From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** We map out how we want it all to look, and we have a picture of the outcome. We create this picture based on the past, and it is through fear we speak. Fear of not having enough, fear of it not working out in the way we vision, fear of pain or sorrow, fear of change. I think I am supposed to know what the future is to look like. So I ask and ask and ask. In the past year I have been shifting to a different kind...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** Airports have lost their charm, at least for the time being. It seems as if everyone is discombobulated. Humans have forgotten their easy flow of being, and there is a kind of uptight scrabbling and agitation that sets everything on edge. People have been cooped up in their own spaces, getting their demands met in every moment, and I guess they’ve forgotten how to comport themselves with strangers. Not every...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** I am missing the meditation hall and its stillness. The hall I am imagining is the one at the Vipassana retreat center near Yosemite. The sound of the small gongs wake me at 4:30. I walk through foggy darkness, following shadows of the other meditators making their way. Small lights line the path that in the daytime is marked with single daffodils. The walk smells like California, pine and sage and sumac and wet...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. http://blissanddrumming.com/2021/03/the-question-of-not-enough/ ‎ *** I settled into life without the scramble of the constant travel of my music career. In the new stillness, I recognized within me a welling up, a kind of panic of not doing enough, not getting enough done. Without shows on the horizon, some mornings I woke in a kind of confused spin. Then, I noticed that in this confusion was a feeling of futility....

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clem reads this piece. *** I have spoken to many people during the pandemic who have made the best of the situation, and who feel guilty about the fact they are doing ‘okay.’ Our society has become a place in which to say that all is well makes us feel ignorant or guilty. I think it is important for us to recognize what is working and what is peaceful. There must be an energy that is in the center, a moderating well-being that is here between the...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** A young man started showing up late nights, a sleight of hand artist who would entertain the patrons with card tricks. I’m not sure he was quite 21 years old. He was quiet and pale, with a sweetness to him. His talent was astonishing. The customers would get overwhelmed with his mastery, and they loved it. When I describe tricks he performed, I am an unreliable narrator. My attitude with sleight of hand is of...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** How often do we get to find ourselves going where it is we want to go, with freedom from judgment? There is discernment of course, this sounds better to us than that, but so much of creative work is letting go of the internal rule follower, the inner judge, and just letting yourself open to what is here, asking to be expressed. This is why creative endeavor is salvation for us. We get to break out of our...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways in which human consciousness is transforming. For one thing people even a generation back didn’t grow up with the idea of “global community.” This concept is new in my lifetime. Once we were connected, first through the ease of travel and then through technology, our minds began to change. We started to realize that events across the planet have direct effect on us....

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** I recently read The Hidden Messages of Water, about the scientist who began analyzing the effect of the energetic environment on crystals in water. If you haven’t seen these studies, you can pull up the images online and see the beautiful snow flake patterns of the sentiments “I love you” and the song “Amazing Grace,” and the chaotic, disrupted patterns of hate and negativity on the water crystals. The take-away...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** The drum begins. I begin my journey on a bluff, overlooking the Pacific. Rolling grassy hills, the coastline rippling side to side, and the big birds delighting in the marine updraft. There is an opening to a cave there, to my left. The first time I entered this cave, a wave of fear washed over me because it was so dark. Then I remembered: this is my shamanic journey! Turn on the light! And light flooded in from...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** I love a band. Being one of a small group forging a way through the landscape, experiencing days and nights together. The intangible connection outsiders intuit. The mystery of the moment after everything has been loaded and the van door shuts and what happens as we drive away. I love the animal protection that forms in a band, and the secret language that develops. This secret language – music – connects us in a...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** I’ve been thinking about power lately, as I watch the world struggle. To begin such a conversation, I can only reference what I know. So who better to illustrate my thoughts about power than John Bonham. Bonham was a powerful drummer, no question. He was powerful in all the ways our culture references power: heavy-hitting, with an ability to let fly a thunder relentless and pounding. All true, but I would argue...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** For the most part, the past week of quarantine has looked much the same as it has for the past couple of months. The preponderance of birds, riotous flower bloomings, quiet streets. Then, a warm spell in San Francisco sending folks out to the parks. Overnight, it seems that facemasks have become obsolete, and big drunken parties of young people fill the grass. I don’t enter the park most days now, and walk Henry...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** My window seat lives in this little porch room off the kitchen. I imagine that one day the whole room will topple over in an earthquake, set on stilts as it is. We’ve got bedrock beneath us, and the house has weathered such rattling since the early 1900s, but still, I have a plan to leap into the kitchen and roll beneath the table should the shaking begin. You’re supposed to practice disaster routes so the shock...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** I know I keep remarking on this, but the birds in the gardens outside my window are really going to town again, under the paused skies of the early morning storm. 6AM is our time, the pug and me. We’re fortunate that built into this small apartment is enough room for solitude, but it’s still nice to have the mornings to ourselves. We’re the ones who take advantage of the pre-dawn hours. The old man caretakes the...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** It was funny, really, and later it brought to mind the article we had both read about the spike in divorce rates after the quarantine was lifted in China. We had to venture out to the laundry. Harsh words were spoken after perceived carelessness. Then, escalation after a reconnaissance to the grocery. We had been doing well up until then, enjoying the time sequestered and getting to spend time together in a way...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** We deep clean the house. We retrieve things from storage to sell. Now that we are out of work for months we start thinking about things to off-load in order to keep the lights on. We make tense financial plans. I order dry goods for just in case. We check in with family and send condolences to friends whose long-term plans have been cancelled, check in with the elderly neighbor. And then, I wake up into a day...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** Death is always on my mind, but in the best way. As we drag through the muck and mire of caring for an elderly relative, I often say to the old man, listen. Should it come down to you making these decisions for me, please just stick me in the cheapest, easiest place possible and leave me, go, live your life. I have spent years cultivating a way to be fine, anywhere. I lived for a year in a van, sleeping on floors...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** This is where I’ve arrived with it all: peace, love, one-heart, common ground. A belief that separateness keeps us enemies, keeps us trapped in our suffering, keeps us simmering in a despairingly low vibration, keeps us choosing war and hatred. You and I are of the same consciousness, manifest to learn from each other. In fact, even the idea of “other” is mis-knowing, and keeps us in pain. Who wants to listen to...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** I have reflected some times, where the hell am I trying to go so fast? I have to be the first one anywhere, and where am I eventually going? Do I really want to be first? There is a vivid, funny memory in my mind of sitting in a living room with a group of children, and the adult saying that we were going to go outside to play, and leaping up and running outside to be first, only to bounce off of the sliding glass...

From her blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** I also see this in the people I work with. I see that sometimes they don’t even realize that the patterns of misery they are caught have gradually let go in subtle ways, and when I ask after a few sessions about these old ways of being, it’s almost as if they’re surprised I’m asking. Someone who has not been able to sleep for years, for example, when I ask how they slept recently says, “pretty good,” not with any...

As a special edition of the Bliss and Drumming podcast, Clementine reads this piece, recently published at https://memoirmag.com/nonfiction/laguna-main-by-clementine-moss/. *** Sharona bleats from a nearby radio and I close my eyes and imagine Sharona, object of adoration. I imagine Jim Morrison, on a beach with a guitar, writing about his LA woman. I love the Doors. I move to ask if Becky likes the Doors, but her back stops the words from forming, glossy and solid and resolute in the bright...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** I want to say that opening oneself to be vulnerable feels like flying. First you have to push yourself out of the plane, out of the open door through the barrier of fear: fat and sappy and dumb and weak. But once you get over the ledge, once you think, you know what? Hanging out in this loud annoying metal contraption of a mind… or a plane… is over for me. I can’t take it any more! Then, you realize there is no...

From the blog http://www.blissanddrumming.com, Clementine reads this piece. *** A funny thing happened during a recent weekends of shows. An unease settled on me, and I felt myself raw and overly sensitive to the slights of others. Maybe it had to do with the heat and humidity of the Midwest weather, or maybe I’ve just been alone too much for a while and the shock of socializing was jarring. Whatever the reasons, I started to fixate a little too much on the typical annoyances of putting on...