March 17, 2024 by willedare

More Ode To Water

Greetings after a months-long pause in blogging!

I hope you remain healthy as winter inches towards spring (at least in New England…)

I also fervently hope that you have not experienced any climate-related catastrophes in recent weeks — or war-related catastrophes — or ANY catastrophic circumstances at all.

Each and every day I remain grateful for healthy food to eat, a warm place to sleep, a functional bicycle, gainful (if very modestly-paying) employment, and clean water.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

I also remain very grateful for all the folks who visit my blog — anywhere from four to eighteen each day during the past ten weeks — even though I have not published a new post since the end of December.

THANK YOU!

Right at the end of 2023 — having relied upon showers for the past few decades to keep myself clean — I re-discovered the delicious experience of taking a bath (after a long and chilly day of travel to visit relatives in upstate New York).

Wow.

Soaking in even a few inches of hot water is such a different experience from taking a shower.

One can slow down and lose track of time…

I also feel as though the heat from the bath water soaks deeper into my body and stays with me longer than the heat from water in a shower.

Or maybe I am imagining that…

And one final bonus is that I have a compelling reason to scrub my bath tub on a regular basis (which, when I was just taking showers, I could easily overlook for weeks on end…)

Hurrah!

Another deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

My latest song release — an Ode To Water — celebrates all forms of water here on planet earth.

And its release coincides with another round of extreme rainfall and flooding here in the not-so-United States.

I continue to be flummoxed by how most of our political leaders — despite the increasingly destructive weather events occurring on a increasing basis all around our amazing planet — remain largely in denial about how closely we are inching towards some significant environmental tipping points — from which it will be very difficult if not impossible to recover.

Maybe it’s because they are human beings and — like most of us — tend to function in a state of denial until a catastrophe enters the inner circle of our lives.

To me, climate change/catastrophe underpins every other issue — huge imbalances of wealth/power, all sorts of civil rights challenges, the rising trend towards fascism in many countries including our own, women’s ability to make decisions about their own health/bodies, the industrial agri-chemical contamination of the web of life, etc. etc. etc. — which we are facing as human beings here on planet earth.

Here in Massachusetts our liberal Democratic governor is waffling about the proposed expansion of an airport used by private planes/jets called Hanscom Field, which is located eleven miles from where I live.

Making it easier for more rich people to fly in private jets is a perverse example of us NOT making the difficult changes in our human behavior/expectations that our climate change/catastrophe is calling for.

But I am guessing that Governor Healey is at least partially beholden/indebted to wealthy donors who have contributed to her successful political campaigns and may be inclined to help make their lives easier — even though it is well documented that air travel is one of the worst offenders regarding our fossil fuel over-consumption (and private jets are even worse than commercial flights!)

Yet another deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

Two states away from me in Maine, a friend has co-owned a tiny, one-room (former) fishing shack for decades with her extended family near Kennebunkport which serves as a very humble summer refuge for a large web of siblings, cousins and friends.

I have felt very fortunate to visit (and even perform) there a few times!

During a recent storm, this tiny cottage (which is boarded up during the winter months) experienced higher flooding than anyone can ever remember happening… and lost its front porch.

Another, larger shack (on tall stilts) which had been damaged last year and thoroughly repaired was entirely WASHED AWAY.

It had withstood nor’easters for over a hundred years… and now is gone!

The time to make difficult choices and change longstanding habits is NOW regarding how we human beings (especially those of us in developed countries) consume fossil fuels.

To top it all off, I recently read an article in The Guardian about how we human beings are very close to experiencing a major tipping point in how water circulates in the Atlantic ocean.

Yikes!

Due to my recent embrace of baths, I have a keen awareness about how water behaves in my tub.

Colder water sinks to the bottom, and warmer water stays near the surface.

In the Atlantic ocean there is something similar called the “Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) — a vast system of ocean currents” that helps to regulate our planet’s climate.

“AMOC, which encompasses part of the Gulf Stream and other powerful currents, is a marine conveyer belt that carries heat, carbon and nutrients from the tropics towards the Arctic Circle, where it cools and sinks into the deep ocean. This churning helps to distribute energy around the Earth and modulates the impact of human-caused global heating.”

But AMOC “is being eroded by the faster-than-expected melt-off of Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets, which pours (very cold) freshwater into the sea and obstructs the sinking of saltier, warmer water from the south.”

And new analysis by scientists has determined that “AMOC is…on track towards an abrupt shift, which has not happened for more than 10,000 years and would have dire implications for large parts of the world.”

Another huge YIKES!!!

Followed by one final deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

This is why I ride my bike and/or walk and/or take public transportation.

This is why I eat less meat.

This is why I choose not to fly in order to visit friends and/or family in faraway places.\

And this is why I remain deeply grateful for all of the miraculous basics in my current life — including clean, fresh water to drink and to cook with and to clean with and to bathe in plus a non-leaky roof over my head.

Here is a link to my “Ode To Water“ in case you might like to stream (music flows in bits of electronic data these days these days…) it.

And as I have explained before, if you “like” one of my songs or add it to one of your playlists, that will improve the algorithmic sharing of my music.

Furthermore, if you listen to it via Spotify, I would be particularly grateful because Spotify recently changed its business model.

Starting in 2024, they are no longer paying indie artists half of the royalties (which are already absurdly low) due to them for any song streamed fewer than 1000 times per year.

So I need to get another 337 streams in the next ten months (so far it has earned 663 streams from 476 listeners around the world in the two months since it was released!)

I will probably write about this discouraging “rob from the poor to pay the rich” business strategy in a future blog post…

But, returning to several of the “glass-more-than-half-full” blessings in my life, I would like to thank Doug Hammer for playing so expressively on this recording and for being such a terrific engineer/producer.

Thank you to Stephen Fischer for his elegant graphic design work.

Thank you to the photographers at Pixabay for their beautiful images.

Thank you to the amazing cycles of water which circulate — from oceans to clouds to earth to plants to us and back around again and again and again — on a daily basis here on planet earth.

And thank YOU for reading and listening to another one of my blog posts!

ps: If you are thirsty for more musings about water, you can click here and here to read blog posts from 2022 and 2020 which featured earlier versions of my “Ode To Water.”

December 7, 2022 by willedare

The Water Song

Thank you to everyone who continues to read my blog posts — old and new!

Today is a rainy and windy day in the greater Boston area.

Now that it’s December, part of me wishes that it were snow falling insead of rain.

The sentimental part of me, that is.

The practical part of me — who would be helping to shovel it from our sidewalk, porches, and driveway — is OK with rain.

I was very grateful to read recently that Massachusetts has mostly recovered from last summer’s drought due to the rain which has fallen in recent months.

Hurrah!

But as most of us know, the rest of the world is not as fortunate — with water levels falling to unprecedented levels in the western and southwestern parts of the USA, for example.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

I wrote a blog post in January 2020 which featured an older version of today’s song.

You can click here to check it out if you are curious. I went wild with lots of water imagery from Pixabay…

However, in keeping with my current resolve to share shorter blog posts, I will include fewer photos today.

Another deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

I’ve been getting acupuncture on a regular basis for 30+ years.

My practitioners have been part of the five-element school of acupuncture, which is an extremely wise and beautiful branch of acupuncture.

Each patient, for example, is viewed as a garden to be tended to by the practitioner in order that all five elements/phases of our body/mind/spirit — water, wood, fire, earth, and metal —remain harmonious and in balance.

The water element corresponds — among many other things — with the season of winter, with the feeling of fear (and/or the lack of fear), with the taste of salt, with the sound of groaning, with slowing down/resting/sleeping, with meditating, and with the experience of not-knowing.

You can click here for a link to an acupuncturist’s webpage which describes more about the water element if you are curious.

Most of us are a blend of all five elements/phases.

Image by Susanne Jutzeler, Schweiz, from Pixabay

I, for example, was diagnosed by J. R. Worsley as a Wood type — with Earth and Water within (ie: Mud as I like jokingly to say).

He recommended, among other things, that I do more swimming — and in the years since my diagnostic visit with him I have spent many hours in pools, lakes, ponds and oceans.

Recently, however, I have become less excited about swimming in the crowded chlorinated pool — which also hosts swimming classes for children of all ages — nearest my home.

So nowadays I swim in lakes and ponds (and occasionally the ocean) during the warmer months of the year — although a friend and I did have share a brisk, final swim in Walden Pond this past October.

It is very easy for many of us to take fundamental blessings such as daily access to clean water for granted.

I continue to be a fan of counting one’s blessings as an antidote to the onslaught of news and commercial messages with which most of us are bombarded every day via social media, television, radio, ads on the sides of busses, etc.

One more deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

May we all be mindful of ways that we can conserve and honor and re-use the water flowing through our faucets, our showers, our baths, our washing machines, our dishwashers, our veins, our arteries, our lymphatic vessels, our skin, our tear ducts, our plants, our forests, our systems of agriculture, etc.

I will end with a few more delightful images from Pixabay of different forms of water.

Thank you to all of the photographers who share their work there.

Thank you to Doug Hammer for contributing his artistry to my song as a pianist and as an engineer.

You are always welcome to visit my website — where you can find many songs and learn more about my musical life here on planet earth if you are curious.

You can also find me singing on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, YouTube and other digital music platforms.

Any song you “like” or “heart” or add to one of your playlists will improve the algorithmic activity of my music there!

I hope to release my “Ode to Water” to the non-WordPress musical world sometime in 2023…

Thank you again for reading and listening to one of my blog posts.

Very gratefully yours,

will

December 13, 2020 by willedare

Let My Heart Be Open…

These are challenging times.

I’ve been reading a lot of posts — as well as the comments they elicit — by my fellow bloggers.

One theme that often emerges is Covid-fatigue.

This is not the fatigue that one experiences when one contracts the Covid-19 virus (although I have been told that fatigue is often a symptom of Covid-19 infection and can last much longer than one would like…)

This is being tired of wearing a mask outside and sometimes even inside if one is quarantining at home with others.

This is being tired of not seeing people’s faces — and smiles — while going to work or buying groceries or walking one’s dog.

This is being tired of feeling scared that one might contract the virus.

This is being tired of feeling upset by the folks who have been listening to a different stream of news — one in which mask-wearing is not necessary and the virus is nothing to fear.

This is — in some very sad cases — being heart-broken that one is unable to visit and comfort a loved one who is fighting for her or his life in a hospital.

This is being tired of not seeing one’s extended web of family and friends at Thanksgiving — and probably not seeing them for the winter holidays either…

This is being tired of not being able to do many of the things that some of us formerly took for granted — like BBQ-ing with friends, or seeing a movie in a theater, or going on a date, or eating in a restaurant, or attending a concert or…. you fill in the blank.

The list goes on and on.

The news of surprisingly robust results from many different vaccine trials gives me a shred of hope — a possible light at the end of a long tunnel.

But this will take time — more time than most of us want to acknowledge.

And we will probably need to wear our masks even AFTER we have been vaccinated because there is very little data — yet — about how infectious those who have been vaccinated may be to others who have not yet been vaccinated.

And not everyone — for a spectrum of reasons both historical and personal and political — may agree to be vaccinated…

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

Then there is the fatigue — physical, emotional, spiritual — that our nurses and EMTs and doctors and others who help to take care of Covid-19 patients are experiencing.

In many cases it is beyond fatigue.

It is trauma.

We are going to emerge from this health crisis with a significant number of our caregivers having been traumatized and in need of all sorts of healing for THEIR bodies, minds and spirits.

Some of them may decide that they can no longer risk their lives taking care of others — especially others who minimize and/or deny the threat of Covid-19 (and thus help to worsen everyone’s collective health and the horrific burden being placed on our health care workers).

I learned recently that one of my friends — a former housemate with whom I lived after college (along with three other people) in a run-down but functional duplex apartment outside Central Square in Cambridge, MA — just spent five days in a hospital fighting to breathe with a Covid infection.

He posted on Facebook:

“I didn’t get the mild version. It was a grueling, terrifying experience. I would like to make a plea for any of you who doubt the danger of this bug to rethink that. If you are thinking, ‘I probably won’t get it’ or ‘it probably won’t kill me’ you’re in danger — and the people around you are as well. Please don’t let your guard down. You’ll never know what you’re missing.”

In another post he shared more details:

“When my COVID was at its worst I had a temperature of 103, and each breath only gave me a few teaspoons of air. I would get panicked, and I would cough and gasp, but there was no more room in my lungs. A nurse at the ER told me to try not to cough; so I started counting my breaths, trying to make it to 100 without coughing. I’d get to about 37 and involuntarily cough/gasp. And then came one of those moments when you realize you had something and never appreciated it and maybe it’s gone. I wanted a regular breath, nothing fancy, and if I could have it I wouldn’t take it for granted anymore. So today I am deeply thankful for my lungs. I’m sharing this hoping that, if you don’t already appreciate your lungs, you’ll take a nice deep breath and appreciate them right now…”

Deep breath in.

And out.

So how did my friend end up in the hospital?

“I got a flu shot the Wednesday of the week before Thanksgiving. Felt achy the next day. Not sure if it was the shot or COVID. By Saturday my chest was getting tight. On Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. I was going to the ER every evening (it gets bad in the evening — no one can tell me how the virus knows what time it is), struggling to breath, doing this sort of gasping/cough thing that just excited my lungs and made them more desperate. Fever kept getting worse — 103 degrees by Wednesday, (when) I went to a new hospital.”

They admitted my friend and started him on a 5 day course of Remdesivir.

“At this point I didn’t know where this was going. The thing about the coughing/gasping is that they really didn’t have anything to stop it. I asked a doctor how concerned he was that I might die, and he said, “Not at all.” That was reassuring. Up until then I was worried about A) being on a ventilator and B) dying. They tell me that they don’t put people on ventilators as much now that they know more about treatment. Gradually, my symptoms receded. Very grateful.”

He was treated in the hospital with Remdesivir, oxygen, cough syrup, nebulizer treatments, and tylenol to control his fever.

He’s pretty sure he got Covid from his 18-year-old daughter, who had a fever for a couple of days and then was fine.

His final comment on Facebook was:

“(Covid infection) varies greatly and it can turn on a dime.”

Another deep breath in.

And out.

Paul is the second person I know who has been hospitalized due to Covid.

The other — as regular readers of this blog may remember — is a fellow singer who ended up on a ventilator for many weeks and then spent time in rehab for weeks after that.

Both friends are now at home and gradually recovering their strength.

There but for the grace of g-d — along with a few face masks, a lot of physical/social distancing, and regular handwashing — go I…

And ANOTHER deep breath in.

And out.

Yesterday morning I picked up a bunch of postcards for me and two friends to personalize and then mail to potential voters in Georgia.

I loved riding my bike — and not burning any fossil fuels — while picking up and then delivering postcards to my friends.

Climate change is a WHOLE OTHER CRISIS which many of us — similar to the Covid-downplayers and non-mask-wearers during our current Covid crisis — are in denial about.

But that’s a topic for another blog post…

I definitely experienced — and was grateful for — my lungs as I pedaled up a bridge and over the commuter railroad tracks that separate Cambridge from Somerville.

I was also grateful that yesterday’s rain waited until I was home from my postcard pickup and deliveries to begin its gentle precipitation.

And I am grateful to share that a song I recorded many years ago — “Let Me Be Strong” by Barbara Baig — now has its own mini-website.

You can click here to check it out (and you may recognize the names of a few fellow bloggers on the feedback page, bless them…)

I met Barbara when I was organizing open mics at the Cambridge Center For Adult Education in Harvard Square, where I worked for 16 years,

As you may also remember from a recent blog post about how modestly streaming platforms currently pay recording artists and songwriters, it is unlikely that we will make much money from distributing “Let Me Be Strong.”

But we have gotten such positive feedback that we decided — as a kind of mitzvah — to create this mini-website and devote some energy to sharing her song with the rest of the world (or at least those people who have access to digital music platforms…)

The chorus of her song says:

“Let me be strong and moving through fear.

When the truth is blinding, let me see it clear.

And when love comes, let me not hide.

Let my heart be open, let love inside.”

Easier said (or sung) than done, I know — but potentially helpful words for the days and weeks and months ahead…

We have begun reaching out to radio DJs, nurses, doctors, yoga instructors, hospital chaplains, ministers, rabbis, and anyone else whom we think might appreciate hearing the song — and possibly sharing it with others.

We would be honored if YOU, too, are moved to share “Let Me Be Strong” with anyone in your web of family and friends.

You can use the share option by clicking on the upper right corner of this page of our mini-website if the spirit moves you.

We also welcome any ideas about other people, DJs, yoga instructors, nurses, doctors, rabbis, ministers, chaplains, etc. to whom we might reach out — one heart to another.

Clearly a lot of our hearts in the USA are quite frozen with fear (and rage) these days.

And music is one way that we can thaw out and begin to feel/heal…

Deep breath in.

And out.

Let’s all keep singing and dancing and listening to music whenever we can muster the time and energy and heart in the weeks ahead!

In addition to my lungs, I am grateful for pianist/producer Doug Hammer, with whom I recorded “Let Me Be Strong” along with Gene Roma (drums) and Chris Rathbun (bass).

I am grateful that my two friends are recovering from Covid-19.

I am grateful for Barbara Baig, who wrote this song.

I am grateful to Pixabay for their wonderful images.

And I am grateful to YOU for reading and listening to another one of my blog posts.

Thank you!

I hope you remain well — and well-masked AND well-rested — as viral and political turmoil continue to swirl through our lives.

May our Covid fatigue diminish…

Let us continue to hope for brighter, wiser, happier days ahead

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

And maybe a refreshing shake!

ps: You are always welcome to visit my website, and you can find me on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music and other digital music platforms.

January 27, 2020 by willedare

Ode To Water

We’ve been having an unusually warm January in New England this year…

So far we have experienced as much rain as snow…

I prefer rain to snow because I don’t have to shovel outside the karate studio where I lead Music Together classes three mornings each week.

Most of us burn fewer fossil fuels as a result of warmer winter temperatures — and save a little money on our heating bills.

One weekend the temperature hit 70 degrees Farenheit (21 degrees Celsius) — an all-time high for Boston in January!

I don’t know if any of our local turtles dug their way out of the mud thinking it was spring…

But there was a fair amount of spring-like frolicking in the greater Boston area — although maybe not quite as enthusiastically as these folks…

I wrote this song several years ago while camping in North Truro on Cape Cod.

As regular readers of my blog posts already know, I LOVE spending time at the North Of Highland camping area.

One of my favorite parts of camping there is how everyone gains — or regains — a deep appreciation for the preciousness of water.

All of the faucets in the bathrooms shut off after a second or two to encourage us not to waste water while brushing our teeth, washing our hands, or shaving.

And we have to carry water — for drinking and cooking and washing dishes after our meals — in big plastic jugs from centrally located cabins (which have bathrooms, showers, and outdoor spigots) down to our camp sites.

So we become very aware of how much water we use all day long — such as boiling pasta for dinner or rinsing a soapy pot afterwards.

We are a short walk away from the Atlantic ocean, which is another mesmerizing manifestation of water on planet earth.

I tend to go to the beach in the late afternoon, when the sun is less powerful and the beach starts to become less crowded with other human beings.

And then there are clouds — another form of water…

How weird and amazing that water molecules are constantly cycling around our planet — from the sky to the earth to plants (and the animals who consume plants) and then back into the sky!

And water is such an important substance in our bodies…

Blood is flowing through my arteries and veins as I sit and type this blog post — and through your arteries and veins as you are reading it…

Water is an important component of all sort of secretions which our bodies produce — and which in some cases allow for the reproduction of our species.

‘