I sit in a quiet house now. Everyone has gone off to bed. Festival life is fun and exciting but exhausting. As I sit, writing and munching on yogurt covered almonds and toasted cashews I'm thinking about my #hashtags I often use, #puttingthatlovelyinyourearholes and #CharmedLife. I realise more and more that these are truly my life.
Illness has tried to embattle me for many years. I first lost my song after a thyroidectomy. It took a year to gain a proper speaking voice and it's taken 10 years to cultivate my current singing voice. Trouble struck again 3 1/2 years ago with partial diaphragm paralysis and the loss of use in my right lung in the process from nerve damage. No matter the circumstances, I have fought back to SING. I have to SING. It's what the Creator has always guided me to do. I have had to work too hard to be able to sing. To put as lovely sounds as I am capable, to fill the earholes of the people I am lucky to encounter along my journey. It's all I can do. It's all I have asked for everytime tough times have graced my life. I get to travel spreading the joy of the thing that has kept me alive for more years than any medical diagnosis has every expected. I say I have a Charmed Life. That doesn't imply an EASY life. I never asked for easy, nor fame, nor fortune, nor my name up in sparkly lights. I asked to be able to do what I loved so I would never "work" a day in my life.
Thank you to my husband, Per Tore, who believes in my abilities when my own falters, that is most important. Thanks to my music partner and best friend, Paul David Longstreth. He has helped me drag my way through some of life's toughest moments. Thanks to Ytre Suloens Jass-ensemble, for giving me a new music home and the new group of musicians of TOKLE who have set a new fire of creativity in me. Most of all, my tiny little mama, Lolet. She set the spark and stoked the fire of my creative world. She's ALWAYS believed in me. She is my fairy godmother.
Yes, music life is not always easy. It can bruise the ego, beat up the spirit and sometimes piss upon you from on high, yet it can fill your world with such joy, there's no other calling for me. So yes, I lead a #CharmedLife.
-- Later fa you!!!
