I am away visiting family at the moment. Sitting and chatting about our collective life’s past family history. They listened to two bits of my developing music journey of a song this afternoon. I winced at the naive beginnings sung with acoustic guitar. For once, I felt as if the song should have been okay from the word go. Strange. After 50 plus years of guitar playing and singing my tunes warts and all to others? I felt ‘Er! Why do I think it is so bad? Because others were listening?’ I think of my songwriting as a holistic journey. They hear once and have not got the intended finality of a finished song.

Subsequent thoughts on my own listening to the songwriting stages always shift to ‘Oh! Okay. It was never there at that moment…but progress was on the cards’. Despite the roughness, I usually smile.

To be fair, I have given you my most vulnerable bits to the song journeys in the past. Every time I do? I feel the presentations will never produce a ‘Hey Gray. That’s crazy raw and actually sounds crap’. No one does because WP is full of supportive people. You have here the gentle and amazing few, who read each others’ blogs, and are kind and supportive. I have always known that a warts and all journey exists to Summers’ life. It is why I present it as a ‘This is how dot. dot. dot….works for myself and my life/music so far existence’.

Tentative start #1 sung into the iPad.

Each experience during our own individual life’s journey, and its learnings, is an essential and important requirement. Over years to decades, life involves sorting through the subconscious and conscious emotional battles and seeking answers to it all. Whether it’s the simplicity of completing a song, a struggle in writing with a misbehaving fountain pen or those difficult and harsher lived realities, for example, of losing someone close to you.

At times, we do not actually see or realise we have our own beautiful collective life’s wood, because we just focus on the individual trees that surround us. And usually get overwhelmed with the bad trees that were present. Once having been seen in the darker parts of your wood…..they are never truly forgotten. However. We sometimes forget and miss ‘that which we have already experienced because it’s happened before’. Those obvious previous times that eventually produce enlightened pathways. Much exists in numerous life’s thrown at you varieties. You can block them out. Or accept them. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy comes to mind. (ACTivate your life is a theme under the umbrella term of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy)

Below. Going backwards in another tentative start #2.

On listening to this particular recent raw to a more improved song, I just shrugged shoulders at the opposite factors. It’s always okay to present the inherent fractious and vulnerable because it is showing the honesty of reality.

We, I assume, find that the past, present and the future are so mind-bogglingly different in values that, once having lived and having got the good/bad T-shirts, they leave you in the perfect place to move onwards with purpose and drop the fails by the wayside. The found answers in struggling for better outcomes lead to where we can say ‘Me, Myself?… I am stronger’. To know and understand life and all its fragile or stronger filled moments gives comfort. By focussing positively, you become aware there will be either new found wins or throw away ‘at least I tried or got through it’ moments.

Below. The song so far on the Apple Mac GarageBand recording. Of course it has to have this moving on with writing more lyrics and getting real musicians playing the song.

I played the Guild D25 Cherry dreadnought acoustic guitar into a Shure MV5 microphone. Two 6 string electric guitars which were my Hohner L75 Les Paul and the Falcon Tanglewood Stratocaster. All 3 guitars built in the 1970s. The keyboard sounds were by using an Akai Professional MIDI keyboard. The GarageBand app was used.

How many years did it take

To find your dream?

Crawling on your hands and knees,

Crazy days……indeed.

The memories, oh the memories

Are not what they seemed.

They were flowers on flowers on flowers

Blooming inside your mind.

Imagination, throws it’s spell over you

Soul’s Vibration finds

You’re not an empty room.

You can kiss goodbye or say hello again to past fragilities that may come knocking again. You have lived and can understand the bitter/sweet complexity that exists in your own state of mind through having seen both sides to your own personal life’s coin. And, having had the experiences, you can exchange with people you trust. Be open and honest by airing both your totalities of self weaknesses or fabulous strengths. Visiting family and chatting is always an openly honest positive experience. Hence why this blog theme is being written.

I was 68 years old 11 days ago. And as you are wont to do on birthdays, you both reflect on years lived and and then envisage years left. Decades of history and reflection. Not so many years left ahead is reality. You hunker down into life’s balance. Where you are now and what you hope for ahead. The dream of hoped for vibes become more settled in the mind. No unsettling in reality because you understand that showing the weaknesses of experience and expectations was your greatest strength all along.

As my blog Mantra says.

‘And so the story goes.

To where?

No one knows.

Borne from self promises.

Not worn out wishes’.

(I wrote the tune/melody to this little thought a fair few years ago).

Anyways…….Summarise Summers!

I suppose life becomes a Vision Quest scenario to how personal self journeys actually get to points with the penny dropping. There may never be a desired finished result. Or, the opposite happens and you achieve a glorious outcome. But, in advancing years, it seems you become more confident that you are on the road to ‘Yup…going in the right direction’. The pathway ahead seems a bit brighter now. Isn’t that the place that we all seek and want to be be? That little sunlit patch, which you break into from the claustrophobic journey through dense forestry traversed which suddenly comes to an end to leave you alone in a shiny oasis. Your wood gives you a gift in providing a small meadow of sunlit drenched beauty that allows you to collapse into the softness of grass and flowers. ‘Go on…..it’s yours’ it says.