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The Magic And The Power

An Interview With Odetta

I’m shy about writing, about exposing myself, but songs have come through me. Once, I was in Israel and had a hard night — an argument that was so unimportant I don’t even remember what it was about — and I decided I’d go to sleep. In those days that was the way I handled my problems. There’s a Chinese proverb that says if you have a big problem, and you need to solve it, go to sleep. The problem won’t disappear, but you’ll wake up in another position. (Chuckles.) Well, I got back to the hotel, and I couldn’t go to sleep. So I took pencil and paper in hand and out came a song. The kind of writing I admire involves yourself right out there, like Joni Mitchell. Her songs are about what she did or didn’t do or what she’s feeling. It’s almost like an exorcism. But I haven’t gotten there yet.

Understanding Pain

(Part Two)

We just happen to be participating in a peculiar local distortion of reality. The planet Earth is as near to a mistake as the law will allow.

Cold Steel

She could have been cast as a nun in an old Bing Crosby movie, the one who trailed the heroine and only came in on the chorus. Charlotte was a person who seemed to have no childhood, whom you could not imagine as younger than she was at the moment you met her.

Miracles

At the airport, in Peru, at a roller-skating rink in Tucson

Hiding Places

A tree house, scotch, the woods

When The Heart Speaks

An Interview With Deena Metzger

Working with people who have life threatening diseases, it’s useful to approach disease as a metaphor because then you can do something about it. Then you are not simply in the hands of the doctors. If you can look at disease as a story being told that has to get your attention, and you can discover the story that your disease is telling you, then you have a chance of finding the healing story. People begin telling remarkable stories about important things that have been distorted or have been missing in their lives, areas that must be reconciled. The body says, “This loss, this distortion, or this amnesia that you’re living is killing me. The silence is killing me. And if you don’t fix it, we’ll die.”

Through The Bars

Letters From Prison

I can’t know for sure what you need to do. All I’m giving you is my opinion, and you have to sort it all out and make your own decisions. But I do want to be straight with you about what my opinion is, because it’s 180 degrees from how you interpreted it. I think you should try a radical change of environment and interests. If you keep revolving your entire life around the trauma you went through, it might make good Hollywood movie stuff, but I don’t think it will meet your deepest needs.

Living With The Dying

An Interview With Dale Borglum

A lot of my work is to just stay as clear as I can, so I can be there, available and loving, but at the same time have a penetrating enough awareness that I don’t buy into the superficial sentimentality of the situation. And death, of course, is the ultimate melodrama.

Wellspring

A Story From The Deep Country

The stillness soothes me, reaches out to my battered spirit, until I sense the borders of that peace that waits beyond words, beyond human interaction. Stillness, peace, wordless energy: this I need, I have come to find.

Two Stories

The Lord Shantih found himself at the Temple of Rahla where the statues of the gods are kept. Pilgrims journey from distant lands to touch these statues, believing that one touch will cure them of their ills.