Saturday, November 10, 2007

New Home, New CD...

Such a year..could I ever have imagined such a year as this? Finger surgery (still a huge problem playing the harp!), selling my Seattle house, switching from classroom to on-line course teaching, moving to BC, living and loving the summer months here, Fall travels in Ireland and the Mediterranean, and through it all, recording and editing a new cd...with dearly beloved friends Shiho and Ann...together we are ShAnLi, and the new cd of kotos, flutes, and harps respectively, is called Tethys, and will be in our anxious hands by Dec 1...the day I leave for several weeks in Mexico with 2 of my 3 gorgeous daughters!

Wot a life, I tell you...a time of change, transition, re-balancing, re-discovery of boundaries, re-uniting with family and landscape...

So if you're still reading this, you're as much an explorer as I, and I look forward to posting a few pictures and adventures from Mexico in a few short weeks!

ps - there are some stories to go with some of my tracks on Tethys...see the comment below if you like!

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Home(s) Again!

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

“Home(s) again”

Such an elusive concept; I’ve been puzzling over various meanings and implications of the word “home”for many years, most recently after moving from a very satisfactory “home” in Seattle, Washington to my birth or original “home” in the interior country-land of British Columbia, Canada. They were both home. They were each home for different reasons, different lengths of time, with different people, and at different times in my life. This in itself is enough to make my head spin, but in recent years I’ve been giving relatively free rein to my wanderlust, using the ability of a middle-class Northamerican to travel and learn about other parts of the world: Mexico, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain…so while living out of suitcases during these adventures, I watch people at “home” in their world and culture, and while I feel like a visitor because I AM a visitor, I also wonder what makes their place home to them. Now I have returned again from travels abroad, but this time it is different…this time I am home in BC without a house (yet) to call home, instead of returning to a home (Seattle) in a land that was never mine to call home…see? It’s all a little vertiginous! Home has been where my stuff is, that seems to sum it up for me of late! And now I am reunited with my stuff at home in my native land, and it’s all different and new and familiar and wonderful and all I need now is a house in which to put it all…myself and my stuff!

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

There is a dusting of snow on the ground, perhaps not enough to accumulate, but certainly enough to lighten the insides of the rooms in my sister’s house, you know how that is. And 3 weeks ago today I begged to be brought “home” right after the cruise, rather than stay on in Spain as planned. So many boundaries were touched that week, so many limits came forward to claim a position of armament against my previously grandiose attitude of “if I can dream it, I can do it”. Not the least of these was an avowed avoidance of winter…but what did I find upon arriving at the airport in Seattle a week ago? I took a deep breath of the damp fall air, felt a gladness for the change of season, felt that the scene from the train of the hills around Malaga, citrus and olive orchards and spectacular geology notwithstanding was too hot and dry to entice me.

Now I have found a basement apartment near Salmon Arm, so I'll be paying for it today and moving in this week...eek!!! How DID that happen so soon! I have to tell you, I need to wonder about "be careful what you ask for" because I've been GETTING what I ask for and then finding that I've asked for too much...thus the early return from traveling. But "home", as elusive and slippery a concept as it is, is the engine on the train now and so that's what I looked for and that's what I found.