On the other side of it all

After a week of household sicknesses, sleepless nights, and the general requirement to press through a lot of drudgery when all I really wanted to do was sleep through it.

After not really liking the me I am when I'm covered in the stuff of life and perseverance, I finally find myself on the other side.  However long it takes, the other side usually comes right?

And this morning, on this side of it all, when I'm feeling spent but thankful, I hear the Voice in my heart whisper, 'I love you. I love the you you are when no one else is around. The gritted teeth you.  The you who left all performance in the dust because there was no space left for it in hands filled with the paraphernalia of Life'.

Perhaps you need to hear it too. If so here's something that's true every single day whether you feel it or not:

You are Beautiful.

byoo-tuh-fuh l]

1. having beauty; possessing qualities that give great pleasure or satisfaction to see, hear, think about, etc; delighting the senses or mind.

2. excellent of its kind.

xxx

Photography: Cat Lane

Throwback Thursday #2

'Rainy Nights', performed for Playstation London a few years ago.  I wrote this song as my ode to London. The London I love.  

Rainy nights in London town

Don't know if he's crying cos I'm looking at the ground

There's a sea of umbrellas floating away from me

A dusty chessboard in an old shop window

A red and white Cheshire on a high brick wall

There's a million faces in a million streets and me.

I LOVED writing this song! x

Throwback Thursday #1

This is a REAL throwback. All the way to 2007, and the launch of Truths and Tiny Tragedies. I was so nervous, not sure how I got the sound to come out of my mouth in a manner that didn't scare everyone away, but I'm grateful it did. Grateful for all the support that night. Grateful to share my recording to a sold out show. And grateful that all the hard work came together to create memories I'll cherish forever. 

As I look forward to future musical moments, and make plans to share new music, I'm thankful for my history. When faced with new challenges and daunting experiences, ones history becomes a great source of encouragement. Positive historical experiences say that if I've done it before, I can do it again.  

I'll be sharing more throwback Thursdays of the musical variety over the next few weeks, so please feel free to check back for more!

x

Reset

I wrote this a few weeks ago: 

I know I've not been living very well recently. I'm rushing forward, straining towards the next thing. Unappreciative of the ordinary and the beautiful. Internally complaining about my situation and the people around me. Critical of pretty much everything. Thinking if this and that and the other we're different, then I'd be different, and that difference would make everything so very much better.

Forgetting to stop and smell the coffee, or the flowers. Passing over the urge to take another photo of my child, and capture a moment that I know is so fleeting. Choosing to eat dinner quickly in the kitchen so I can get a head start on the cleaning instead of enjoy our family meal.

Ignoring that all to rare feeling of creativity. The kind that births songs and other things. It's that feeling where the hair on my body kinda stands on ends, there's a stillness in the chaos, and my heart beats funny. It's that place in between this and that where new things are born. And I'm just passing it up for the great pleasure of vegetating in front of the box. Again. And the thing is I know, whilst I'm doing it that I'm just not living right. I really do know better.

Since writing the above, my granny sadly passed on from this life. More on this in another post I'm sure, but one of the obvious side effects of loosing one of your most cherished human beings is that one inevitably receives an acute sense of ones own mortality as well as the unstoppable passing of time.  So I'm living life abit better now.

I'm cherishing moments again. Well not as fully as that statement implies, but I am buying up my opportunities and making better use of my time, well a lot more of it, and it feels good.

In other news, I've ventured into songwriting for others again and it's been soooo fun! In the past I've always found this to be a struggle. The pressure of having to come up with something, and having to write with other people, erghh. I write all of my own music alone, and that's the way I like it.  Writing with others has previously proved quite incapacitating and unenjoyable, however it seems to be different now. I've been writing with a great team, and whilst we were given the task of writing an album in a few weeks, it was really easy! Things just flowed. Yeaaahh. And the most amazing thing ever was that I could take Ava into the studio with me! And she was fab...most of the time, providing lots of light relief, thanks honeykins!