You, My Love ...

Stand absolved

Behind your electric chair

Dance

Stand absolved

Behind your electric chair

Dancing 

Past the sound within the sound

The voice within the voice

Leave your office, run past your funeral

Leave your home, car, leave your pulpit

Join us in the streets where we

Don't belong

Here under the stars

Throwing light 

~Jeff Buckley- New Year's Prayer

While in year's past, the ringing in of the first day of the year is aways the symbolic new start, this promise of a clean slate in 2022 seems more fantasy than fact for many. But as we've done in the past two years, maybe some shifting of our old ways needs to happen. Call it self-preservation if you'd like, many have taken the turmoil of the last two years and started to Marie Kondo their lives: more life in the work-life balance, staying away from toxic relationships, tuning out from social media, becoming more involved in community, and setting and achieving new goals. Others see the new year as the gut check to assess and keep going on what they've built. 

All in all - be kind to yourself and to others. Don't forget to show yourself respect in addition to others. We've spent too many years trying to outdo one another and not paying any attention to ourselves as well as our loved ones. We've spent the last few years understanding the importance of togetherness and compassion - and that's something that needs to keep moving forward year in and year out. 

Musically, 2021 did give us back live music and some great new albums. Adele, Billie Elish, Nicole Atkins, Wolf Alice, and Robert Plant and Alison Kraus all used 2020 to work on new materials. And live shows also made a comeback. And being in that audience for the first time in so long was simply magic.        

And watching Get Back! was such a gifted highlight. Even if you're not a Beatles fan, what Peter Jackson did was allow us to peer into a part of music history in a special way, warts and all. 

And while there is a little flashback over the holidays, there is still promise of new shows and fresh new albums. The amount of creativity in our artists is paramount. These next few years will see them gifting us with what has been stirred within them over the past few years.

To quote my spiritual guru, George Harrison

Yesterday, today was tomorrow

And tomorrow, today will be yesterday 

May your New Year be what you desire it to be: a new beginning, just another day, or something else entirely. Have a happy, safe, healthy, and brave new year. 

My New Year's Eve Prayer by Jeff Buckley

performed live at Sin-é NYC 1996.

You my love are allowed to forget about the Christmas you just spent stressed out in your parents house

You my love are allowed to shed the weight of all the years before like bad disco clothes, save them for a night of dancing, stoned with you lover

You my love are allowed to let yourself drown every night in bottomless wild and naked symbolic dreams

You my love in sleep can unlock your youth and your most terrifying magic and dreaming is for the courageous

You my love are allowed to grab my guitar and sing me idiot love songs if
you lost your ability to speak, keep it down to two minutes

You my love are allowed to rot and to die and to live again more alive and incandescent than before

You my love are allowed to beat the shit out of your television, choke it's thoughts and corrupt its mind k*ll k*ll k*ll k*ll the motherf**ker before the song of zombiefied pain and panic and malaise and its narrow right winged vision and its cheap commercial gang rate becomes the white noise of the world (turn about is fair play)

You my love are allowed to forgive and love your television

You my love are allowed to speak in kisses to those around you and those up in heaven

You my love are allowed to show your babies how to dance full bodied, starry eyed, audacious, supernatural and glorified

You my love are allowed to suck in every single endeavor

You my love are allowed to be soaked like a lovers blanket in the New York summertime with the wonder of your own special gift

You my love are allowed to receive praise

You my love are allowed to have time

You my love are allowed to understand

You my love are allowed to love

Woman disobey

Little man believe

You my love are a rebellion