May 2020 | ARTIST JOURNALING | The Songs in my Soul | Music and Video Meditations

I’ve never been a “musician,” I can’t keep a beat, I dance to a different drum - but I do love playing some music, especially on my steel tongue drum, and beating on my hand drum can be a great cathartic and energetic creative release, especially during times when I’m too busy to devote much time to artwork, or too emotional for one reason or another to really be inspired to focus on a bigger project. Right now, as I’m typing this, it’s a little over a month after my mom died of lung cancer, and just over 3 months since I first moved my mom down to Austin to take care of her, the saga of which occurred concurrently with our country shutting down due to a pandemic. It’s hard to believe it’s only been a month and a half, hard to believe it’s only been three months — even though summer 2019 seems like it happened a lifetime ago. My mom missed the lockdown protests with gun-toting white supremacists, she missed the riots and the racial violence, she missed the 100,000 coronavirus deaths. She was hoping the pandemic would show us all not to fight, and look where we are now. It’s sometimes impossible to maintain composure in a world gone mad, but there’s just something about moving and using my hands - whether it’s with a paintbrush, or a hand drum, or a keyboard - and the creative process that really helps me find myself when I’m feeling lost in darkness. And in these dark times, I think it’s important for everyone to find some kind of outlet for their hands — something of yours to put out into the world, something to gift to someone else who may need it, something to say, ‘here is my attempt to add something of mine to the ether.’ And music, especially, has a way of spreading, vibrating, bringing us all together into collectives and singularities where we are all experiencing the same emotions. It only takes a few minutes of really playing to feel a difference in your self, to feel the release and the flow of energy, and to change the way you’re experiencing your day and your thoughts.