I was listening to an interview and concert today on World Café on WXPN with Scottish singer-songwriter K.T. Tunstall. I was introduced to her music when Black Horse and The Cherry Tree came out in 2004. Besides loving her melodic meanderings, I discovered that she and I have something else in common. It was a life changing experience on July 17, 2008 when (not at the same time, though) we each had an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama when he came to Philadelphia. I was fulfilling a 20 year journalistic dream when I interviewed him and it still feels surrealistic. She, along with musicians Moby, Joss Stone and Serge Tankian joined him in celebration of The Missing Peace Music Project.
One of things she offered close to the end had to do with one of my favorite subjects; creativity and the ways in which inspiration comes to us and is expressed. She envisioned it as if it were a ‘wispy stream that flowed above my head’ and that she needs to grab ahold of it, lest someone else do it first. I feel the same way, since there have been times when I have seen something elsewhere that I could have written. We are all part of the collective mind that ponders and processes reality. I find inspiration everywhere. It shows up in the simple things, such as sitting on the porch of my ‘office away from home’ called The Zen Den, in Doylestown, PA sipping a glass of multiple-herbal, anti-oxidant infused iced tea in the midst of birdfeeders and wind chimes at a brightly painted rescued and restored wrought iron table. I had the serene experience of breathing and being while waiting for my friends Jon and Chris to arrive to put the finishing touches on a workshop we are co-facilitating next Sunday. It arrives when driving in the car on winding back roads, arm breezing out the window, catching an updraft as my hand rides the wave~ It peeks in through my bedroom curtains in the form of sun dappled branches playing like a Balinese shadow puppet. And it visits my dreams as I drift and float on cloud cushions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQmDUEv939A Black Horse and The Cherry Tree
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