Michael
Tomlinson
Howdy my friends,
“Waiting for Spring” is the working title of the above photo. Is it spring yet? Because it’s dang chilly in the Pacific NW. I’m not really complaining, because a cold spring means a long spring, which means more blossoms for a longer time. I love it when spring blossoms all summer.
I was in a cafe a little earlier and sitting in the middle of the room I suddenly felt an icy chill on a sunny day. I looked up and someone had left the door wide open as they left. Then I looked at everyone around the room. “Is this what everyone wants?” I thought. I took a chance that it was not and walked across the room and closed it. Instant relief indoors. There was an elderly woman watching my movements in the far corner. She placed her hands on her heart in gratitude and grinned at me. Now, see? That’s all I ever really ask for. Just whenever you see me doing stuff that you like, place your hands on your heart. I doan knee no tips, just that is plenty.
I’m writing many songs. I don’t recommend writing many songs at once. You know why? You discover at some point that among the 40-some-odd pieces of songs on your little recording device, that some of them have the same melody! Yep. And chords of course. That’s what Covid did to me. Some people got a divorce, some moved to another state, some like the feel of shots and just keep taking them. Me? I wrote a bunch of song pieces and wasn’t aware that some had the same melody and chords.
But then I got to thinking about it. While you can’t easily get by with using other artists’ melodies in your song (unless you’re Dua Lipa, constantly) you can steal your own melodies ALL you want. I could literally take my melody from Yellow Windows and write an entirely different song. I shall not, but I could. Just in case you came to my site for musical legalities and such. There you are.
I’m loving what I’m writing, though a lot of it feels quite different from what I used to do. Oh, there will still be beautiful ballads. But there are also much more complex songs, where I have to sing five or sing lines on the same breath. Luckily, I practice breathing fairly often. I’ve been pleased that I’m writing, despite how hard it is to be beautifully creative during a time when the very country we live in seems in such a precarious place. The songs I’ve finished are upbeat, colorful lyrics and in some ways filled with literate phrases. Some of the titles are Woman On A Rain Train, Honeysuckle, Weather Man, Maidenform & Stetson, The Welcome Tree. And several more I shall not yet name.
Also, among the things I’m doing, I’m putting together a series of workshops where we use writing to raise our level of awareness and to spark memory and fluid thinking. When we’ve been under duress and at times almost paralyzed in depression — as many people have told me they feel — we need ways to come out of fear and worry and live with love and creativity and gratitude. I’ve seen writing to do that. In fact, I often tell my friends that when I’m highly creative, I have no age. Like when you’re outright laughing. You are as young as you’ve ever been when you’re laughing. And when you’re creating something new in the world, it’s as if you yourself are new again in this world. So, as the workshops and ongoing online gatherings define themselves a little better to me, I will share with you what I’m doing next.
If you read my Substack letter, called The Morning, Brilliant Blue, you may know that I recently found a magnificent bumble bee crawling his very last gasping crawl of his life. He’d been in my place for two weeks without food or water. I’d seen him high in a window and had thought he’d gotten out, but no, he had not. So, I carried him out to the bird bath, made sure he wouldn’t fall in. He could barely move, but what he wanted first wasn’t water. He needed nutrients. As he grasped frailly to a fern leaf, I ran back upstairs and brought down some raw honey, squirted some on the leaf ahead of him and you’ve never in your life seen a proboscis come alive like that. His body might be too tired to move, but that proboscis was like a wild snake.
To my grateful astonishment, after half an hour of drinking honey, he flew away. I know, it’s a small thing. Insects, bees, die all the time and we don’t notice. But I’d marveled at him that day he was buzzing up high in a window. And when I saw him weakly fumbling along two weeks later in my kitchen, I just wanted to do all I could to help him make it. I wanted him to fly away and go to town on new flowers. It seemed like a miracle that after half an hour, he’d done just that.
So, see? There’s obviously nothing I won’t write about. Like this; a few weeks ago there was something in my eye, down in the inner corner of my left eye it was driving me crazy. It seemed like something stuck there and no amount of eye drops would move it. Did I mention that it itched so badly that a man might howl like a coyote to express just how much it itched? I had to go to my credit union that day at a Safeway ten miles from my house. Totally handy banking. I’d brought a couple of my CDs for two young people who worked at the credit union and had always asked me about my music. After a nice exchange I was leaving the store when I realized how thirsty I was. I turned around and went back in and trudged to the juice cooler. Nothing, I couldn’t find what I wanted. Then I saw this drink called ALIVE mushroom elixir. “Okeedokey sir, I’ll have the one that says, Root beer.”
As I drove back toward home, I guzzled that elixir. I noticed something strange, within a few blocks that my poor itching eyeball I’d considered plucking out and tossing, well, it lessened by half. What? I held up the mushroom drink and looked at it again. (I was at a red light!) No way it could be this drink, could it? It was then that I thought, “Hey, is this just pollen that caused this insanity? Is my eye itching beyond description just a pollen thing?” By the time I got to my next stop, the itching had stopped. Completely. Oh, come on! That can’t be the root beer — can it? I called my friend Jeffrey who takes a lot of mushrooms for healthy reasons, not for psychedelic ones. Told him about ALIVE. He’d found it the year before and occasionally enjoyed himself a bottle. But he hadn’t known about this allergy effect.
That very day I ordered 16 bottles online. It’s good stuff. The next morning my eye started itching again. Not yet at a torturous level but it was coming on strong. I remembered that I have some handy elixirs in my fridge. I walked over and pulled one out, it takes gargantuan hand strength to open the lid, by the way. I sat back down and had a nice big chug. Halfway through that bottle, the itch went completely away. “You’ve GOT to be kidding me!” I swear, I am so often led to little solutions to problems. I drank many bottles over the last few weeks. No return of itchy eyeball syndrome. So, I know that was what did it. A mushroom elixir containing reishi, chaga, and turkey tail mushrooms. I just had to let you know about this. Also, it tastes really good.
Well, I could go on and on and make up even more stuff than I already have, but I’ll save something for next time. Thank you for stopping by, my friend.
Your friend in the wind, Michael Tomlinson
The Morning, Brilliant Blue
Stories, Humor, Memoir, Imagination
An ongoing flow of my writings on Substack
