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Jul 15, 2021Liked by Tessa Lena

Beautiful! And it is so much a story of my life and the life of our culture. Coming to this world with your gifts and learning that you must make yourself useful to a dysfunctional culture to earn your keep, and nobody has interest in your gifts. A soul-crushimg "moral injury". And yet - somehow the hurting is good and you learn to know in your bones what really matters.

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Jul 15, 2021Liked by Tessa Lena

That was beautiful beyond words. Thank you.

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Jul 15, 2021Liked by Tessa Lena

That really was lovely

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Wonderful. I just knew you were going to say the person was Anaïs Tekeria, and I know a/the feeling of no longer feeling the music flow. The discussion you had with Anaïs moved like music, it was moving, and I was moved. I haven't listened to the video in this piece yet, but I can't wait. Thank you, both.

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Being a music-maker myself, this post hit me in right in the gut. For me it was nearly 20 years between projects-- the last one was in 1997 and my new one creeped in around 2016 and was finally completed in 2020.

Looking back at the dry spell it's clear enough now that I had to move through something "not quite right" in my inner world. Without going into too much detail, let's just say that I had to go through a slow, painful process of inner "death and destruction". A lot of old junk had to go-- self-defeating notions, acquired identity/self-image and, of course, your typical default-world programming/conditioning, all of these being completely useless but to which I nevertheless found myself steadfastly clinging to.

Can't say that I was even aware of it while these things were all slowly crumbling down. All I knew was that everything that mattered to me in my life was gone, out of reach and entirely unobtainable. I didn't know what to do with myself. I was just kind of forced to live as an artless creature. All I had left inside of me was dogged determination born of blind trust that life would somehow take me somewhere so long as I kept living it.

What needed to happen, did happen. Thank God ; ^]. I guess it never totally went away but when the music returned it arrived roaring like a lion. And (so far at least) continues to do so.

I might venture to say that all artists experience, like waves on a beach, ebbs and flows of their creative energies? Sometimes you find yourself surfing a monster and other times you are standing there watching flat water roll in with little ankle-slappers. The ocean is not at our command.

In the end, the artist IS their art. One can only bring forth what is within. If one finds that there is nothing left to work with on the level one is existing at, maybe it's time to go deeper. Time to "die" and move into another realm. For me, I learned it's okay to drop the art and just live and let normal life kick your ass for a while.

'Cuz you know it will.

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