A couple posts ago, I mentioned how excited I was and how much anticipation I was feeling about a workshop I was to attend. Well the workshop has happened and I am still glowing from the energy and hope I drew from the experience beyond the sheer pleasure that being at the conference, in the moment, brought to me.
The workshop was entitled, “Our Lives as Sacred Stories.” And, “Oh, Lordy, Lordy, it was wonderful,” as my maternal ancestors used to say.
Carrie Newcomer is a dear friend I have known since before disco-died. In the very late 1970s or extremely early 80s, I heard Carrie perform as a solo act at the Pizza Keg in West Lafayette. I am not sure if she had written “Survivors” as yet, and she probably performed “Black-eyed Susan.” Within a short time she was dating a good friend of my boyfriend, and I was eating veggie dinners of delightful stuffed mushrooms, and wine, at her place, and was marvelling at this woman who soaked soybeans and made her own soy milk and tempeh, and made a run-down upstairs apartment in central Lafayette, Indiana into a beautiful, homey haven from impending Reaganism, and on top of it all she was a singer-songwriter. I was in awe of her. Still am.
I was right there through the entirety of the Stone Soup era. I lived with the sound man. I wrapped a lot of cords. I wrote a thesis about underground networks of midwives attending home-births as she had a home-birth. I marvelled at her strength, and her belief in the path she was making, taking, or following (depending on your own world view) as her solo career began again.
We were both there at the beginning of the ending of some quite significant relationships for both of us. One of images my memory conjures up whenever I hear the word “angels” is of Carrie and I as we sat on a low concrete step connected the sidewalk in front of my student ghetto home. There was a sense of turmoil and sadness around us as we talked. There were some pretty hard times ahead for both of us. I listened as she told me how she saw angels. I did not really understand this nor the verse that she had referenced until I heard the song of hers, Angels Unaware, decades later.
We have rarely seen each other in the intervening decades, but there is still a connection when we meet. Two midwestern girls all grown up, in fact grown to an age where some become wise women (but not us…, nah, we both see ourselves as doing foolish things with some regularity) as we live very different lives across the continent from each other. She is fiercely gentle as she shares her story of love and the connectedness of all things.
One thing I know: “Never get between a Quaker… and her mission.”
So what did we do at the workshop?
She showed us how to write about a kindness received or given. Then, she showed us how to take that glowing feeling we had after writing and take it out into community and grow it larger, this time, into a song. She showed us that when we share this kind of experience and really listen to someone, and connect, it is then good to stop, and say, “and it was holy.”
Carrie is so good at walking the walk. It is like the difference between being lectured at and having someone share a part of her heart with you.
Sacred Stories
This Friday I attend a workshop by Carrie Newcomer called, “Our Lives as Sacred Story + Community Songwriting.” I will report back, of course, as the course is very much in synch with what WLP is about. I’m writing now as there is some trepidation about attending. The person leading the workshop is someone I first met a lifetime ago when we were both young women with lives intertwined with men who we would be with for a while, but would both soon come to know we had to leave behind these men, through whose lives we met, if our lives were to grow toward the light.
I have seen her a few times since then for coffee, a quick meal, a walk in a park or along a stream, or a rare day long visit. She is a rather well know singer and song writer. Me, I am a women that few know who writes and tries to help other women write or capture their stories. For me it is always daunting to see someone who has made her dreams come true with incredibly hard work, tenacity, persistence, and a whole lot of days and nights on the road. It seems like a more difficult path than mine, but as we say these days, “she persisted.” It would be relatively easy to say she is successful and I am not, but inside I know we are all successful in our own way, just as we all have our stories, sacred and tender that we have lived as we walk our path in life.
It is still a bit daunting for me, here I am signed up for the workshop yet I do not write music, or lyrics or songs. Poems, yes. So while I am a bit nervous about tomorrow, I am also very excited. I want to see what women’s wisdom she has accumulated about the topic so I can share it with you.
The sacred, the place in our hearts where our precious aches and joys are felt and remembered, is not an place easily called upon for sharing, let alone easily evoked, yet Carrie writes words wrapped in music that open the hardest lithic hearts. Her music calls out and lifts our better, light-filled, selves.
We all have these selves inside us. Sharing our selves, sharing our sacred stories is a beautiful frame for living our legacies now, telling our stories, giving those stories as beautiful gifts of self whether they are songs, poems, acts of kindness and helping, or times spent with grandchildren at our knees.
You can find her touring schedule and a few recordings and videos on her site at CarrieNewcomer.com.