I haven’t written a new song in over a year.
I’ve been writing over here and tinkering with words over there, but that electric holy feeling of a new song being dropped down from the ethers into being… I haven’t felt that in a minute.
And I’ve been battling with it.
Are there suddenly no more songs left? Is there any more magic in me?
If I was making all my music out of the heart wrenching ache of life and love and this body and out of men…. Have I used up all the material and there’s nothing left to alchemize?
Obviously I know that’s a lie. But it’s funny what the mind wants to believe sometimes.
As we’ve shifted seasons, this creative front has felt like a lull. The sweat and the sex and the heat and aliveness of summer dropped into the subtle over the last few weeks. Into the body. Into the home.
Virgo season.
Brought with it a sacredness that said it’s time to get quiet again, and remember we are more attuned to the natural rhythms of it all, than our blue light scrolling thumbs would have us believe.
Jennie Morton told me of a study that was done of all the greatest composers of the last few hundred years. I can’t find it online, maybe it’s fake news, but bear with me....
This study examined the journals of these great composers, the Beethovens, Tchaikovskys, the Mozarts etc. And found that basically all of them had gone through this existential depressive moment, on multiple occasions… where nothing seemed to ‘go right’. Maniacal depression, suicidal thoughts, unrequited love, empty pockets in everything.
The study then tracked all these composers’ most prolific works. The pieces that give us their names today.
And EVERY. SINGLE. ONE was written immediately after their darkest times.
So, as Jennie tells me, those dark times may look pretty tragic, but really they are the most rich, the most fertile, where nothing is seen above ground, but SO much is happening beneath the surface.
And I remember this sentiment whenever I feel like a lull in creative output. Oh yeah, I’m just in the winter of that season. Spring and summer and autumn and winter. All as inevitable as life and death and sun rise and set.
But creation is inevitable.
AND. Here’s the big fat AND. I still have to put the seeds in the ground.
In the last few years I have studied SO much esoteric sh*t. We know there is a MUCH bigger game we’re all playing here. That there is FAR more happening behind the curtains than any of us can fully claim to know in this lifetime. Isn’t that exciting?!
And as I’m in my creative lull, the one that has spanned weeks, and nearly the full year, this week I’m hit with the next instruction.
Just book the damn show.
There’s 2 things I’ve really been craving.
To record a live album. But I’ve been creating a block around money. Because you do need money to record and studio and engineer and all the things. And I’ve been focussed on my business and things have been slow and that’s ok, it’s just taking time and I’ve been learning patience.
To sing with everyone. Ever since Ireland, the experience of singing with others, some who call themselves singers, some who don’t, harmonizing in rooms around candlelight, a universal resonance that kisses the holy aliveness pulsing through our veins. I want to make music with everyone.
About 18 months ago, the day after the fires in LA, I was interviewing Zack Bush for this AI business I was working with at the time. Spanning 4-5 hours, asking the most intimate questions that were designed to pull his essence out of him. I fell totally in fantasy love with this man. Who had more capacity to see the beauty of the world than any man I had ever met at the time.
Total Zack Bush fan girl crush. And yes, he’s a human. And I know it’s not really HIM I was obsessed with, but the god and the life and the spirit that moves through him.
Last weekend he was speaking at the Kinn (I’ll return to that content another time), fan girl crush once more. Before the talk began, the entire room hummed together. Holy aliveness pulsing through our veins, together.
Signing his book, he kinda remembers me, but writes….
‘Rising from the ashes of the city of angels - your song is remembering us into coherence’.
That aliveness is sparked again in me. It wasn’t HIM. But whatever spark of life was moving through him, touched the spark of life in me.
Book the damn show.
And with that, the sudden realization that I already have everything I need.
I’m a member of the Lighthouse where I did my album release last year, and I have credits that need using up.
Wait, what if I just put on a show and invited friends and anyone that wants to sing and teach them the songs and we hum and harmonise and we just record the whole thing at the Lighthouse using all the production credits that need using up?
And then I speak to the people, and they say yes, and now I’m like oh sh*t. I have to plant the seeds.
And planting the seeds is just picking the date. And in the last 24 hours, suddenly the creative force that has WOKEN up in me is telling me spring is here.
Here I was stuck in what felt like a creative rut. Songs dormant. No more magic left in me.
And then I threw out the fishing line.
I don’t have to force my way to creating the next ‘thing’, because now I am being PULLED towards it.
I threw out the line, and now I am being pulled towards it.
Music is flowing in me once more, songs are knocking on the door, my head is full of harmonies that don’t leave even when I’m sleeping. Every cell in my being is galvanising towards this future that I have casted out.
My friend Meena is hosting an event at the Kinn 9/30. It is literally about people bringing their dreams into the world and leveraging the community and network to make dreams happen.
We were kinda collabing on it, and then things changed, and the other people involved changed, and there were a few question marks for a moment, and Meena is navigating all this change and how / if to move forwards on it.
Throw out the damn line I tell her.
Everything will galvanise around it. It always does.
We have to book the date and plant the seeds and tell the universe we’re ready to step into the next thing and yeah it’s gonna feel hella uncomfortable and uncertain at times and we’re gonna question WHY THE F did I say yes to this and blah blah blah.
And in that process. We wake ourselves up to our own creative fire. And creatively sparked humans are the GREATEST HOLY GIFT OF ALL because we keep sparking each other into more and more creative fire.
In the last 48 hours I’ve been listening to this song by Natalie Bergman on repeat.
Glory, glory hallelujah
I’m gonna fly home to you
I’m gonna fly home soon
I’m gonna fly home to you
I’m gonna fly home soon
There’ll be no more teardrops falling
When you hear the angels calling
I’m gonna fly home soon
When you hear the angels calling
I’m gonna fly home soon
Natalie wrote the song after her Dad and step-Mum were killed in a car accident. She went to a monastery, sat in silence for a week, and a 4 song EP came out of it. So here I am listening to it probably 100 times in the last 2 days. I am being sparked by the words. The melodies. The harmonics. The total GOD that I hear in it.
I am being sparked open by another. Dancing. Feeling life. And that’s really the only game in town.
We are all just balls of the sun. Sparking each other into remembrance. That WE are the greatest holy creation of all.
So it may have felt like a creative lull. But then I remembered I AM creation itself and all was right with the world once more.
Or as my friend Micheline says, I was dying and then I had a sandwich.
All was right with the world once more.
p.s. I had the TIME of my life with these new font and colour options on Substack.
Watch out world. It’s gonna get wild.
—Holly Gottlieb (Founder, Whole Collective)
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