Where Have I Been? (Great Question)
Who and what am I attracting? Do you ever ask yourself this question? I do, all the time. Since the year 2020, I have found myself in some of the most bizarre places, especially in the beginning. Those bizarre places, more recently, included spending many hours with elderly women who were in their final days of life. Each and every experience I have had on that level has been priceless, but it always left me viscerally aware that I am either attracting this, or this is attracting me. I can't say for certain but I know I had one prayer when I left Saint John, and subsequently my entire life, behind. It was this: send me where I am needed. And so I ended up at the bedside of dying women, at times, and I held their hand as their lives came to a close. I ended up doing quite a few less glamorous jobs as well.
Regardless of the state I was in, I seemed to bring nearly each and every one enormous comfort. How could I complain? I couldn't. However, on my downtime, all I ever did was rock and roll with headphones on. Walking, dancing around in my camper, or driving wherever I could think to drive, stereo blasting; music has been the framework (once more?) of my life. One world did not exactly mesh with the other. I just learned to go with the flow.
The day I was approached by an artist from the Capital Region of my home province of New Brunswick, Canada, to collaborate with him on a song, I was overjoyed. He found me through my music project (The Accihte Music Project) and asked me work with him on a song called Curse of Blood. The common thread that tied us together was the the focus on the Wolastoqey language, which forms the building blocks for the premise of the a variety of songs I made to keep record of this information download and/or brain overload, which I experienced and discussed at length HERE. As for Oluwi? Many of his songs focus on the theme of the old stories of our Indigenous Peoples and he sings about them on his EP Magical Bones. I agreed to work with him immediately and we share a very pleasant and fun, mutually professional exchange. My project attracted the attention of this artist, but we had never met before and I couldn't have said, prior to last night's experience, what he was like as a person. When it came to this collaboration, I wondered what and who had attracted me, and vice versa. I was not sure, until last night.
Much to my absolute delight, this artist and fellow collaborator, turned out to be one of the brightest rays of sunshine I have experienced in a while. He exuded positivity and inclusivity simply by the smile on his face, which was evident in the tone of his voice. He was very nice. I was very pleased by that.
I finally had the first-hand experience of seeing him play live last night as well and it told me many many things about the status of the healing that has occurred within the magnetic fields of my life. Something is gradually shifting and getting better and better, which is what I have been waiting for. When I get a glimpse into my future, this is the type of thing I see. Everything is elevated to a much more joyful norm. I found myself being pulled into this vortex of positivity almost immediately when I saw him post an advertisement for this show he and his friends were organizing; a sort of house-party kind of thing. After the four hour journey (there and back again) I embarked on to see Tom Morello, I never really thought twice to travel an hour and a half away (by car) to see him perform and, hopefully, meet him face to face.
I put in a seven or eight hour day at my day-job (working with aforementioned elderly folk) and then got all prettied up and went to the show, which was having a "best-dressed" contest, and not of the Halloween variety. So, just in case, I made sure to look sharp. The drive was easy, I grabbed a chance to visit my sister, who lives in the area, and then I headed out to this show where I knew no one other than my fellow collaborator and even then, it was only by one or two video chats and some emails, etc.. There was a time when I would have died from anxiety to dive into a scenario like this all alone, but these days? I enjoy the adrenaline rush and, without fail, there's always something really good on the other side of fears and anxiety. I push through them a lot lately, and its getting easier every day. So? I waltzed right in the door and sat down beside a singer/songwriter who I've been following on Instagram. She said how pleased she was that the music scene in the area is so vibrant. I told her that is was incredible, but it never used to even exist. This whole thing was brand new. There was never a music scene like there is now. This is one reason why I really wanted to go. I wanted to see what this was all about because I would have surely been a part of a music scene back in the day, had there been one. There was none, however.
The interesting thing about this scenario, this house-party/music show, was the fact that I am pretty sure I was the oldest person there, but I don't know if anyone noticed that about me or not. I had only ever been to something like this a handful of times and that was a very long time ago. I never enjoyed it much because the noise was unbearable for me, at that time. As for last night? Everyone who spoke to me did so with ease. Nothing weird was said. Nothing weird happened. It was just a lot of fun. And neither the crowd nor the loud noise bothered me at all. Not even a little bit. This is a brand new development. I used to abhor situations like this. What changed? Maybe it's generational, I am not sure, but it feels amazing.
And something else really damned good happened to me last night as well. Something that surprised me in the most intriguing and delightful way. As I was chatting to the lovely singer/songwriter, who was as kind and friendly to me as I could possibly ask anyone to be, I suddenly heard a noise come across the sound system. I stopped dead in my tracks. I stopped talking and felt a little jolt, a little WTF moment. The first sounds that came across the room, aside from some snaps and cracks from the speakers, was a sound I shall never forget as long as I live, in terms of its perfect irony.
The sound that I heard in that moment was the sound of MY OWN VOICE.
"Hey!" I exclaimed to my new friend, "that's me." And she looked at me, pointed to the air, and said "that's you?" And I said, "Yes! That's me!!" I was ecstatic. It was the beginning of the song Curse of Blood.
I was so excited. I squealed with delight. I started to sing along, but I think I am the ONLY ONE in the whole room who knew all the words. Other than my muted lust for fame (ha ha) the significance of this is so profound, I am quite sure I can't put it into words, so this post goes out to my die-hard fans, who will hopefully pick up what I am putting down, here. The words that came over the sound system were spoken in my voice, but the language is Wolastoqey. So, the first foyer into the realms of sound, in terms of my personal contribution, to this date, exists in this form; my words and the ancient Wolastoqey language. This is exactly what I had hoped to achieve when I decided to make music of whatever variety with The Accihte Music Project. I wanted to form a crack in the realms of sound, knowing my voice has its own inherent signature, by which this language could find its way through to tell the story I seemed destined to tell and so my voice could achieve the outcomes it seemed created to achieve. And guess what? That achievement was unlocked. Now, ain't that something?
This moment, this soundbite, this clip, which is played each time Oluwi7 performs the song, which I didn't even think about before. When I say the world is sort of a haze to me, this is what I mean. Sometimes I miss the most obvious things. It's is funny, except when it isn't. And, in conjunction with the scope of everything else has happened to lead me today, to this moment? I will be honest and say, as wild as things have been, I am smiling, what more can I say? I miss the point of things sometimes ( a lot of the time) but I do go back and retrace my steps rather often, for this exact reason.
In essence, this dynamic proves my point. This language was attracting me, or I was attracting this language. Either way, the odds of these events coalescing over the span of such a vast amount of time, and coming together as it has, is certainly suggestive of the laws of attraction, to say the least, but on a much more universal scale, it also signifies a mighty force at work in this world, that caused me to follow my heart, which lead me up the stairs of a rather witchy looking house, where I have never been before in my entire life, amongst people I had never met before. I wiggled through the crowd and made my way up to the front of the room and sat on the floor as soon as I could muster the courage to do so. Everyone could see me. I did not care.
I shook hands with Oluwi of Oluwi7 the moment I had the opportunity to do so. Finally.
No one else in the room knew me at all. I was not exactly ignored so much as just kind of left alone. Everyone had good manners. Everyone was smiling. Everyone was kind and at least ten years younger than me whereas my kids (whose age I gauge my entire life by for whatever reason) are ten years younger than all of them, give or take a few years. What a deeply bizarre scenario it was for me. But I didn't not feel out of place, rather I felt like I had finally arrived, in some sense, to a destination I have been waiting for and working for. Timing is everything.
Just as singing my guts out at the concert in Moncton did for me last week, this experience released a pressure valve in my mind. I felt a release of tension within myself. After hearing my own voice being played in a public setting like this, in such an unexpected way, I felt somewhat humbled. It's like the entire universe slapped me with a newspaper or something (do you get the reference?). I felt sort of silly for being so surprised, especially after I mentioned it to Oluwi upon speaking him to the very first time. I stuttered and stumbled over my words, but told him I was surprised to hear my own voice on the speakers. He looked at me, seeming mildly annoyed in a congenial kind of way and asked me how it was I could be surprised at that. "Curse of Blood is the first song on the EP!" he said. He smiled and shook his head, messy dark hair falling ever-so-gracefully across his face, affording a casual calm to the moment, thank goodness. I fumbled even more to excuse myself for not recognizing the obvious, while also thinking to myself; he assumes I know how all this works. Damn.
I truly don't know how all this works, but I saw his point. We made the song over a year ago.
This whole thing is still a shock to me, to be honest. It is a shock because I still feel like my life was not so much sacrificed as commandeered, for these events. I use the expression 'deer in the headlights' a lot, and for good reason.
Again, this absolutely glowingly positive human being looks at me, sort of shakes his head, and in an incredibly endearing Montréal accent smiles and says to me "where have you been?"
Indeed. That is a great question. Where the hell have I been?
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