4/1/09 This letter came recently from an audience member at a show. I wanted to share with you all as its a beautiful piece of writing from an very obviously creative and artistic person. It reminded me of things I went through and felt growing up in the South. It's important it is to remember that even when we feel trapped by circumstance and situation, we can always turn inward to our source - and find ways to redefine ourselves and our identities. This person inspired me with their writing and I hope I was able to inspire them with my music. Bright Blessings, Magdalen "Your music and performance permeated the bleak, dreary and colorless landscape which had been filling me up all day with the vast crushing spaces of emptiness, and injected into my bone marrows a living, breathing, and moving force that undulated like waves to form a sea of torrential rage that burst me open at the seams. I had been feeling completely severed from the world and from people to such an extent that everyone seemed to have morphed into a multitude of flitting shades and shadows of Homeric Underworld. I felt lost and extremely bitter due to certain recent agonizing disappointments, which, it seems, had deposited maggots within my very core of being and they were eating me alive from within. I felt nothing. Yet as soon as you, elegantly and effortlessly, struck the piano to claim the Muse of your songs, I was moved. Genuinely moved. I felt a surge from within, rushing through all my tendons and synapses and neurons to map onto the world. It forced me to draw a breath and, you see, that one singular, biologically-mechanized, yet spectacular breath felt like the first true and sincere breath I had ever taken in my entire life. It was like walking on a beautifully deserted beach with white, gleaming sands to tease your feet and a cool, gentle breeze to fill your lungs with unpolluted humanity. Then you spoke of Fire, the most explosive and intense element of all elements. And I didn't feel so damn dead anymore. I felt like I could be revived and the multitude of flitting shades and shadows began to take forms, colors and shapes of the familiar membraneous soft flesh, the coveted crimson blood, and the exuberant sparks of our eyes. I truly felt like I was digging through a glass coffin, through the layers of dirt and rocks of isolation, and with bloody knuckles and what's left of a charred soul, I reached the surface. I could finally feel the life within me stirring and writhing to play its own wonted melody, much like a struggling, winter-beaten flower striving to the sun, risking even its own incineration and disintegration. I felt hopeful for the first time in such a long while, and that is a lot for a natural-born pessimist. It was refreshing. So, thank you for your gifts to us. Thank you for your inspirational expressions. I believe that there are certain things in life which can only be captured by and expressed with even just half a note. And today, I feel like me again. If you were looking to connect to and to change the world, I think you genuinely achieved it." News Archive | Last Updated: April 1, 2009