Christmas Eve-ing

All night long and all day long the snow has continued to fall. This is probably the most Christmassy Christmas Eve I have ever seen in all my years in Vancouver.

Never mind that the snow is knee deep in drifts around my apartment. All the better for Santa’s sleigh tonight, although I am sure that the falling snow will muffle the sounds of the midnight sleigh bells and the tapping of hooves on the rooftops.

I don’t have to work today which is a good thing, as I don’t have snow boots and getting transportation to work other than by foot could pose a major problem.

The snow is falling so thickly that when I put my head out the window to have a look it comes back covered in wet white powder.

Now if only I could have avoided the family holiday blues and if only the Canucks had not been skunked by the Sharks, it would be a picture perfect holiday. On second thought, isn’t family drama a huge chunk of the traditional holiday season? It is for me, anyway!

Not all the family is suffering. My daughter Chaya is in bliss by a fireplace today reveling in holiday spirit and my son Ky purchased his plane tickets for the UK. He leaves on January 19th, putting his dream into reality.

He showed up at my place yesterday with a gift of a steam iron (which he says he never uses and has to get rid of for his trip) and a book of poems & drawings by Leonard Cohen called The Book of Longing published in 2006.

We shared a holiday eggnog and talked about his upcoming journey. He is literally chomping at the bit, as I was at his age.

I wonder if I ever told him that it was Cohen’s The Spice Box of Earth and Eliot’s The Wasteland that really fueled my start into writing in California in the late 60’s?

Never mind. All things considered it is shaping up to be a Wonderful Christmas.

Missing Songs

It is around 7:30 pm on Wednesday as I slowly gear up for my weekly work shift.

Ky visited this week and informed me that my songs from Alchemy and Border Crossings were now inaccessible on line. He said the pages had disappeared.

I checked and although I still found the pages, I found that the .ram files (Real Audio) were not playing properly. Maybe it has been too long since I updated my player.

I spent a good portion of today recreating mp3 versions of my songs Destiny (from the album Alchemy) and Master Five Willows (from Border Crossings).

You can now access them at my Eagalic Music website at http://www.eagalicmusic.com/music and I should have the lyrics posted in the next few days.

It has been an interesting weekend...and today I took my seawall walk under the cloudy skies. I was expecting sun but that didn't come until I had arrived home in the late afternoon.

I have been processing the news that my blood pressure count is now in the danger zone once again despite following my medication dosage every day.

Last night while meditating before sleep I decided not to worry and let it interfere with my peace of mind.

Without that, (as my sister Marilyn had reminded me) I am in no postion to carry on day to day or to help family.

After all, what is more important than that?

Temple Bells

When I visited India in 1986 with my family, I took my guitar with me. I imagined that India would be fertile ground for writing more music.

But as I have written in my book Eagalic Music, I think my creative powers were temporarily blocked in India as I couldn't summon any music. In retrospect, I think all of my resources were used up simply taking in and trying to process the vastness/immensity that is India.

I did a lot of writing in India though, keeping daily journals of many of our experiences. At a bookseller's in Connaught Circle downtown Delhi I purchased 6 enormous hard cover journals, each one weighing a couple of pounds at least.

I filled these up in the next year or so and started the process while still in India. But when we arrived in Greece and set up house on the island of Symi in April 1986 on the return leg of our journey to the East, I began to compose songs again and wrote the lyrics in the first of these huge books.

I composed most of the songs on my album Alchemy in Symi but I didn't compose Temple Bells until we arrived back home and settled into our house on Dovedale Road in Shawnigan Lake.

There I set up a makeshift home studio using a 4 track recorder (a Tascam Porta One) and that is where I recorded Temple Bells.

A couple of months ago I uploaded the first of my unreleased songs The Crofton Mill in mp3 format to my website Eagalic Music and on November 25 I attempted to upload a second song, Temple Bells.

After setting up the post with the lyrics I discovered that the upload function was not working and I couldn't decipher why as an error bar appeared in place of the upload progress bar which covered a background error message with the word "dismiss".

I presented my difficulty to Danny my website designer and friend and on a computer at work, the error message was clear...the file was too big. Danny solved this by increasing the server file size upload limit and although it took him a few days to get to it, the file is now uploaded and if you are interested you can hear one of my songs definitely inspired by India.

Go to: http://www.eagalicmusic.com/ and check out the November 25th post where you will find the lyrics and an mp3 version of this song.