Sparks from the Fire

Tonight I’m speaking to myself as much as with you.  The Missus and I sat in shock last night and looked at each other dumbfounded remarking that something has broken yet again.

It seems like in the past 3 days we’ve gone from one mishap to another.  First this blog site broke – for two days no one could get on to read.  Then that got fixed, but I still couldn’t get on to the back end to post.  That’s been a week now.

Then I had a major disaster in my studio, a place where nothing ever breaks except on rare February 29^th full moons.  I keep a pristine workspace and since I’m the only one who ever engineers the room, everything stays put in its rightful place and the room simply works.  However, a pair of midi converters that were over 20 years old decided to give up the ghost.

I had to replace them and re-think the entire system of literally thousands of midi channels, a 23 hour job and I’m not done yet, but up and running.

Then last night one of our laptops went down.  I won’t bore you with the rest.  You probably got your own troubles.  It seems like all I’ve done for the past three days is to try and figure out technical solutions and my brain is fried.

So last night, two brains fried, the Missus and I sat in shock over a cup of hot chocolate and asked each other, “What’s really going on here?” (more…)

Albert Einstein

Down in the dumps?  Out of work?  Out of money?  Suffering?  Fighting the matter model?  What you need is to be inspired – inspired to change your thought.  Inspirational music can literally change your life.  An inspirational song can lift you up and rummage around in your mind for days reminding you of the truth even when the material picture around you looks bleak.

When things seem at their worst, they’re not really.  That’s the great thing about goodness.  It’s like light.  It’s always there waiting to be turned on.  You just have to throw the switch.

Buddha

One thing for sure:  Turn on the light and the darkness disappears.  Darkness is just the absence of light.  It’s not some thing; it’s no thing – it’s simply an absence.  You can’t turn on the darkness.  There’s no switch for that.

The same goes for goodness.  It’s just there ready to be goodness.  The turn-on switch is your thinking.  Just throw the switch and the goodness that sits waiting to be appreciated will be there instantly, just like light.  We just have to change our minds. Change our thinking.

“The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” — Albert Einstein

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For me in life there’s nothing more exciting than starting the production of a new album.  It means an immersion into Inspirational music and the ideas surrounding the project.  It is always a time of inspiration, for if I don’t get inspired, neither will you when you hear the CD.

It’s also always a time when I have a great excuse to pull away from the craziness of this world into a higher minded process of thought.  It’s a time of great creativity and consequently, a time of great satisfaction.

It is what I live for.

Now is such a time.  Why not?  It’s spring!  Time for the buds to blossom.  Time to grow.  Each experience holds within it the possibility and the opportunity to grow, to get better, to dig deeper, to flower.

And so we begin Julia Wade’s sixth CD, a departure of sorts, an expansion really.  I like the word “expansion” because it implies maintaining the old while exploring the new.  This CD will mark Julia’s foray into songs of issue, a deeper consideration of the world around her, its problems and the healing of the kinds of issues that we hear on the news every day.

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Julia Wade

Last night it was business as usual at the WFM Listening Room.  Both La Tanya Hall and Julia Wade and their Inspirational music ended our week on the perfect notes – notes that soared, notes that calmed and notes that enlivened the soul.

These Fridays are crazy busy for me.  I wake up in the morning on show day and immediately know I’m in for it.  It’s a day of go, go, go until I flop down in my chair at the end of the day.  I won’t bore you with the details, but rather assure you that that’s just what it is – a day of endless detail.  It never stops.

When I get home at night, it’s all I can do to just crawl off to bed.

I’ve been doing this all my life, but it doesn’t get any easier.  Thank God for a great staff and a most professional venue.

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Law of Life

Why is it that we think we can get away with it?  And, oh yes, it happens to us all.  It comes under the subject heading “Cheating”.  Somehow we go through this life pushing the envelope, seeing how far we can go before the inevitable balance swings and rights the wrong.

Perhaps it’s just with that extra dessert or that thrown in, self-justifying sentence of gossip or that slight omission on our income tax report.  Perhaps it’s that slight exaggeration, or that roll through the stop sign when nobody’s lookin’ or that daydream of sweet revenge.

What if we knew absolutely for sure that we never, and I mean 100% never actually get away with anything; that life, or God, or just the equilibrium of balance is such that all wrong gets righted (some call it punished) no matter what?  That nobody ever gets away with anything.

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Sometimes it’s a little hard to get up and write about inspirational music when the world is facing such trouble.  The man-made stuff like war is bad enough, but it’s the so-called “natural disasters” that really spook us all.

It seems now that every year brings its earthquakes in Japan and Haiti, its hurricanes in New Orleans, its tsunamis in Sumatra and now Japan, its volcanic eruptions, tornados, and on and on.

“Why do these things happen?” we ask.  Why do seemingly innocent people have their lives pulled out from under them year after year?  When does it end?  Are we helpless and hopeless to stop this, to at least control this?

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I’ve been working on loving more.  It makes me a bit uneasy just to say it.  I mean, why should I have to ‘work’ to do that?  I’m sorry to have to say it.  I know it should come more naturally – to love more – but I just went through a pretty terrific healing and one of the things I identified in my negative thinking as I worked to clean it up was that I simply needed to love more.  Love people, love what I do, love God – more.

Much of what I do is easy to love.  I live for the moments every day when I can be creative and I’m fortunate that my life seems to bring me those opportunities daily.  However, some of what I do, like everybody else, is just drudgery.  I battle through it running headlong to what I love.  I’ve learned not to put the drudgery off, but to tackle it ASAP so I can go about the things I love with freedom.

So I’ve been working more on loving the drudgery.  Or rather taking the drudgery out of the activity and going about the supposedly non-creative stuff more creatively.  To a certain extent it’s working.  I’m happier and I have less drudgery.

I’ve been working on loving people more.  This has been my most successful endeavor in this exercise because I’ve simply decided to button my lip as much as I can when I don’t have something good to say about someone.  I’ve stopped rehearsing my complaints as much and that has enabled me to spend more time on what’s right or what’s good about someone and see them in a positive light.  It too is working.

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It will come as no surprise to anyone that Inspirational music comes to us as a result of thinking.  Before it is expressed through the fingers or gets jotted down at the end of a pencil, it first originates in mind.  I’ve learned, as a composer, that when I’m stuck and the music is not pouring forth, to take my hands off the keyboard and let mind imagine it first.

This always works.  It works because I’m going back to the root of creativity – mind.  I’ve always said that my best work comes through me figuring that the best ideas come from God or a higher power or source, but the portal that the ideas come through is mind.  Perhaps they don’t originate in mind or brain, but they exist somewhere out there or ‘in there’ already and we’re just here to provide the portal.

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