had an absolute blast! The crowd was great, we danced alot and had some friendly banter and got to shake Leger's hand after a really fun set. (Though I wish he had played a little more of his own stuff which is so deliciously clever and quirky and punchy...apparently he writes it on Ableton, or such was the information I managed to elicit from him before he was whisked off in a car!)
On top of that, there is a music course in Logic Express especially for DJs who want to start producing their own music, one evening a week in GTI and it is well reasonable. Mum and I have started a little pot to attract money for it over the next two weeks. And so far I have had a couple of wee windfalls. So I now have €17.50 saved towards the €115 it will cost! (Note for Mark, think the course will be helpful in my work for TB too!)
And FINALLY I got the recording software for my DJ sets working, so the last two days I have recorded an hour of mixing each, to listen back and see what works and what doesn't. Not feeling majorly inspired just now, but pressing on anyhow and so glad to have my complete set-up by the window, looking out on the lawn and the fields beyond...I have a set ready to record and my brother who loves doing graphics is well up for doing the cd covers to hand out.
Also my other brother, Paddy is familiar with Reason (though he has Reason 3) and I am gonna spend a few hours over at his to learn a bit more and hook up his midi controller to my computer so I can do more interesting stuff...
When I have some cash saved and all debts sorted, I am going to get my hair cut (tis an absolute disaster!) and get some new headshots done so I can blitz Dublin and Glasgow with acting cvs. Just to put myself out there and see what comes back...And am thinking of talking to a few places in Galway next week about teaching classes, once it all starts coming together in my head a bit more. There is alot to do, but I have the time and space to do it now...And as I just said, see what comes back. And that will be a clue as to what I am meant to do...

Musical Adventures

I've really been getting busy with my music lately and it's been brilliant! I spent the last two weeks preparing for a 2 hour set at the Classic Grand which I played on Friday and which went down really well. I worked mainly with new tunes which I picked keeping the vibe of the club in mind, but also which appealed to my own taste. In consequence, I feel I have developed my own sound a bit further having stretched myself in this way. It was really fun putting the set together (though a bit exhausting as I would mainly have to do it coming back from work at night) and all the songs seemed to slot into place and into each other much more easily than before. I felt like I had pushed past the wall I hit a couple of months ago where I was holding myself back by being too perfectionistic. (But the perfectionist phase was necessary as it improved my mixing a great deal.)
The main thing I was nervous about with this gig was that it would be my first time playing on a big club system and I was worried about controlling the levels well enough to get a good sound while putting the bass up more than usual. Also I didn't know how responsive my mixer would be when put through the club mixer. But it was fine! I will need a better mixer which can handle more sound and which I can hear the headphones through a bit better (think my headphones may be a bit buggered as a result of the last night as I had to have them up full blast but still couldn't hear...) But all in all I was delighted. The dancefloor was full, people seemed to be really enjoying themselves and told me so afterwards.
But the best thing is that a guy came up to me, he thought my set was fantastic and wanted me to play at another night that he was involved in organising! And turns out he organises gigs in Ireland too and he's well up for me playing there. Anyhoo I gave him my number and hopefully he will get back in touch. If not, there is another gig at Pivo Pivo on the 6th November!
I really love DJing. I love music. I love putting a set together and choosing songs and sharing them with people. And I love the utter absorption it demands of you, you can get completely lost in it. And it's all self-motivated! You don't have to wait for people to show up to work with you or worry about what kinda mood they are gonna be in, you don't have to wait for an opportunity to practise...
So on the Sunday when I had my day off from work, Lewis and I went about town and got stuff together for me to make my new demo. Blank cds and all the stuff you need to print up the covers for them and 2 phono jacks for my soundcard so I can make an extra output in order to be able to record. That is still the sticking point. I downloaded Audacity so I think I may have it solved. Will just need to give it a try the next time I am over at my flat. And Christina took some beautiful pictures at the gig which I will ask if I can use for promo shots.
Then yesterday I went over to a guy called Adam's house to record vocals over one of his electronica tracks. He'd been at a party in my house as he is friends with Vincent and Lorena and played at one of their gigs and he heard my tune on MySpace and liked my voice and thought it would suit this track. I was a bit nervous because I haven't recorded in about six years! But it was a really nice song, quite a sad piece of music and the lyrics quite sparsely visual like Joy Division. I think we got a few good takes for them to use. I really really enjoyed it and I think I will probably be working with them on some further tracks. I would like to anyhow.
But the best news is that I finally have a copy of Reason 4!!! I just find Logic so inaccessible for starting to compose and though I know it will come in handy later (it had better, or it will be a waste of £125), Reason 4 is so visual and practical. Lewis is quite familiar with the earlier version so we are planning to sit down this morning and play with it which will be a good way for me to get to know it...I can't wait! Once I get into that system, I know I can really get to work. And Adam gave me a magazine which is sort of an unofficial guide to the program with lots of user-friendly screenshots etc.
So tis truly an adventure! My wish-list is growing though. Let's see...
Full-version Traktor
New mixer with effects panel
Samson G-Track
Midi Controller
Colour Printer (for demo covers and acting stuff too!)
Oh I love technology...but only once I am friends with it!

To begin at the beginning...

Do you know, it's very strange...I never know what title to put on a blog post, at least I rarely do and this one just popped into my mind. As I tried to recall what it was (they are the opening lines from Dylan Thomas' wonderful play for voices Under Milk Wood), I then had a fuzzy remembrance of dreaming about that play last night, or at least those lines. I have no idea what else happened, but I am wondering how much of our nocturnal wanderings shape what goes on in our day. How much do we dream? How significant is it in our lives? I don't know the answer, but it has excited my interest.
I've had really vivid dreams in the last few months. I don't remember them all very clearly, just moments or impressions. Often they are impressions of great richness, in the way you get the sense of a mythology as being very rich - and you know what they say about our dreams being part of the great collective unconscious!!! Sometimes I want to just keep sleeping so I can inhabit this fantastical world, even if it is at times scary, because it seems so much more. It is nice for the brain not to be limited by the "realities" of the everyday world, to be part of fairytales and magic and adventure.
And often it is the sense of the deeper truth is coming across through these very resounding images and sensations. Sometimes you know you have grasped this truth when you wake up even though you don't know it with the part of your brain that you use throughout your waking hours. I used to think that all these truths were lost as soon as you awoke, but now I think differently. I don't think we store all our knowledge in our immediate consciousness, I think we learn differently from the way we are taught to, if that makes sense! We don't always need to understand things immediately, we simply take them in and they are processed and assimilated without our conscious effort. Our interior lives change beyond our conscious perception, through living, through practice.
And sometimes you wake up and you know exactly what God or your higher self or your unconscious (whichever you choose, tis not the main point of distinction here!) has been trying to tell you. I had a really interesting dream just over a week ago. Normally I don't recall dreams in enough detail to be able to make a huge amount of sense of them beyond the feelings they leave me with (which I suspect at times act alongside my intuition), but this one, perhaps for the first time in years, I wanted to write down because I had a really strong feeling I knew exactly what it meant when I woke up.
I was stuck alone in this scary house and I knew there were two rooms in the house I was terrified to go into because they were haunted, there were horrible things in there I didn’t want to encounter. And I don’t know if there were things I was scared of outside and maybe I was waiting for people to arrive, but I knew I had to be alone for a spell of time. So to protect myself, I started going through the house systematically turning on all the lights, but I couldn’t go near those two rooms. However, I thought the rest of the lights would keep me safe. The thing is I am not sure if it was to keep me safe from what was outside or what was in those rooms or both...
When I think about this dream, especially in the context of what happened the day before, when two unpleasant things happened that raised ugly ghosts from the past, bringing me back to an old way of seeing myself that I had thought I was finished with and I was a state for the rest of the day, the first thing I realised was that the house was my soul. It's what they generally say, isn't it? And it was strange cause I had only imagining my soul as a house the day before and had pictured all the different rooms it would need as I was falling asleep.
I have been reading alot of Marianne Williamson lately and of how she says we need to bring light to the darkness inside of us, to confront it with light rather than staying in the dark and over-analysing it. And it seems I am doing that, but the dream seemed to show me there are more rooms in my soul that I need to be brave enough to go into in order to heal. There was a strong message that I need to be brave enough to bring light in there.
I am not speaking today as an expert on dreams, or even an enthusiast. I wasn't even going to write about dreams until the title of my post brought me into this territory which I hadn't even realised was interesting me as much as it has been, but I want to keep this blog to muse over things more and explore what is going on in my head as I don't really have the opportunity right now, or perhaps am just unwilling to share it in everyday conversation. I haven't written in ever so long and I just took this up as an impulse after reading the thoughts of a friend on his blog without a clue what to write about.
I mentioned the notion of practice earlier and the notion of practising even when you don't fully understand yet. I am speaking in relation to A Course in Miracles which I have taken up recently. In general, I have been faithfully reading one chapter a day and doing the accompanying exercises. I find the text difficult to penetrate and some of the exercises quite obscure, but I find as I go, the text is revealing more and more and the exercises provide some supreme moments of insight which flicker for a moment and then disappear back into the swirl of my thoughts, my ego. But, like with my dreams, I know they are working. They just are.
I realised when I studied abroad in Moscow and Bali, when I overcame my resistance to the truth inherent in contradiction and the my need to have information delivered to me as it were on a platter, beautifully presented and ready to digest, that this where what you need sinks in at a deeper level. It becomes part of you and because it creates a certain amount of mental conflict, it individualises what you take in, thereby neutralising the danger of a generic learning experience or, even worse, a brainwashing effect. It helps us to learn with our intuition.
And it helps you to realise, no matter how much you learn, you don't know much!