Pouring Music From a Cup

     It’s a symbiotic relationship, or so we’re told. Before you can love someone else, you must first love yourself.        I suppose the underlying logic is analogous to building a wooden ship. Before you can slip your ship into the water to see if it floats, you must first deem it seaworthy where it rests, on dry land. After all, you are the master shipbuilder. No one knows her timbers and masts, her keel, rudder, and rigging better than you. You have known this godly vessel from the day you bent her first hull planks. If you are not fully satisfied with your own craftwork, how can you expect any harbor master, captain, or ship’s mate to be impressed with her?      Standing back and taking a final glimpse at this impressive sailing ship, your chest puffs out as sure as you see yourself reflected in her architecture: her broad, swollen hull, your planning and carpentry evident in every brace, lift and cringle. Her bowsprit and spars ar...

               Many an evening I go for a bike ride. My preferred route is a relatively short one- 13 miles. It’s an individual ride, sometimes devoted to mental decompression from the day’s stresses and activities and sometimes focused on speed. I’m on a heavy mountain bike, and the challenge for me is seeing what kind of miles-per-hour average I can attain. Over the past six months I’ve watched as my average speed has steadily climbed from around 11 mph to 14.3 mph.  On the weekends, however, I go for a much longer ride. Distances vary- I’ve ridden as few as 18 miles and as many as 70 -but always the purpose is to spend time on my bike and enjoy the pure experience of riding. To that end, I will sometimes ride along the Trinity Trails in Fort Worth, Texas, a long and interconnected series of riding and running trails that afford anyone who wants it hours of uninterrupted “think time.” One day not long ago, as I was completing the final...

How much land does one man need? Six foot long from head to feet -Terence Martin-       Terence Martin is the best songwriter/singer poet you’ve never heard of, and he deserves better.       Born in London, he grew up in Los Angeles but moved East in 1994 to Fairfield, Connecticut, after the devastating Northridge earthquake in California that year. He had always dreamed of teaching and making music in New England, and the east coast offered him two advantages over the west coast: one was that things would stop falling off the walls; the other was that New England was a haven for acoustic musicians.       Martin wanted to become part of the flourishing NY acoustic music scene, some twenty years after another singer/songwriter you’ve never heard of, Steve Forbert, hit that same post-sixties acoustic scene with his debut album, “Alive on Arrival” and was cursed with a Time Magazine cover proclaiming him “the next Bob Dylan.”     ...

  . . . and it will,        Where do you go? Who do you talk to? What do you do next?      It’s too easy to say, “You cry, and then you go on.”      It’s too easy to melt into yourself and say, “I will never give myself over to love again.”        What’s hard, so very hard, is to accept that it has happened. Love has failed. We are put on this earth, I believe, to learn the one universal truth that all created beings are meant to learn, and that is Love. Giving it, receiving it, accepting it. Knowing it for what it is, and what it isn’t. It is not a lesson easily learned. The curriculum is long and difficult, the instructor demanding and invisible. Our teacher is nurturing and patient one day, harsh and unforgiving the next. We work in groups and independently, some of us not at all, but none of us comes to earth and gets to skip the class. We can’t; the Earth and this Life are the classroom. We drink the water a...

  Dear My Someone, I have had a most unsettling revelation tonight, and I’m afraid it is one of the painful kind. For it occurs to me that in spite of centuries of literary admonitions to the contrary— the fairy tales of damsels and princes in the days of yore; the tearfully delightful endings to boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-wins-girl-back movies; shadowy promises from the pages of celebrity and romance magazines; the plethora of smiling, familiar faces frozen in time on my computer screen; and the seemingly endless imaginings of my own juvenile, hopelessly lovestruck mind . . . Miss Right does not exist. I’m sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings, and up until now I have kept silent, for I was a guest here. But now I must speak. You are but a fantasy, Miss Right. A will o’ the wisp, as they say. A nice idea, a warm and charming concept, but I’m afraid that’s all you are. It’s all you’ll ever be. I know, believe me I understand all too well what it is to be reduced to a social ...

Did I ever love you? Did I ever need you? Did I ever abuse you? Did I ever cheat you? Did you ever want me? Did you simply settle? If it hadn't been raining, would you have wanted to leave me? Did I ever lie to you? Or raise a hand to you? Think back over the years and search your memory— you, the one with the ironclad, photographic memory —search the archives and see if you can find a time when I wasn’t there for you. Did I give you the space you needed to be who you wanted to be, or did I constrict you by being who I already was when you met me? The scruffy, misaligned, searching soul you said was so different from all the others you’d been floating along with had a thousand reasons and a thousand occasions to banish you. The night I hinted I might, and you sobbed, begged me not to leave you. And then what did you do? Decided to “pull the trigger” (your words) yourself. “Who knows?” you said. “Maybe I’m doing you a favor.” Yeah, maybe. You certainly didn’t need to do me such a fa...

I am not a religious person; I’m not even sure I qualify as a spiritual person. But I do believe there are forces at work with symmetry and order in the universe. Listen: The two most important men in my life, my sons, appeared after I met and married my wife. My younger son turns twelve today, just after noon. He arrived on the day he was due and has been punctual ever since. He is physically little for his age, wears glasses, has long hair, and is playing organized baseball for the first time since he was five. He laments that he wasn’t a child of the 60s. He also is the only boy I know who desperately wants to leave his home state of Texas. He has a wicked sense of humor, an insatiable curiosity, a tender heart, and a profound sense of social resistance. He loves math (he completes Sudoku puzzles in pen and never makes mistakes), is restless, and is the only child I know who can ask me with a straight face while walking the streets of Shanghai, “Are you homesick?” and when I ans...

  First, the lyrics to Iris DeMent’s “When My Mornin’ Comes Around’: When my mornin' comes around, no one else will be there So I won't have to worry about what I'm supposed to say and I alone will know that I’ve climbed that great big old mountain and that's all that will matter when my mornin' comes around When my mornin' comes around, I will look back on this valley at these sidewalks and alleys where I lingered so long and this place where I now live it’ll burn to ash and cinder like some ghost I won't remember when my mornin' comes around When my mornin' comes around, from a new cup I'll be drinking and for once I won't be thinking there's something wrong with me I'll wake up and find that my faults have been forgiven and that's when I'll start living when my mornin' comes around I know my mornin’ will come around This is a confessional, a way of saying that, like Iris, I know my morning will come around. In fact, I f...