Fill My Life Up with Light!

I am at sea this morning. Casting about for meaning and purpose. My dreams were clogged up with airports and passenger lines, and the most mundane of human things. Late for flights, late for meetings, lost and unsure where I was going next. Dreams of flailing about!

I wake up looking to make a pot of coffee.  Kickapoo coffee beans. I do know that Kickapoo was a Native American Indian tribe. I run thru all the Indian tribe names I can think of off the top of my head: Crow, Shoshone, Comanche, Cherokee, Navajo, Cheyanne. I think of Dee Brown and his great book "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." If I were to name books that "changed my life," Brown's book would be up at the top of the list for sure.

I can mark my life by key texts at every time in my life, again, just off the top of my head: The King James Bible, Treasure Island, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Slaughter House Five, Catch 22, On the Road, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, The Great Plains, On the Rez, Erections, Ejaculations and Other Tales of Ordinary Madness, Lolita, Speak Memory, Desolation Angels, The Sheltering Sky, Infinite Jest, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Moby Dick, The World According to Garp, Dog Soldiers, Dispatches, A Bright Shining Lie, The Snow Leopard, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Zen and the Art of Archery.

I turn to the Flaming Lips this morning for my soundtrack. Can't go wrong with their stone-cold masterpiece, "The Soft Bulletin." Never fails to give me a swift kick of adrenaline. I would run down the key albums of my life, but then, this post would basically take up the whole morning. Figure lots of Dylan, The Band, Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Stones, Nick Drake, Steve Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, Lucinda Williams, Nick Cave, Sly & the Family Stone, Who, Kinks, Miles Davis, Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin, Gillian Welch, Fairport Convention, Richard & Linda Thompson, Sinead O' Connor, Allman Brothers, Van Morrison, Grateful Dead, etc. Oh yes, Flaming Lips, Radiohead, The National, Wilco, Drive By Truckers... the list is long & endless...

How to fight that listless, lost and flailing about feeling? Music, Art, Poetry, Love... I fill my life up with light, sound & thunder!